Mike Gifford

Photos were taken at the State of Open Con 25.

I am wearing a CivicActions jacket and T-Shirt.

Photographer: Tiana Lea.

View the Project on GitHub: mgifford/ox.ca

Mike Gifford wearing a CivicActions jacket and T-Shirt

Digital Transformation Is Hard

The last 30 years of digital are now legacy

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::notes Governments are not to blame for choosing proprietary software over the last 30 years. There were no easy options at that point. Open source maturity & digital public goods are changing this now. Government is old & slow to change, but change is always slow until it is fast.

Set up the audience & prime them on the focus. ::

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Building the Digital Commons

The rupture is driving strategic autonomy

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::notes Governments around the world are building a digital commons. It is clear that our assumptions about the structure of power has changed since the rupture. DPGs & DPIs are increasingly playing a larger role as countries need to cooperate more. DPGs are open source tools, tied to the UN’s SDGs but also much more than this.

Digital is a national security matter for all governments. Digital independence is about the ability to choose & proprietary software restricts options. The UN is trying to respond to a global need. All governments are facing lower budgets & higher needs. ::

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Proof of Concept: Europe’s Shift

Europe is truly leading the way

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::notes Europe is already leading the way. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency. France’s La Suite. Dutch OSPOs.

So much work has been done to verify that mid-sized countries can shift to use open source & can collaborate with others outside their government. ::

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Most Governments are Digital Tenants

Proprietary software is now a risk

::column-left Performative Sovereignty

::column-right on-click The Harsh Reality

::center You must be able to inspect, improve & distribute, to control digital. ::

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Since the rupture, it is clear that organizations cannot assume that software which is owned & controlled outside their country will abide by national laws. With increased vendor lock-in, a handful of giant companies are able to charge what they like.

There is still so much power held by a handful of USA companies & they have not stood up for democratic rights. They cannot be trusted with the future of our digital lives.

The Dutch Wake-up Call: The infrastructure behind the Netherlands’ national ID system (DigiD) faced a US corporate takeover, triggering a parliamentary crisis over foreign data access under the US CLOUD Act.

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AI: The Sovereignty Fork

Two paths for the future of state power

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Algorithmic Clientelism

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Participatory Stewardship

::center AI investment must shift from replacing human labor to augmenting national autonomy. ::

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::notes In traditional political theory, sovereignty means a state has absolute, supreme authority within its borders. But in the AI era, that absolute power is a mirage if you don’t control the stack.

We face a choice. Path A is Algorithmic Clientelism, where we surrender absolute authority & become digital client states to a handful of foreign companies. Path B is Participatory Stewardship. We protect our sovereignty not by trying to stand alone, but by owning, modifying & running the open infrastructure ourselves. ::

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Currently most people perceive AI to be a choice between Anthropic, Google & OpenAI. The race is for nothing short of global domination. If this model succeeds, it will disrupt everything. There are alternatives though, which follows on building strategic autonomy.

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The Middle Power Strategy

Participatory Sovereignty Through DPGs

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::notes If the old Westphalian model of standalone national sovereignty is dead in the digital space, what replaces it? Participatory Sovereignty.

Middle powers like Canada cannot build a closed, proprietary ecosystem that rivals the US tech giants. We shouldn’t try. Instead, our strategic autonomy relies on alliances. By building on Digital Public Goods alongside partners in Europe & globally, we ensure we are architects at the table, not tenants on the menu. ::

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Sovereign SLMs: “Weights as Law”

Deploying open government AI safely

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::notes Let’s ground this strategy in technology: Small Language Models, or SLMs.

Take France & Germany’s joint work on Albert—a sovereign generative AI built specifically by the state, for public administration agents. It doesn’t rely on commercial black boxes; it leverages open-weights models like France’s Mistral & Meta’s Llama, fine-tuned precisely on government administrative guides.

As public servants, you have a constitutional duty to transparency & due process. If a Canadian citizen asks how an AI-assisted administrative decision was reached, you cannot answer, “The proprietary algorithm said so.” By using open Small Language Models (SLMs) hosted locally, we ensure that the weights of the model are as auditable as the laws of the land.

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Procurement as Industrial Policy

Feeding the Ecosystem, Not the Hegemons

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::notes We need to address the rupture, learning from Europe. We need to find ways to help build better governance ::

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The FWD50 Call to Action

From Tenants to Architects

::center The future will be controlled by those that best steward digital infrastructure. ::

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::notes We can do this. In many ways we are much closer than we might imagine. ::

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