Prof. Dr. Julian Kunkel has been elected as chair of the Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) in the British Computer Society (BCS) on October 21, 2021.

Digital sovereignty is a fundamental issue for the GWDG and its customers. We therefore endeavor to support alternatives to commercial solutions in order to avoid vendor lock-in. Open-source solutions are a cornerstone in this strategy. The GWDG offers many open source products as services for its users and is committed to the further development of these products in order to continuously improve the user experience.

With more than 1,500 members, the OSSG deals with all facets of open-source software and hardware and drives a wide variety of activities with its members. In addition to the organization of topic-specific evenings at the headquarters in London, initiatives such as RISC-V and RUST are supported. As a hybrid event, all meetings are made available to international guests free of charge by video conference using the GWDG’s BigBlueButton (BBB). The OSSG had previously used BBB on its own server in AWS, but is extremely satisfied with the experience so far with the use of BBB from the GWDG.

The BCS is the association of IT experts in England and can be understood as an analogue to the Gesellschaft für Informatik. With more than 60,000 members in 150 countries, the mission of BCS is to raise technical standards in order to increase the potential of the IT industry.