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This article addresses the equal opportunities and project benefits that the Association provides for all open source and cloud businesses, irrespective of their size and origin. Moreover, it elaborates on our non-discrimination and non-compete clauses as per the Articles of the Association of Gaia-X and the letter of comfort that DG CONNECT, European Commissions had issued earlier this year.

The future of our economy is driven by the digital economy, a new way to build value on top of the existing ecosystem. It is tied to data infrastructure, sharing information, and optimising the quality of services by extracting insightful data. The last two years were marked by the COVID pandemic, which harshly impacted every aspect of our life, personal and professional. Thus, we need appropriate tools to perform on the job and to build a new digital market based on transparency, controllability, portability, and interoperability.

The five pillars of openness, transparency, sovereignty, interoperability, and trust serve as the foundation of Gaia-X Framework. We are currently developing a structured federated data space infrastructure ecosystem on top of these pillars. Compliance automation and empowering SMEs and start-ups for fair competitiveness in the free market with the big scalers are essential elements to establishing a data space ecosystem but equally enable sector-specific data spaces.

A project headed by the Berlin Charité aims to make data from our smartwatches and fitness apps usable for personalised therapies. The team responsible, led by Harald Wagener, Head of Cloud and IT at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité, is developing the German “HEALTH-X dataLOFT” as a joint cloud platform for the healthcare sector. In an interview, the computer scientist explains which applications project partners from research and industry are currently working on, and how citizens can retain control over their data in a digital health system.