As the study on export control progresses, several projects have been clearly identified as restricting their contributors to certain countries (EU or France). This brings back to the top of the list a subject that has been discussed several times over the past year, creating « sister associations » to Open Space Makers [France] in other countries, eg « Open Space Makers Italia », « OSM Belgium », « OSM Brazil »…
The main incentive at this stage is clearly to enable technology transfer on restricted technologies between countries. Another one I can already see is establishing formal links with national space agencies in countries outside of France, and include them in the Federation ecosystem.
The objective of this thread is to kickstart the discussion, to challenge the assumptions above, exchange on the pro and cons, build the practical steps to lead to the establishment of these sister associations… We need you!
This is indeed a big step, IMO very important and necessary, that would really give substance to the « Federation » word.
My ideas:
The ecosystem must be kept as joint as possible: for example I think that the Forum for the other international branches needs to be store within this one, with separate section / categories. This allows everybody to check what the others are doing and contribute on different country projects (where applicable). This would maybe also avoid duplicate work. Maybe also the Wiki and Gitlab? With specific subprojects per country?
The point above will bring another challenge: how do we scale the management of the infrastructure? Do other branches contribute with computing resources (i.e. servers) and maybe I.T. staff that joins the WebU core? Also SSO… Plenty of technical subjects that maybe can be discussed later on, but need to be kept in mind
I agree on the main objectives for now:
Export Control
Cooperation with national Agencies
In terms of steps, I’d probably suggest selecting one pilot nation, the most promising one, and develop all the things we will need directly doing the job with this pilot nation. Anticipating what will need will be much more difficult IMO.
Regarding IT, one key question will be: will a common IT infrastructure be compatible with export control regulations? Each government may require that data that is subjected to export control rules be stored physically within a given country.
This will pave the way for « federated » IT services, where you have an overarching IT architecture as well as local IT architectures below - a subject I am passionnate about, there are many other use cases
On the IT side, and currently working with systems in the US and Europe, I can assure you that interoperability and compatibility on regulatory constraints are pretty hard to handle, between these two continents at least.
Within the European regulatory framework we may have more possibilities, and it will be a good starting point for further studies on this field.
Each country has its own regulation on data management and protection (and more specifically regarding sensible data, including those relatives to dual use goods), and even if the EU provides more and more frameworks as a basis for the European countries to follow, each state is sovereign on these issues (and it will most likely stay that way).
But anyway, a federation of IT architectures could be a solution
The issue could actually even be within the EU, as it is not only privacy laws that are at stake, but export control laws. So Italy may request that data generated on dual use hardware by Italian citizens be stored on servers in Italy, not in France.
A bit more on Federated Architecture for those who are not familiar with the subject I had the opportunity to work a bit on the subject with Patricia Florissi, now Technical Director at Google Cloud but formerly CTO at EMC and Dell Technologies, it really is an awesome topic!
I had the opportunity to work a bit on the subject with