Policy analysis time: the Public Procurement Regulation leak

Policy analysis time: I have finally taken the time to look into the Public Procurement Regulation proposal that leaked/floated around earlier in July, and while I concur with Diego Naranjo’s first assessment that there is no direct mention to #OpenSource, #PublicMoneyPublicCode in there, I don’t necessarily think there needs to be a direct, concrete reference to these terms. I’ll try to explain (disclaimer: from an absolute amateur position when it comes to procurement):

The European rules for Public Procurement deal with the 27 regimes of public procurement in the Member States and have thus far taken the form of three separate Directives. The Directives have dealt with anything from IT hardware, software and services procurement to the procurement of buildings, agricultural or landscaping machines etc.

The EU Procurement rules apply to IT procurement, but IT procurement is by far not the biggest concern of public procurers. It is for us, of course, but that means that we won’t likely find direct references and these words in a text that is a very general framework.

From my very shallow comparisons of the structure of the 2014 Directive with the leak, the following points stand out:

👉 Title II is called “Strategic design and execution of public procurement”. Strategic being the key word. The Title then contains the three important Chapters:

🧑💻 Innovation Procurement (Chapter 3),

🔐 Security and Resilience (Chapter 4),

🇪🇺 European Preference (Chapter 5).

In the context of the #DigitalSovereignty or #TechSovereignty debate (I use these terms interchangeably but what doesn’t one do to please the algo’), innovation, security and resilience, and European products read Open Source (which I use interchangeably with #FLOSS, btw) to me.

While the PPR is too broad to directly focus on IT procurement (which Digital Sovereignty efforts are a part of), it very directly opens the door to achieve broader policy goals with procurement, like we have suggested repeatedly at APELL. The way to realising them is through specialised legislation, such as the proposed a Cloud and AI Development Act (#CADA).

I have not yet looked at the Recitals, nor the Annexes that I am particularly curious to see, as they could also allow for some more detailed and specific intervention for IT procurement. We will have to wait until the foreseen publication date in about a month (9 September) to know the details.

photo credit

Index finger = attention, Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA/3.0