ALASCA with a C – for Community: Working together to break down technical silos and advance Europe’s digital sovereignty.
At the round-table discussion on the topic of ALASCA with a C – for Community: Breaking down technical silos together and advancing Europe’s digital sovereignty, organised by ALASCA e.V., will provide a forum for discussing key issues relating to the creation of a stable open-source ecosystem.
Europe’s digital sovereignty is increasingly a determining factor in its capacity for innovation, competitiveness and technological independence. At the same time, numerous initiatives are emerging at European, national and regional levels, each with similar approaches and objectives. However, these often develop in parallel rather than in collaboration. Technological silos, parallel developments and a lack of networking between stakeholders prevent the full realisation of potential and the efficient
Use of resources. What framework conditions are needed in Europe to prevent a fragmented ecosystem from emerging out of a multitude of good individual initiatives?
This is precisely where Community comes in: digital sovereignty is not achieved through isolated individual projects, but through genuine collaboration. Only when businesses, the research sector, the public sector and open-source communities pool their expertise and work together in a coordinated manner can interoperable, scalable and sustainable digital infrastructures be created.
Open source provides the foundation for this: transparency, traceability and technological openness make it possible to share knowledge, jointly develop solutions and reduce dependencies – across organisational, technological and national boundaries.
The round table will be chaired by Julia Nitzschner (Silicon Saxony e.V.).
Experts
Key points from the press briefing
Dirk Meyer-Claassen
Head of the „Strategy, Management, Legal Affairs and Processes“ Department, Berlin Senate Chancellery
Since 2023, he has been in charge of Dirk Meyer-Claassen the „Strategy, Management, Legal Affairs and Processes (CDO responsibilities)“ department (formerly the „Administrative Modernisation and Management, Digitalisation of the Administration“ department) within the Senate Chancellery of the Governing Mayor of Berlin. His key responsibilities include shaping administrative reform, modernising the state and reducing bureaucracy, as well as developing and implementing digitalisation strategies, digital law and the ‘Digital Check’ initiative. In addition, he is responsible for city-wide administrative management, the management of citizen and public order services, digital accessibility, and the supervision of ITDZ Berlin.
Statements
- „Technological independence and interoperability must take precedence over short-term convenience.“
- „Open standards and open source are strategic tools for resilience and competitiveness – not an ideology.“
- „Digital sovereignty is not achieved through individual projects, but through a coherent architecture, clear strategies and binding standards.“
Vasu Chandrasekhara
Ambassador NeoNephos Foundation
Vasu Chandrasekhara He is the former Vice President for Cloud-Native Strategy at SAP and is now an Ambassador for NeoNephos. Having established Kubernetes as part of the Enterprise Foundation at SAP, he now focuses on the cloud-native ecosystem and the development of a mindset conducive to digital sovereignty.
Prior to this, he led the extensive SAP project as part of the EU IPCEI-CIS and established NeoNephos as its „OSS Infrastructure“. Vasu studied physics and computer science at the University of Osnabrück, but is reluctant to be tied to any particular geographical location. He prefers to be in the cloud.
Statements
- „Sovereignty = func(Ecosystem, Interoperability)“
- „Collaboratively developed, vendor-neutral open-source solutions – such as those owned by a foundation (like Linux, etc.) – are not sufficient to meet the challenge in Europe.“
- „“The core problem is that typical open-source foundations do not offer a solution for monetising the parties involved or contributing, but leave this task to the respective providers. In doing so, they contribute to the fragmentation of the potential market."
Luise Kranich
Head of Department T – Technology Strategy and Information Technology, BSI
Luise Kranich heads the department at the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) Technology Strategy and Information Technology. It is responsible for the technological direction, standards and testing methods across the entire IT stack, as well as for the operation of the BSI’s laboratories and its internal IT systems.
Prior to that, she was a head of division at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Home Affairs (BMI), where she played a key role in shaping the framework, standardisation and federal digitalisation programmes for the implementation of the Online Access Act (OZG).
With experience in applied computer science research as well as in the non-profit and start-up sectors, she combines strategic technological expertise with practical implementation experience – at the intersection of digitalisation, administration and security.
Statements
- „It is not the technology that is sovereign, but the acting subject – that is, a person or an organisation.“
- „The claim to sovereignty arises from the context in which it is used and should not be formulated in general terms.“
- „To be adaptable, we need open interfaces and the ability to assess situations.“
Christian Schlaeger
Managing Director, Schwarz Digits Cloud GmbH
Chris Schlaeger He heads the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) organisation at Schwarz Digits Cloud, which positions itself as a European hyperscaler under its STACKIT brand. Before joining Schwarz Digits Cloud, he spent 13 years at Amazon AWS, where he led key parts of EC2. There, he was responsible for technical innovations such as the Nitro hypervisor and the open-source virtual machine manager Firecracker. Through previous roles at AMD and SUSE, as well as personal projects, he has been an active member of the open-source community for many years.
Statements
- „We need a European alternative to the US hyperscalers.“
- „We must close the technological gap with the US hyperscalers as quickly as possible.“
- „The cloud is a business driven by economies of scale. Every step of growth unlocks new opportunities that can only be realised once a certain scale has been reached. That is why rapid growth is critical to our success.“
Miriam Seyffarth
Head of Political Communications at the Open Source Business Alliance
Miriam Seyffarth has been Head of Political Communications at the Open Source Business Alliance since 2022. From 2016 to 2021, she worked as a research assistant and office manager for Tabea Rößner, a Member of the Bundestag, and in this role was responsible for various digital policy issues at federal level. Prior to that, she worked as a cultural manager at the German Consulate-General in Saudi Arabia.
Statements
- „The issue of digital sovereignty has received significantly more attention in recent years, which is both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, more and more stakeholders and organisations are vying for the right to define it: what exactly is digital sovereignty, and what is it not? Where does „open-washing“ or “sovereignty-washing’ begin? At the same time, there is also more to be gained economically, which is why the open-source sector is no longer dominated solely by the ‘old guard’, but is increasingly attracting companies that simply want to win contracts. As an open-source community, we therefore face the challenge of pooling our efforts despite these centrifugal forces and continually finding common ground, so that we can pull together to achieve the goal of digital sovereignty.”
„The open-source community is a close-knit group with a strong sense of belonging.„ If we really want to “break down the silos„ and build new bridges, then we need to actively and consciously consider how we can network with other communities and sectors, and who could be our new allies.“
Christian Berendt
CEO of 23Technologies GmbH, CEO of OSISM GmbH, Member of the ALASCA Executive Board
Christian Berendt He has been actively involved in the field of open-source cloud infrastructure for many years and, during this time, founded, amongst other things, 23 Technologies – which focuses on transferring cloud-native technology to the industrial sector – as well as OSISM, a platform for managing sovereign clouds, in the development of which he played a key role.
In addition, I have appointed Christian as a member of the Governing Board of the NeoNephos Foundation and at ALASCA itself – as a member of the extended board and as spokesperson for the Technical Steering Committee.
Statements
- „The bottleneck is not the technology, but expertise.“
- „Open source alone isn’t enough; it all comes down to governance.“
- „Sovereignty is not a matter of self-sufficiency.“
Kurt Garloff
CEO, S7n Cloud Services GmbH
Kurt Garloff has been deeply rooted in the open-source world since the mid-1990s. His professional career began with contributions to the Linux kernel and took him through various management and development roles at SUSE – including as head of SUSE Labs – to strategic work on open-source partnerships.
Whilst at Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems, he played a key role as Chief Architect in the development of the Open Telekom Cloud and T-Cloud Public respectively. He later played a leading role in the design and technical implementation of the Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) and took on the role of technical project manager at OSBA.
Today, he provides consultancy and carries out development work relating to the Sovereign Cloud Stack and is actively involved in numerous open-source communities. Among other roles, he is an elected board member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation and a member of the SCS Project Board. His focus is on open, sovereign cloud infrastructures and the integration of technology, community and strategic leadership.
Statements
- „The attempt to establish a single dominant cloud provider in Europe („Cloud-Airbus“) as an alternative to the hyperscalers is doomed to failure and does nothing to promote digital sovereignty.“
- „The alternative model is a federated approach: a decentralised, distributed „hyperscaler“, held together by common open standards and collaboration on free software and open operational knowledge.“
- „Fragmentation is a natural tendency in larger projects – this must be countered with a great deal of commitment and sound structures. It’s hard work!“
Marius Feldmann
COO of Cloud&Heat Technologies and Chair of the Board of ALASCA e.V.
Marius Feldmann is Chief Operating Officer at Cloud&Heat Technologies and, in this role, is responsible for the technological development of the software stack, the operation of the cloud infrastructure, as well as strategic business development and market positioning. He has established Cloud&Heat Technologies within several significant partnerships and initiatives (including Gaia-X, SCS and OSBA), amongst which is the partnership with STACKIT, in the context of which, for example, the Yaook lifecycle management system was developed. In order to separate Yaook from the individual companies and develop it more independently, the idea of founding ALASCA e.V. emerged in parallel with the rising demand for operational open-source tools for digital sovereignty; Marius Feldmann currently serves as its Chairman of the Board.
Statements
- „Digital sovereignty in Europe requires the creation of a resilient open-source ecosystem.“
- „A sustainable open-source ecosystem connects technical communities and businesses in such a way that economic value is generated through collaborative development – and this value, in turn, enables further investment in open source.“
- „The term “community’ encompasses not only technical communities but is understood as an alliance of all the stakeholders required for the positive and collective development of digital sovereignty – technical communities, economically resilient businesses and users of sovereign cloud infrastructures.”
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