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The discussion was underpinned by the overarching aim of creating a viable open-source ecosystem, and the panel of experts discussed the necessary conditions for this from a political, economic and community perspective. The panel identified the following conditions: 

• Public administration as a user: Through consistent demand and clear tendering guidelines, incentives can be created to encourage a shift towards sovereign solutions.
• Capacity to act as the basis for sovereignty: Germany needs to build up technological expertise in various areas in order to keep pace with the rapid pace of digitalisation. This includes, for example, the ability of decision-makers in government organisations responsible for procuring IT infrastructure to assess such matters.
• Interoperable standards in digital infrastructure: The aim should be to ensure that individual product components can be sourced on a modular basis from different suppliers. This is because uniform standards in the form of modularity and interoperability facilitate fair competition by enabling companies to develop a variety of business models on a common basis.
• Long-term funding for maintenance: Funding alone is not a long-term solution for stable open-source technologies. It is not suited to maintenance alone, is too short-term in nature and requires excessive detailed planning. Instead, what is needed is the development of sustainable funding models that cover maintenance, security and governance.
• Granular procurement models for SME access: Smaller, modular tenders open up opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises that possess the technical expertise required for such contracts.
• Altruism versus egoism: Above all, the ecosystem needs stakeholders who build fully-fledged open-source technologies – including governance and quality assurance to support long-term operability. 
• Organisation of technical cooperation: Technical cooperation across organisations should begin where there are points of overlap. Specific technological components required for various initiatives should be implemented jointly without major organisational hurdles. If an increasing number of overlaps between such small-scale, technical components are identified, organisational structures for joint collaboration should be established.   
• The open-source ecosystem: We must not allow technical details to stand in the way of structured, cross-organisational collaboration, but rather gradually build a resilient open-source ecosystem involving all relevant societal stakeholders in this context, such as universities, businesses, the public sector, open-source foundations and private individuals.

Once these conditions are in place, a functional and stable open-source ecosystem will emerge, from which all stakeholders will benefit.