We’re delighted to be participating in the ‘Summit on European Digital Sovereignty' at the EUREF Campus Berlin, jointly organised by the governments of Germany and France, with support from other EU member states.
The event aims to develop a practical roadmap for creating a digitally sovereign Europe, including the importance of the transparency provided by open source software and the role of open standards in protecting against vendor lock-in.
Keynotes will be given by Friedrich Merz, Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic.
Opening addresses will be delivered by:
- Karsten Wildberger, Federal Minister, Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, Germany
- Roland Lescure, Minister of Economics, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, France
- Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, European Commission
Amandine Le Pape, COO of Element and co-founder of the Matrix open standard, will take part in discussions on why open standards are essential for sovereign communications.
Dr Patrick Alberts, managing director of Element GmbH, will be there to discuss the value of transparency in open source software and the importance of government support for upstream vendors.
The Power of Digital Commons: Building Europe’s Shared Digital Future
Perhaps the most exciting presentation of the day is how the new European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC) will help transform European cross-border cooperation.
The session will focus on how open, sovereign digital commons can scale across Europe. The discussion will highlight Germany’s openDesk and France’s La Suite Numérique; digitally sovereign office suites based on open source software. Both openDesk and La Suite use customised versions of Element - and the Matrix open standard - for real time communications.
It shows that Matrix and Element are at the heart of Europe’s digital sovereignty. Matrix is an open, decentralised protocol that lets governments communicate securely across borders without being vendor locked. Element turns that protocol into a user-friendly app with a professional server-side solution including enterprise-grade features to ensure performance, compliance and ease of management. Crucially though, Element is just one of many vendors that provide systems based on the Matrix open standard.
Element and Matrix power platforms like openDesk and La Suite, creating a shared, interoperable digital ecosystem for public administrations. By keeping data and infrastructure under European control, they transform communication into a digital commons - a reusable, open resource that strengthens collaboration, innovation, and resilience.
The magic of open source, and the alchemy of upstream vendors
Element is also participating in a showcase highlighting the ‘magic of open source,’ in partnership with European Open Source Software Business Association (APELL), Germany’s Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), France’s Conseil National du Logiciel Libre (CNLL), B1 Systems, Heinlein Group, Univention, SUSE, and ZenDiS. It helps explain the importance of the transparency provided by open source software to enable digitally sovereign solutions.
Governments and large public sector organisations are adopting open source software as part of their digitally sovereign strategies. They are increasingly aware of the need to ensure the open source project they are building upon is suitably funded by working with upstream vendors, as opposed to IT services firms that fail to contribute to the underlying project.
Many governments are now committed to subscription based procurement of open source software, rather than insisting on time and materials contracts for open source firms while simultaneously contracting traditional vendors through SaaS subscriptions. We are grateful to the likes of the European Commission, ZenDiS (openDesk), Försäkringskassan, NATO ACT and UNICC for their commitment to upstream vendors and subscription based procurement.
The importance of an open standard for interoperability
A healthy open standard such as Matrix ensures interoperability and encourages an innovative and competitive marketplace. That means end-users organisations are able to mix and match their Matrix-based backend (server) and frontend (app), so they are not forever-tied to Element (and any other Matrix provider). It’s a completely different model compared to traditional software companies - such as Microsoft, Slack or Wire - that deliberately do not interoperate with other solutions in an effort to vendor-lock customers.
Open standard based federation is also a game changer. Governments consist of multiple separate organisations. Having a common sovereign and secure real time communications fabric between those organisations brings tremendous productivity benefits. That each of those separate organisations can use any Matrix-based system means they all retain the ability to choose their own vendor, provider or in-house solution.
Multiply that approach across European governments - with each government also comprising multiple separate entities - and you begin to realise the step change that widespread adoption of the Matrix open standard offers. If that sounds a little theoretical, many European governments already have a Matrix-based system in place.
Matrix is the backbone for Europe’s digitally sovereign communications
One of the highest profile is the French civil service which uses Tchap, a fork of Element, as its official (and only) messaging platform. The German public sector is building heavily on Matrix, including its Armed Forces which has standardised on an Element fork called BwMessenger. It has also recently introduced BundesMessenger for more general public sector use. Meanwhile Germany’s IT Planning Council and FITKO have stipulated Matrix as the basis for government to citizen communications, and Matrix deployments are already supporting entire German states.
As will be highlighted in The Power of Digital Commons: Building Europe’s Shared Digital Future, Matrix-based communications also sits at the heart of the new era of digitally sovereign office productivity packages being created by European governments, such as openDesk in Germany, La Suite in France, SAFOS in Sweden and MijnBureau in the Netherlands.
Combine that level of adoption with live deployments in intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) including the United Nations and NATO - as well as NATO members such as US Department of Defence, Germany’s Armed Forces, UK Ministry of Defence, Polish Armed Forces and Armed Forces of Ukraine - and you can begin to see that Matrix is essentially the internet for real time communications; open, decentralised, interoperable and sovereign. And to that end-to-end encryption by default, and it’s obvious why Matrix is rapidly becoming the common way to communicate across the European public sector.
Many thanks to everyone who has enabled the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty, and let’s hope it helps galvanise sovereign, interoperable and resilient cross-border communications.
On 18 November, watch the summit live at: https://bmds.bund.de/aktuelles/eu-summit
