2025-10-01 –, Auditorium
Director Thibaut Kleiner (DG CNECT – Future Networks) will set out a practical European vision for open source as a driver of digital sovereignty, competitiveness, and trust. His intervention will show how openness translates into five levers—transparency, interoperability, portability, security by scrutiny, and stronger European supply chains—so that public administrations, SMEs, industry, researchers, and communities can all benefit.
Director Kleiner will outline two complementary pillars: the Open Internet Stack, a new catalogue of trustworthy, deployable building blocks aligned with EU rules, and the Digital Commons EDIC, a Member-State consortium designed to steward, maintain, and scale critical open technologies over time. Together with national OSPOs and smarter public procurement (including forthcoming cloud/AI guidance to support choice and portability), these efforts aim to make European, secure, sustainable services easier to adopt.
A dedicated section addresses keeping OSS secure—from supply-chain safeguards (reproducible builds, SBOMs, signed releases) to ongoing Commission work around the Cyber Resilience Act, including support for community-driven standards and guidance, and a study on security attestations that will support the Commission’s reflections on effective approaches for open-source projects.
The talk closes with a call to action: align roadmaps, reuse what works, and invest in long-term stewardship - so Europe offers a trusted, open digital choice that people can use every day.
Director Thibaut Kleiner (DG CNECT – Future Networks) will set out a practical European vision for open source as a driver of digital sovereignty, competitiveness, and trust. His intervention will show how openness translates into five levers—transparency, interoperability, portability, security by scrutiny, and stronger European supply chains—so that public administrations, SMEs, industry, researchers, and communities can all benefit.
Director Kleiner will outline two complementary pillars: the Open Internet Stack, a new catalogue of trustworthy, deployable building blocks aligned with EU rules, and the Digital Commons EDIC, a Member-State consortium designed to steward, maintain, and scale critical open technologies over time. Together with national OSPOs and smarter public procurement (including forthcoming cloud/AI guidance to support choice and portability), these efforts aim to make European, secure, sustainable services easier to adopt.
A dedicated section addresses keeping OSS secure—from supply-chain safeguards (reproducible builds, SBOMs, signed releases) to ongoing Commission work around the Cyber Resilience Act, including support for community-driven standards and guidance, and a study on security attestations that will support the Commission’s reflections on effective approaches for open-source projects.
The talk closes with a call to action: align roadmaps, reuse what works, and invest in long-term stewardship - so Europe offers a trusted, open digital choice that people can use every day.
Thibaut Kleiner is the Director for Future Networks in DG Connect. He has worked since 2001 at the European Commission. The first ten years of his career in the Commission were spent in the area of competition policy (merger, antitrust and State aid). In September 2011, he moved to the digital policy area, as advisor of Vice-President Neelie Kroes, in charge of the Digital Agenda, and supervised Internet policies at large (Internet Governance, cybersecurity, cloud, data).
From January 2014 to June 2016, he was head of unit in charge of network technologies (5G and Internet of Things) in DG Connect. From June 2016 to December 2019 he was the deputy head of cabinet of Commissioner Oettinger, in charge of Budget and Human Resources and he then came back to DG Connect to head the unit in charge of Research Strategy and Coordination and was subsequently Director for Policy, Strategy and Outreach from December 2020 until March 2025. An economist by training Thibaut holds a Master from HEC Paris and a PhD from the London School of Economics.