Sivan Pätsch is Research Director at OpenForum Europe (OFE), where he is shepherding OFE's academic network, the OpenForum Academy. Before he joined OFE, he gained experience in EU digital policy making at the Council of the European Union. Within OFE he is responsible for the ongoing study on the impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on Europe, where he leads the work on policy analysis. He presented the results of a previous project on Open Source skills and SMEs at multiple events, among them during the European Commission conference "Open Source Beyond 2020". He has a master’s degree in European Affairs from Lund University, Sweden with a thesis on the global expansion of the European data protection standard. In addition, he holds a bachelor’s degree in European Public Administration from the University of Twente, Enschede and from the University of Münster.