Visiting (and speaking at) the German Bundestag #

Many, many years ago, I invited Berlin Buzzwords keynote speakers to join me for lunch pre-conference. For the view – and the impact of the location – I reserved a table at the restaurant that is located atop the Reichstags-building here in Berlin. If back then anyone had told me that one day I’d get an invitation to speak as an expert in the committee for digital issues of the German Bundestag, I wouldn’t have believed a single word!

The invitation #

Fast forward some 15 years: I’m sitting at my desk, checking my personal mails some time in November 2024 – only to find an invitation letter to the hearing on Open Source. The instructions: Answer a catalog of questions around Open Source (“Yeah, sure, no problem with that.”), attend the hearing at the Bundestag (“Oook – that’s half an hour by public transport, not problem”), give a 5 minute verbal statement (“Wait, what? Are you kidding me?”), and afterwards answer questions of the representatives (“Sure, happy to”). After reading that (and making sure it’s not spam or phishing or else) I needed a bit of fresh air. I asked who told them my name – the answer confirmed the hunch I had: .oO(Ok, if that person thinks, I’m the right one to do that, …). I consulted my family in the evening, receiving a “You should totally do that mommy” – putting me in the “great, now you’re a role model and your behaviour will influence at least one child’s view” position.

Cutting the story short: I sent my acceptance, received the questionnaire and formal invitation shortly after that – it took me another two days to figure out that the most important information of that invitation was contained in the attached pdf documents, not in the message text itself – oh, yeah, that already had been weird when booking a slot to visit the Bundestag dome as a visitor.

Background #

So what was the hearing about? In early 2024 during FOSS Backstage Jacob Green had asked me, what I expected public admin to do wrt. Open Source. Could be procuring more software under open source licenses, could be providing funding to software infrastructure especially that which is underfunded by private corporations.

For the first task, think public money, public code by the FSFE. Or in a more child friendly way, think of the book Ada und Zangemann – if you haven’t done so already, go do that now – I’ll wait here in the meantime until you come back.

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“Ausschuss für Digitales” you said? If you’re not from Germany but speak a tiny bit of German (or can make your AI translate videos): The Bundestag has a lovely explanation of how that construct operates on the site Kuppelkucker for kids. (Kids pages have the added benefit that not only do they start from the basics requiring no prior knowledge – they also come with very easy to understand German language ;) ).

Preparation #

For the catalogue of questions: It took me about two evenings to get to a first rough draft of the answers. Polished and refined in the following days. Thanks to every expert I met in the past 20 years (Yiiiiks – 20?!? I’m not getting old, not at all, nope!) - and in particular thanks to everyone at FOSS Backstage who shared their wisdom! Having access to the recordings of FOSS Backstage also meant that for questions who were outside of my own area of expertise I could share pointers to presentations given by people much more knowledgable than me.

Reaching out #

On Thursday ahead of the meeting I sent my draft to a bunch of friends, some of which pointed me to a few other usual suspects that I had forgotten to include. As a result, this invitation gave me the opportunity to again work with people I hadn’t met for ages.

After a lot of silence, comments started to fly in on Friday evening, peaking on Saturday evening – on the weekend that I had reserved for baking cookies with my mom and daughter. The cookie baking exercise at least made me take regular breaks of an hour or two – after which waves of comments often settled down, so I could address them top to bottom without more flying in at the same time from the top :)

Sunday evening, back home in Berlin, I finalized everything and submitted it. Confirmation came on Monday, obviously not during the weekend.

Logistics #

At some point in time a kind human pointed out that my child would be allowed to get onto the guest gallery of the room if accompanied by an adult (not me for obvious reasons, not her Dad – he had another group of Open Source policy experts in his office that same day). During the flurry of trying to find another kind and brave human with time at their hands on short notice there’s two things I learnt:

a) Getting a “no” quickly is much more helpful than getting a “I’ll try” followed by a “sorry, can’t make it” days later. The quick “no” responses helped me to quickly move to the next person.

b) I went through people in my Berlin tech bubble, narrowed down to those I trust for obvious reasons. Feedback from those who did join (adults who had last seen our Bundestag as kids, even though working literally next door): The experience did have an impact on them, did make them think about how they can become more active. Occasionally we pride ourselves as having nothing to do with politics – that’s not only a very privileged thing to say, it’s also one cause why on the other hand we tend to find reason to roll our eyes when looking at the state of digital in public admin.

The evening itself #

To watch the recording of the evening yourself, checkout the official page online.

A choreographed ballet dance of a meeting #

If you’ve watched the kids movie above on Kuppelkucker you already know roughly what the room the meeting takes place in looks like. You also know roughly the outline of the meeting. To recap:

Essentially the entire meeting is very strictly organised to allow for sticking to the schedule and to allow for giving air time to participants according to the will of voters. That’s where my comparison to a ballet choreography comes from: The frame is very well defined, it’s brought to life by the people participating.

For a public hearing there’s transparency for the people in that visitors can participate in person from the visitors’ gallery – no chance to speak or ask questions from there, following the discussion in person does make a difference though. People from all over the world can participate online because the entire meeting is streamed. In the background notetakers are taking care that everything that’s being said and done ends up on the protocol. Side note: You remember that my child was sitting up on the visitors’ gallery? One of my friends who went there with her was really nervous, the little toy cat she brought would decide to jump down onto the desk underneath – hearing about the people writing the protocol she told me after a school trip to the Bundestag, the first question to pop up in my head: “I wonder, if the cat “jumping” down would also have made it into the protoc… “ ;)

Putting jokes aside: The agenda of the meeting is pretty much as follows:

In a first round, all experts are asked to give a five minute statement. In our case in alphabetical order by surname. There’s a big cube in the center of the room with four screens attached to call remote people in. Those five minutes are being counted down for everyone to see on the lower right corner of each screen for everyone to see. One minute before the end of the slot a bell rings. If the speaker goes over the five minutes, the counter turns red. If they still don’t stop shortly after that the meeting chair will intervene.

In the second round representatives of elected parties can ask questions. Order is determined by size of elected members of that party in parliament. Each one has a five minute slot for question-answer interactions. Typically those questions first go to the expert they invited (if they did invite one), then to others. The answers to the questionnaire submitted before are one basis for formulating questions. Another one is knowledge about the area of expertise and experience of each of the experts.

The third round is a repeat of the second one. Experts in my case were expected to be available to answer questions not only from the party that invited them but provide their expertise to the entire room.

The coordination that is not visible on the recording: In many cases, answers to the questions are the result of the input of more than the expert invited. It is not unlikely that experts know each other - if they do, it is likely that the communicate before the hearing - and go to dinner afterwards, even if they disagree on details. The points and references made do not necessarily reflect the personal opinion of the speaker, but may mirror the way topics are discussed in groups deemed relevant by the speaker.

Learnings #

• Democracy is about arguing about the best way forward – there are ways to structure discourse such that it happens in a productive, civilized manner.
• At least some of the experts in the room were there not as individuals but representing their organisation. There is no way they could possibly argue differently – they are there to represent their role. Mixing that up would only complicate the message.
• Each role is important. Often we only hear quotations taken out of the context of the entire meeting and get emotional about those. Watching the entire meeting unfold though tells very complex and interesting story about not only the topic, but also interests that participating individuals and organisations have.

Final invitation #

Political leaders also have a day that has only 24 hours. We can mock them not getting what we do on a daily basis – but that won’t change anything. If we expect different outcomes, we need to participate – not only at the level of the Bundestag but also at local levels. It took me ages to write an e-mail to local admin with a question I had – I got instant feedback, and a friendly smile for the warm thank you for the speedy response.

And, if you speak German: Checkout the Bundestag resources – even if just as an educational exercise – or as a test how good your command of the German language really is :)

Parting thoughts #

A couple days after the meeting I got feedback that explaining instead of expecting people to know even an Open Source foundation as old, large and impactful as Apache was a positive surprise. I’ve been a part of that foundation for long enough to know that no matter how large you think you are, there will always be people who didn’t hear about it before - or hear about it in a much smaller context than it’s active in. If you bump into people who still divvy people up into tech and non-tech I would like to urge you to watch the recording of a talk that Leslie Hawthorn gave many, many years ago - but that I personally still find highly valuable.