Alexander Sander
Alexander Sander works as Policy Consultant for the Free Software Foundation Europe. Alexander has studied politics in Marburg and later has been an MEP Assistant in Brussels for three years and the General Manager of Digitale Gesellschaft e.V. in Berlin for four years. Furthermore he is the founder of NoPNR!, a campaign against the retention of travel data.
Session
The Corona crisis has made it clear to us which developments in digitisation we have missed in recent years. Administrations, but also many employers, were not prepared for this. Often, they simply chose some “obvious” solution in order to remain or become workable. Only a few considered the effects and consequences, for example in terms of data protection and privacy, as well as future dependencies on single vendors. In schools, video conferencing solutions that did not comply with data protection regulations were used, some administrations were not able to work at all and many processes are still not digitised.
At the same time, there are also positive examples. Free software has become more and more of a topic and more and more administrations have understood the advantages it brings.
I would like to take a look at the developments of the past year and give an outlook on how we can better face future crises through the use of Free Software and what role governments, public bodies and administrations and the principle of “Public Money? Public Code! play in this.