Open Source Program Offices for Good - UN Open Source Week 2026 (Part 5)

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to OSPO for Good. This is our fourth day at the UN Open Source Week, and it's a very special day for us. It's very special because this is how everything started.

It—

the start of the Open Source Week was OSPO for Good, then it expanded to, to, to, to to the Open Source Weeks, but we made sure we keep that segment and keep giving it a full day of attention. And what began as a small but passionate community has since grown into global movement. I remember we were 60 people in 2023. It's incredible to see that this year we passed 1,400, and we're extremely grateful for all, for all of you. You We have over 100 countries who are represented in this conference this week. But despite remarkable growth, we had kept OSPO for Good at the heart of the program because we believe that institutionalization of open source within different organizations is one of the most important challenges and opportunities we can all face together. How org— Also is very important and meaningful for us because we are also, as United Nations, at the heart of our open source adoption, and we're looking for a way to scale our open source engagement and adoptions. Since the last time we met, we have achieved some very important milestones. I'm particularly pleased that the UN Open Source Principles have now passed 250 organizations around the world who endorsed them. That's a remarkable achievement. Let me do a show of hands. Please raise your hand if your organization endorsed the UN Open Source Principles. Thank you to all of you. Those who did not, please open your phone, opensource.un.org. Opensource.un.org, there's a page about the principles. Please learn more about them. Please endorse them. We want you to join this global movement. It's really the recognition that open source, it comes to complement the existing principles of open source, and it has to be open in the hand of everyone. In fact, I would like— the principle for us is not just a declaration of intent. They are a practical framework for organizations, seeking to institutionalize open source and maximize its benefits. So throughout the day today, we will hear from an outstanding and diverse group of speakers. So we have very little panels. I think there's just one in the morning and two in the afternoon, and— but in between, and it was done because we heard from you to give more space for engagement. So in between the two panels, there's a lot of breakout sessions. So some of them will take place here, some will be in the basement. We will give instructions You can go on the program to find where all these breakout, but really they're designed to be a space where we can engage and hear from all of you. So it was done on purpose, but in the panels you'll see we have an incredible selection of speakers coming from government, academia, private sector, and foundations. And I really encourage all of you to participate, share your experience, challenge the assumptions, and shape us build OSPO for good. With this, I just once again, on behalf of the organizers, the UN Office of Information, Communication and Technology and the UN Office of Digital and Emerging Technology, thank all of you. I know you flew from very far. Let's do another show of hands. Please raise your hand if you're not from New York City, you came from somewhere.

Wow.

Raise your hand if you're not from United States, you flew from even further.

Wow.

I think this deserves a round of applause. We're incredibly grateful for all of you for giving us your time and really hope that you get to get the best of this conference. So with this, I just want to now open I give the floor to Her Excellency Madame Amal El Filah Sarrouchni, the Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in charge of digital transition administration reform of the Kingdom of Morocco. You have the floor, ma'am.

Good morning. Hello. Sabah al-Nour. I gained some time, some minutes. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Distinguished representative of the United Nations, dear partners, it is a great honor for the Kingdom of Morocco to contribute alongside the United Nations to the opening of this week dedicated to open source and the future of digital transformation. We are meeting at a decisive moment. Digital technologies now shape our public administrations. Critical infrastructure, public services, competitiveness, and increasingly the very exercise of our sovereignty— digital sovereignty. In this context, every nation must address a fundamental question: how can we fully benefit from global innovation while retaining control over our technological choices? For Morocco, strategic autonomy rests on the capacity to make informed choices, cooperate with confidence, maintain control over our data, secure our infrastructure, and direct technology towards our national priorities. This ambition is pursued under the high guidance of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, may God assist him, who has placed artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, and digital transformation among the key drivers of the Kingdom's economic, social, and human development. Indeed, digital technology represents a structural transformation and enables the emergence of new patterns of production and consumption, expands investment opportunities, and creates new prospects for employment. It is in this spirit that Morocco is building what we call a third digital path. This path combines international openness with national governance. It draws on global standards, technological partnerships, the articulation of knowledge and access to the best innovations, while remaining deeply rooted in our legal framework, our languages, our culture, our social needs, and our strategic interests. Open source plays an essential role in this vision. It strengthens transparency, promotes interoperability, facilitates auditing, and enables institutions Institutions to adapt the tools they use. It also supports the reversibility of public sector choices and the long-term control of our critical digital systems. This openness must be genuine and verifiable. It must enable people to use, study, modify, and share a technology. In the field of artificial intelligence, This means considering the model's weights, code, documentation, training, training conditions, and the effective rights granted to its users. For us, open source is therefore an instrument of sovereignty through its capability, the capability to understand, adapt, audit, secure, and continuously improve the technologies we use. This conviction lies at the heart of our Digital Morocco 2030 strategy and our AI Made in Morocco roadmap. Our ambition is to make Morocco a country able to understand technologies, adapt them to its realities, contribute to their development, and produce its contextualized solutions. This ambition is already being translated into concrete initiatives. I will cite some of them. We are developing artificial intelligence models and technological building blocks adapted to Arabic, Darija, and Amazigh— those are Moroccan languages— a technology that understands the citizen's language, can improve access to public services, and transform everyday life. We are also prioritizing specialized, resource-efficient, and targeted models designed to address concrete needs in public administration, education, healthcare, agriculture, law, water management, and cybersecurity. We have launched the Jazariya Institute's Network deployed across the Kingdom, 12 regions, to connect universities, researchers, public administration, startups, and companies around applied artificial intelligence projects. This territorial network reflects a core conviction: innovation must emerge as close as possible to real needs and benefit every region. We have also established, established a joint laboratory with Mistral AI built around applied research, co-design, and skills transfer. It will enable our engineers to participate fully in the design, adaptation, evaluation, and security models while allowing sensitive solutions to be deployed in nationally controlled environments. Open models and their components also enable the creation of genuine digital commons—tools, evaluation frameworks, software building blocks, and sector-specific models that can be reused by public administrations, researchers, startups, and SMEs. This technological ambition is, uh, combined with major investment in human capital. Morocco aims to train 100,000 new digital talents every year by 2030. Strategic autonomy depends just as much on skills— much on skills as it does on infrastructure. It also requires tangible technological capacity. Morocco's portfolio of data center projects represent a projected capacity of approximately 1 gigawatt by 2030. Combining sovereign infrastructure, cloud services, computing capacity, and renewable energy, these investments will allow us to determine where our data is hosted, how our models are operated, and under what conditions our critical services are secured. This approach extends across the full spectrum of public action. In public procurement, we intend to better integrate criteria relating to reversibility, interoperability, portability, and access to essential components. As part of public administration modernization, we are building shared foundation and open interfaces. Our national interoperability platform has already processed more than 52 million transactions while the Idaratı, my administration's main portal, documents over 2,450 administrative procedures across more than, more than 120 public administrations. These results illustrate the gradual transition from fragmented administration to an administration designed as platform. For sensitive users, we combine openness with strong requirements in cybersecurity, personal data protection, traceability, and human oversight. Open source is therefore embedded within framework of trust, responsibility, and security. This combination enables it to become a sustainable driver of transformation. Morocco also considers open source to be a powerful instrument of international cooperation. This approach is fully aligned with the vision of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, may God assist him, for solidarity-based, practical, and capacity-centered South-South cooperation. His Majesty has notably called for the mobilization of the necessary financial and human resources, with particular emphasis on harnessing African talent capable of developing digital solutions adapted to the cultural social specificities of our countries. Through the Digital for Sustainable Development Hub, D4SD Hub, launched with the United Nations Development Programme, PNUD, or UNDP, we seek to contribute to the design experimentation and deployment of inclusive digital solutions for the benefits of the Arab world and Africa, a continent of 1.4 billion people and one of the major frontiers of artificial intelligence in the century. With a program budget of $38 million over 3 years, the hub will pool expertise and accelerate solutions in areas such as healthcare, education, climate resilience, governance, and digital public infrastructure. Our conviction is that countries of the Global South have a central role to play in designing technologies, adapting them to their realities, and contributing to the development of the standards and govern them. Africans will build their own models. A statement that seemed ambitious only recently is now becoming a reality, and open source will be a decisive instrument in making it possible. Opening the code must therefore go hand in hand with opening access to capabilities, ecosystems, and opportunities. Ladies and gentlemen, in a world marked by technology fragmentation, Morocco intends to remain a bridge between Africa, the Arab world, Europe, and the Atlantic space, between innovation and regulation, and between sovereignty and cooperation. We believe that the digital future will be shaped by nations that are able to cooperate while remaining in control of their choices. This is the vision we wish to share throughout this week. Open technologies serve interest, resilience, innovation, and our collective capacity to act. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Excellency, for your keynote. Next in our list of speakers, we're very honored to give the floor to Excellency Ms. Angela Kayrouk, Minister of Information, Communication and Technology of the Republic of Tanzania.

Thank you.

Excellencies, distinguished fellow honorable ministers, the leaders of the industry and the open source community, esteemed panelists, ladies and gentlemen, good morning to you all. Let me begin with a question that sits at the heart of every government represented in this room. Who actually truly owns the digital systems that serve our people? For too long, for too many nations, the answer was someone else. A license that we did not write. A platform that we could not inspect. A dependency that we could not break. Today, I'm very proud to say that for Tanzania, the answer is changing, and open source is the reason for that change. It is a profound honor to share a few reflections on open source as a critical trigger for the digitalization of the government, a path to genuine digital sovereignty, but also to adaptable systems that put citizens first. Excellencies, when we embrace open source technology, we do far more than reducing the licensing costs. We change our posture in the world. From passive consumers of technology to become active creators of technology. We build the infrastructures that we control, safeguard, and own. We keep our nation's digital destiny firmly in our own hands. And this is what digital sovereignty means in practice. Not to be in isolation, but ownership. Not dependence, but partnership on our own terms. Distinguished participants, The United Republic of Tanzania does not speak of this in theory. We are living the practice, built on the three pillars of progress. First, it's the right legal foundations. Under the eGovernment Authority Act of 2020 for Tanzania, we changed the rules of the game. We empowered our public institutions to move away from fragmented, costly proprietary licenses and to build instead on flexible, open-source software that are running on shared national infrastructure. It is for this reason that today more than 90% of our government systems are built on open-source technologies. And all around them, laws such as the Personal Data Protection Act of 2023, the Cyber Crimes Act, and our own Electronic and Postal Communications Law allow us to safeguard citizens' privacy, secure our services, and exchange data seamlessly across the government through open interfaces and connected services that are full in-house. Second, it is the clear institutional leadership. Through our e-government authority, we created a single point of coordination, one body to set the standards, and to enforce technical compliance across the government. The result is discipline. Every new system must contribute and draw from our shared public infrastructure. Our data is never locked away, and even a Tanzanian shilling of digital investment is built to last, but also to be enhanced, not discarded and replaced. Third, it is an empowered workforce. We took the funds once spent on external vendors and expensive licenses and invested them in our own people. We've done capacity building for 500 public officials that have been trained as a collaborative community of internal developers—citizens building for citizens, owning the very systems that they create. Excellencies, Tanzania's experience proves a simple truth: With the right laws, with a clear leadership, and an empowered workforce, building an independent digital infrastructure, it is not the privilege of a wealthy few, but it is within reach of every nation that is willing to choose it. And this is precisely why Open Source Program Offices for Good matter so deeply. OSPOs turn good intentions into lasting institutions. They are how governments share what works, reuse what others have built, and give back to global commons for digital public goods. They are how the open source promises of the Global Digital Compact that are becoming real for ordinary people in a clinic, be it in a classroom, be it in a tax office. And they are how South-South cooperation moves from words to working code. What we have built in Dar es Salaam can serve Kinshasa, can serve Nairobi, can serve Kingston, can serve Rabat, and other places. When we open our solutions, we multiply them. So it is my call to every leader, to every innovator, but also every partner present here today: let us sustain the momentum. Let us break down the silos between our institutions and organizations and countries and across our borders. Let us build adaptable, transparent systems that put our citizens, not our vendors, at the very center. Open source has handed us the keys to our own innovation. Let us use them together to secure a digitally sovereign, inclusive, and a prosperous future for all our nations. I thank you very much.

Thank Her Excellency for her key remarks. My next speaker is Mr. Bernardo Mariano Jr. He's the UN Assistant Secretary-General and the Chief Information Technology Officer of the organization.

Good morning, Excellencies, distinguished guests, colleagues, members of this vibrant open source community. Let me first say welcome. Welcome to United Nations Headquarters. Building the success of the previous editions of this symposium, I would also like to extend my gratitude to all of you who have traveled miles coming from 100 different countries to come here to take part of your valuable time. To share, to collaborate, to keep this passion that the open source community have and bring it to United Nations. Your presence demonstrates this growing strength of diversity, of global reach, but also of the value of open source to all of us. I also want to thank our co-hosts, partners, sponsors, and many volunteers that made this event possible. Open source, as Minister Ângela mentioned, is, is like bringing true sovereignty into digital ecosystem. Imagine a situation where one individual, because he has a big company, can turn off or turn on systems that you use in your own countries. In the digital ecosystem in today's world, you know, that's not an utopia. It's a reality. And guess what can counter that? Nothing else than open source. So you— what you have to bring into this world is not just what United Nations can bring by talking to the different countries. Having General Assembly and the Security Council, it is what you do. Fast-track the development of open source. Fast-track open source AI. Fast-track everything that you're doing in open source because that is the antidote to what we could what we could see as either anarchy or perhaps just full control of the world by very few. And you know human history, that never ends well. So you have a big role to play. So let's do it, and let's do it together. We are here at the very start of extraordinary technological transformation times where Economies, elections are changing. We see fragmentations, we see standards that are not adhered to, we see governance that is discussed whether it should be there or shouldn't be there, but you are the alternative. Open Source is the alternative to that. With your help, we can be very powerful to change how we build this digital ecosystem that does not have a physical border. With your help, we can share knowledge rather than duplicate effort. We can, with your help, we can build digital solutions to serve public interests. So hosting this event here, that reflects the alignment between the principles of open source, but also the vows of the UN. For me, this event is like UN is walking the talk. We're not just sitting down and say countries should do this and that, the world should be more peaceful, we should have SDG. No, we are doing it by having this event, by bringing you together, looking at the solutions, try to fast-track the development of that open source. And as we are trying to walk the talk, and in the United Nations, especially in my office, the Office of Information and Communication Technology, we have— we are using as part of the enterprise systems open source technology, and I will mention 3 examples. Every time you search any resolution of United Nations, in the web, on Google, whatever platform you search, that result that you get comes from an open source tool. We call it the Official Document System. So every resolution of a General Assembly, every resolution of a Security Council, it is hosted, it is stored in an open source platform. So thank you for all these communities that are supporting that particular open source tool. Everybody that applies for a job in UN, in terms of career portal, we have an open source tool there that we also built recently, an AI open source to help both the candidates but also the hiring managers worldwide. I also want to say thank you for the community of open source that supports that. And the third is the websites. The standard UN website is hosted by open source too. So that's all our web presence is powered by open source. Perhaps we should have that tag, powered by open source. So this is just to show that open source for United Nations and my office is not just a technological choice. It's a strategic enabler for innovation. And that, we couldn't do that without you. So I want to say, let's keep going. Far and going fast, as in African terms. I'm from Mozambique, so there's a— there's a— we say that if you want to go far, go alone. If you want to go fast— if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We want to go far and fast and together. I also want to mention the launch of the open source portal. It's a gateway that showcases open source initiatives. Omar mentioned to you opensource.un.org that will gather all the open source initiatives across the UN, so please visit, and then in the process of visiting, endorse the open source principles, And as Omar mentioned, more than 200 organizations that endorsed the principles, but also those covers government, international organization, academia, civil society, private sector, but also I want to recognize the last endorsement, one of the last endorsements of the city of Barcelona, which became the first city in the world to formally endorse the principles, but also the government of South Africa. That became the first government— African government to endorse the principles. We want to see more, and I want to ask you and all the countries and member states to continue to endorse this principle because that is the antidote for what we don't want to see repeating in this world in the digital ecosystem. In parallel, we also have an open source community of practice in the United Nations to make sure that we just don't use, but also we give back. But on top of everything, we also promote and strengthen this collaboration across. But I also wanted to recognize their flagship initiative, the Reboot the Earth. Which has reached the 8th locations across 6 countries. And I'm happy to announce for the first time the edition will be held in Brazil, expanding our reach to South America region to bring those innovators, those young innovators. And I want to welcome the winners of 2025 edition who have joined us in this, in this Open Source Week. So welcome and thank you, congratulations to the winners of the Reboot the Earth initiative. But you are here, and there's a formal program, there's an informal program, there's a coffee break, there is side events. I encourage you to use it all to network, to use it all to exchange ideas, because not everything is born out of a regular formal meeting. Can be born out of a coffee break. Can be born out of an event that you attend and a few of you meet together and think about it. So yeah, I look very much forward to see that those exchange of ideas, those— that creativity, that passion that the open source community have, it translates into fast and more greater things that we can do together in this fast and growing digital ecosystem that if we're not there, if we don't bring the antidote of the open source, some will be the winners and many will be the losers. So we want to find a win-win situation, and that's where open source comes through. So thank you very much. Thank you for being here. Wishing you a productive day., and let's do it. Thank you.

I thank the UN Assistant Secretary-General, Mr. Bernardo Mariano Jr. Our next speaker would be from— we heard from government, from international organizations, now we're going to hear from civil society. So my next speaker will be Jim Zemling, the Chief Executive Officer of Linux Foundation.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I want to thank the United Nations for having us here today. This is an incredible group. How many people here have heard of the Linux Foundation before? Oh, wow! That's a lot of you. Before I talk, I think it's important to understand the role of the Linux Foundation and my role in ODM. Open source. I've been working in open source for 22 years. Uh, in fact, I got this job when I first met my wife on a blind date. Uh, she is a graduate of Harvard Business School, she's a tech exec, and when I told her I work at this small nonprofit and we kind of give away software, the look of disappointment was just palpable. Uh, and that kind of thing keeps you humble in the open source community. And I think that's the premise and what I want to go through in this talk as I talk about artificial intelligence and some of the challenges in open source resulting in that. Someone just before this talk reminded me of the most important concept in open source, and that is humility. That the Linux Foundation and our family of projects are just a small part of the open source community. That the open source community is actually a diaspora of hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations that all make this rich tapestry together. Uh, some of those leaders are, are in this room, uh, today. Uh, Duane O'Brien, I think, is here from the Open Source Initiative, who, uh, the creators of the Open Source Definition. Uh, Mike Malinkovich is here today. He's the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. Uh, Ruth Zuley is here today. She's the executive director of the Apache Software Foundation. Karen Sandler is in the room today. She is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, and I could take my entire time to keep going here, but I just wanted to mention a few and remind everyone that the Linux Foundation is one part of this community, um, and we're very grateful to be a part of that community. Today I thought I would talk about how open source is impacting artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence is conversely impacting open source so that you can all get an idea of the opportunities and the challenges around open source as it relates to AI. There's a famous movie in the United States that has a saying, "Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you." Sometimes you win, sometimes you get challenges. The good news in artificial intelligence as it relates to open source If you think of the layers of technology that are required to deploy AI, from a GPU in a data center to the software that is used to run that data center, to the software that use— is used to train models, to the models themselves, to the agent frameworks on top of that, just above the hardware, open source is the entire stack. Every layer, at the operating system layer, Linux, at the inference and deployment layer, Kubernetes, at the training layer, PyTorch, at the agentic layer, open frameworks like MCP, and much, much more. Top to bottom, the entire stack is built on open source, and that's critical for any organization or government that wants to leverage artificial intelligence, even in open weight models, open source is very, very close, and these days 3 to 6 months behind frontier models. I think we're going to see this year people start paying much more attention to open models, not just because they're very, very good, but because they're very cost-effective. The Linux Foundation and Harvard, uh, did a study last year on the costs of open models versus proprietary API consumption. And we found that over $50— roughly $50 billion a year is overspent on models that could have— on work that could have been done using open weight models. And I think we're going to see even more transition to open models as people start to realize the economic value of that. So I think that we are doing well in open source as a fundamental building block of artificial intelligence. Where we're having some challenges is in a couple of areas. One, in data. Unfortunately, we are seeing the world go from an internet, which was very open and shared a lot of data, to unfortunately a world where data is getting a little more closed and a little more scarce. Now you have tools from organizations that can block crawlers to get access to what had been traditionally open data. We're seeing the licensing and sort of hoarding of large-scale data initiatives, uh, and I'm hoping that the Linux Foundation and other organizations like us can help in a counterweight to that, building open consortiums of shared data. For example, we have our Overture Maps project, which is the largest shared geospatial mapping data infrastructure in the world. I think for every, uh, action there's a reaction. And as we see more closed data, I'm hoping we'll see a reaction just like we saw in proprietary software to open source, from closed data to intentional open data sharing. Governments around the world can be a big part of that effort. So I think that's one of the big challenges in AI as it relates to the concept of open. But I want to spend a few of my final moments on the most immediate and urgent challenge that artificial intelligence poses to open source, and that is in the area of cybersecurity. Today, the mean time to exploit for a vulnerability in software, proprietary or open source— this isn't just about open source— is now -7 days. Just a— maybe in 2018, 2020, that time was 60 days. The speed at which a vulnerability can be discovered and exploited now is faster than we can keep up with in terms of our ability to patch. And so when you think about this, when you look at these artificial intelligence models, a good harness being used by attackers to exploit vulnerabilities in software, that is an immediate, urgent, daunting problem. The good news is the defenders, in this case the diaspora of open source maintainers, have access to the same technology to defend the stack. And this is something that I think requires nothing more than willpower, setting aside all of our collective competitive differences in the corporate world, our differences in the open source world. And let me tell you, there are a lot of differences of opinion in open source. And exercising the will to come together and retire 20-plus years of technical debt. By building a group of organizations and maintainers that can use this AI technology to scan, to find vulnerabilities, but most importantly, come to the most critical people, the open source maintainers, to provide them working code that they can merge into their software easily without extra burden on them so that we can collectively secure the corpus of open source software. And the final thought I'll leave you with is when Jim says corpus of open source software, what does that mean? It means roughly a million open source projects. These are not the 80 million repos on GitHub. These are the million open source projects starting from Linux and then long tail dependencies and kind of every software component out there. That are used in production systems and critical infrastructure— banking systems, telecommunications, utilities, the energy sector, uh, government systems. It's a million different discrete components, and we need to look at every single one of them, leverage this intelligence, and spend the next 6 to 12 months hardening this software, getting it secure, Leveraging this technology to make that happen. And if we can exercise that will, we will restore the equilibrium between attackers and defenders in the cybersecurity world. Most importantly, and this is for the open source community to understand the most, a lot of us have been working in here for, for 20+ years, some 30, 40. It took us this long to create open source as a trusted resource. That trust can be broken if we do not meet this moment and collectively work together, come together to collectively secure this large ecosystem of open source components. So that is, I think, the most immediate and urgent challenge that AI presents us. The good news is that we have these tools. The good news is that the entire stack is built on open source. The good news is that we can counter closed data with open data, and the Linux Foundation looks forward to working with all of our partners and all the governments around the world to do just that.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Jim Zemling. Our next and last speaker before we start our panel today would be Louise McIver. She's the government CIO, Chief Information Officer, at the Department of Public Expenditure, Public Service Reform and Digitisation of Ireland. Louise, you have the floor.

Good morning everyone and distinguished guests. I'm absolutely delighted to be here. I visited New York a couple of times, but this is my first time in the UN, so it's an absolute privilege to be here and talk a little bit about open source and digital sovereignty in a connected world, and that will be from an Irish perspective. Just give you a little background, um, I took up the role as Government CIO a month ago, so I want to thank you all for coming here today and celebrating my one-month work anniversary. Um, but I'm no stranger to operating across government. Previously, I worked for 5 and a half years as the CIO in the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine, where their policy is open source first. So their technology stack is built on open source, which is very much aligned to the systems and services for central government. Our enterprise systems are also built on open source technologies. So one of my mandates is to drive digital government. So, the technology stack will be the enabler to drive digital government, but it's not just the technology that's going to drive, it's also collaboration, and I think collaboration has been a big focus of discussions over the last couple of days. So, I'm gonna start by talking, I suppose, answering 3 questions, which, if I can get it to work now, apologies, which is what is digital sovereignty? Why is it becoming a priority for governments? And how can open source help Ireland build more resilient public services. So digital sovereignty is the ability of an organization, and in my situation, government, to maintain control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technologies. In today's environment of cross-border data flows, AI advancement, and geopolitical risk, digital sovereignty is a national security concern. So digital sovereignty is about choice and resilience. Why is it becoming a priority for governments? Well, public services are increasingly digital. We talked a lot the last couple of days about digitalization, and in Ireland, to drive digitalization, we have what's known as the Better Public Services 2030 Plan, and the vision is, is for a professional, innovative, and agile public service that is responsive, reliable, fair, open, and trustworthy. These drivers of trust are central to all reform efforts. The requirement of 2030 is to have 100% of public services available online, and 90% of applicable services are consumed digitally. Digital sovereignty is also a priority for governments due to increasing focus on cybersecurity and resilience, and data control. So how can open source help Ireland build more resilient public services? And we've heard a lot about the benefits of open source, source, obviously, over the last couple of days. But just to name a few is greater transparency, improve interoperability, the ability to adapt solutions to public sector needs, and collaboration across public service bodies, which is a key driver of Ireland's digital government agenda. So open source and digital sovereignty in practice. So how does open source contribute to digital sovereignty? Well, by increasing control, improving resilience, supporting security, and building capability. It is built through trusted technology choices, secure architecture, and an open approach that gives governments and organizations the ability to shape, adapt, and govern their digital environments. From Ireland's perspective, we're at a critical point, or a very important point, in Ireland's digital journey. Across government, we are working to deliver public services that are more connected, more consistent, and easy to use. Our vision is clear: to provide inclusive, high-quality, and integrated public services that meet people's needs and improve their everyday lives. A whole-of-government approach sets out to help departments address key strategic investment questions and choose effective, scalable technology-based solutions, and in particular to help them to consider using digital public infrastructure—a lot of what we spoke about yesterday—for economies of scale and ROI, return on investment. The Digital Public Services Plan, as mentioned, is Ireland's roadmap to fully digital, customer/user-centric, and inclusive public services aiming to meet that 100% services online by 2030, as mentioned. At the core of the plan is the life events approach, and I know that was mentioned yesterday, where, you know, we reorganise services around, I suppose, critical or significant moments in people's lives, residents' lives, such as becoming a parent, starting school, learning to drive, accessing housing, and planning for retirement. The plan introduces government digital blocks to support service delivery, including a government digital wallet and shared digital platforms, which enabling collaboration across public service bodies. Now, I stand to be corrected here, but I believe Ireland is the only member state in the EU that is pursuing both life events as a methodology and the GovStack building blocks architecture as our target architecture, working with partners and and providers who are all supporting our open source development efforts. A key enabler of Ireland's transformation is the, is the Government Digital Wallet, which I mentioned, and at a high level, the wallet will give people a secure and convenient way to prove who they are, to store important documents, and to access services more easily. It has the potential to simplify how people interact with the state at important points in life, and it is underpinned by strong principles such as privacy, security, and user control, ensuring that individuals decide what information they share and when they share it. For government and the wider public service, the wallet also has many benefits. It can support more efficient and scalable service delivery by reducing manual processing, paper-based administration, repeated verification checks, and duplicated service journeys. And that certainly was discussed over the last few days. In that sense, it's not just a new app, it's part of the infrastructure that can help public services work better across organisations. We have just concluded a comprehensive public consultation process and I'm delighted to say that Ireland is moving into a national pilot testing phase over the coming days, so really exciting times for Ireland. So just to summarise, and I've got a couple of key takeaways for you. So digital sovereignty is becoming a strategic issue for government. Open source enhances transparency, flexibility, and resilience. Ireland has an opportunity to adopt a more open-by-default mindset where appropriate. So digital sovereignty is not about owning every technology, it's about ensuring that we retain meaningful control, choice, and resilience in the technologies that underpin our public services. Thank you very much, and I look forward to hearing from the panel.

I want to thank all our keynote speakers. So this is the end of our opening ceremony, and now we're going to move to the first panel of the day. We have very exciting set of speakers joining us for the first panel. So the first panel will delve into the important topic of open source and digital sovereignty in a connected the world. With that, I want to call our panelists to join us here on the floor. So we have with us as a moderator Ruth, Ruth Ziele. She's the president of Apache Software Foundation. And let me introduce them.

I'll say a little bit more about this organization.

Thank you, Omar. This is the third time that a lot of us have been here, many of us the first time, but the third time for a few, the fourth, under the name Osmos for Good, now under Open Source Week here at the UN. But I think it's important to think about why we're so excited to be in this special place. And for me, it's because the preamble to the UN Charter, written so long ago before any of us were thinking about open source, actually says, "To promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancements of all peoples. And that we have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims." To me, the UN Charter itself is built on open source principles, and that's why it's so wonderful to all come together here. I've been looking at these banners all week with the SDG wheel in the middle of open source, and it's such a perfect and natural fit using the combined efforts and collaboration and the open source way to meet those goals. But we have a lot to do to make that happen. As Jim mentioned a few minutes ago, there are a lot of us in here who have been doing open source Open Source for a very long time. Now we're here under this banner of UN Open Source Week. If you have been involved in the open source ecosystem for, let's say, less than, like, 10 years, look around, find someone who looks like they've been doing this for more like 20 or 30, like Jim or some of those folks he mentioned, and ask if back then they could have imagined that they would be here in the UN with something this big and growing every year called Open Source Week at the United Nations and how amazing That is. And I say all of this to remind us how the technology landscape has changed in those decades and how much it's still changing and even more rapidly every day. Uh, I think we all feel that strongly. And today governments around every part of the world are looking at the fact that critical systems, the very critical pieces of infrastructure that we all depend on every day for absolutely everything, often run on technology that they cannot inspect and thus cannot fully understand. We're seeing a massive shift in the way that governments and public institutions think about technology. And open source is now a big part of that conversation. So for a lot of folks in this room, open source has been their, their careers, but really their lives. And they've known about the benefits and importance of the open source way for many, many years. For some who are newer to it though, it can feel a little bit like a magical solution to digital sovereignty questions, to other technological challenges. But it's not that simple, and so we have a lot to discuss. Open source matters for sovereignty, not simply because of lower costs, although there is this huge benefit in the collaboration enabling shared investment of multiple organizations coming together to solve the same problems. But open source matters because of transparency, because it is inspectable. It matters because it enables local capacity building. It matters for a lot of reasons. But it's not automatic, and it's not without all of those people who are depending on it becoming participants. In that ecosystem. Code being available is not the same as an organization being able to use it wisely, or to contribute to it responsibly, or to sustain it over time. And those are where the structure of an open source prog— program office, or an OSPO, this OSPOs for Good title, becomes important. Because an OSPO is the mechanism that lets an organization engage with the open source community, and to do so strategically, in— instead of perhaps haphazardly, perhaps a little accidentally, or even worse, not at all. And so in companies for probably about 15 years now, uh, OSPOs have been this structure that people like our panelists that you'll meet in a minute have tremendously helped their organizations to responsibly consume open source, to contribute back to it, and to really build relationships with those external communities. What's newer is the emergence of those OSPOs in government institutions, in international organizations, in public institutions, and the particular and specific challenges that and, and opportunities really that those contexts create. Because a government or public institution OSPO is not exactly the same as a corporate one. The accountability structures are different, the procurement rules are different, the relationship to the public interest is different. There are different concerns. But there's no, certainly no shortage of enthusiasm for open source in policy circles right now. So what we need and what I hope this conversation in the next little bit will produce is more clarity about what it actually it takes to make this work, what we all need to be doing. So our panelists for the next little bit are looking at all of this every day from different perspectives. They're going to help us look at how OSPOs can help public institutions, how to balance sovereignty matters with the realities of a deeply interconnected global tech ecosystem, and how to be genuine contributors to the communities that the— these organizations are depending on and the importance of being a part of this ecosystem. That we're all here appreciating this week. So I'd like to welcome our panelists to join me up here. We have Margaret Dawson, the Chief Marketing Officer of SUSE. Arun Gupta, Director of Open Source Ecosystem and Developer Platform at NVIDIA. Sachiko Muto, Chairwoman of Open Forum Europe and Senior Researcher at RISE, the Research Institutes of Sweden. Adriana Gro, CEO of Sovereign Tech Agency. And Frank Karliczek, founder and CEO of Nextcloud. So Margaret, I'd like to talk to you first. So you've been a leader at multiple companies I would generally describe as being quite focused on open— oh, are the mics not doing them? Okay.

You have to turn them on. Test, test. Hey. We're unlike technology. I know.

I don't know how many times something like this has happened out in the world, and I've said, if only I worked in technology and knew someone who could help. So, as I was saying, Margaret, you've been a leader at multiple companies that I would describe as generally being focused on open source, if not entirely dependent on it. So can you lead us in with the key functions that an OSPO should perform, uh, particularly to support long-term organizational resilience and control over critical digital systems.

Yeah, I love that. I think there's a few key things, and I should first say thank you and welcome. I love seeing this incredible village of global citizens here today. Um, I think the Open Source Program Office does multiple things, and I think what's important to note, uh, and you and I have spoken of this before, is that it's not just technical. So there is some key things that I think the Open Source Office can do from a technology perspective, whether that be helping you identify risk of current technologies and the cost of exiting those potential technologies, identifying open source projects, communities, and technologies that fit the goals of the organization. And I would say one of the things that helps the Open Source Office be successful and be more resilient for the organization is to make sure everything that office and initiative is doing ties to the broader mission of the country or vision of the organization. So, the other thing I've seen very successful is to get the Open Source Office involved in procurement, right? Have them help with vendor selection to, you know, both do that risk management, but also think about all the ways these things fit together, interoperability, the future architectural vision. So I think when the Open Source Office really builds resilience and success is when it plays that overlay role across your organization, looking at everything from the culture of the organization, because one of the things I've seen a lot is that we can speak about transparency, as we all have been doing, but if your culture does not support that, it's very hard to become an open source first or driven organization or government if everything else is a black box, both culturally and technically. So from a culture perspective, your code of conduct, the way you operate, how you choose technologies, how you exit from technologies, and how you think about security and vulnerabilities and business continuity from an open perspective, I think are all key things that an open source office OSPOs can play. Thanks, Margaret.

I love that. I've often said you can tell a lot about how a company truly feels about open source based on where they place their OSPO, what team that sits in. And so it's definitely worth thinking about if you're establishing one in an organization for the first time, thinking about where it sits. And I love what you're saying about making sure it stretches across the, the organization. Sachiko, as governments and public institutions seek greater digital sovereignty, what role do you feel that OSPOs play in helping them make more informed choices?

Yeah, thanks, Ruth. And can I also take the moment just to say I'm happy to be here for the fourth time. Amazing. Yes, Adriana was also here 4 years ago. I heard somebody mention 5 times, but I think that was a hallucination, right? Yeah, okay. So I think, you know, I'm bringing the European perspective, and I don't know, Omar didn't ask how many people had traveled from Europe. But, you know, for me, it's refreshing to hear that some of the concerns that European governments are discussing, that those are also being discussed not just in terms of, like, Europe and competing with the US and China, but that these are also concerns for countries like Tanzania, for Sierra Leone, for Jamaica and Morocco, etc. So I think that's really refreshing that that digital sovereignty is not being defined as a zero-sum game, but, and in a way that your own sovereignty doesn't necessarily impinge on somebody else's sovereignty. I think that's really, really important that it's about bringing user control into the discussion. So the question is about sort of the role of OSPOs, and I think that for me, I've seen, I've been in the intersection of policy and open source promoting public policies around open source and open source in public procurement for close to 20 years. So I've not been involved in the technical side of open source, but really on the policy side for a long time. And so what we're seeing now is that in Europe at least, and I see now also in other countries, that this is coming to the, really to the top of the agenda. And I think we have seen some of these things before, some of these high-level endorsements. Of open source. I've seen that, you know, after the global financial crisis, there were many open source first policies adopted in various member states. But when you look at what happened after those, you know, high-level endorsements, oftentimes they were not translated into, you know, anything changing in real term. And Frank, you're— I see you're smiling there. It didn't translate into change, public procurement outcomes. And so I think that the OSPOs and public sector OSPOs are really key to turning— now when we have a second wave of sort of open source endorsement at the highest level, turning those endorsement into a sort of operational capability, because that's— at the end of the day, that's what's going to be needed. And so again, open source, we've heard that several times. Open source for me was never about only code or licenses. It was about collaboration, open collaboration. And I think OSPOs have unlocked that ability for organizations to collaborate for the private sector. And now hopefully they're doing that for the public sector as well because, and this is my final point here, Everybody thinks that open collaboration and building on top of each other's solutions and etc., it makes a lot of sense, and it makes a lot of sense especially for the public sector, and maybe in particular, you know, even more so for the Global South, as we heard during the first day, the first panel, which I found very inspiring. It makes a lot of sense. That doesn't mean that that individuals who need to kind of implement these policies will automatically collaborate. Collaboration is actually difficult, especially for public sector. There might be also regulatory concerns. Can we actually, as a public official, engage with third parties? Can we contribute code? What's the liability there? Can we even join an effort, you know, a collaborative effort with the private sector, et cetera? So there are a lot of things guidelines, clear rules that are, and capabilities and expertise that needs to be centralized somehow. And I think that the OSPOs, public sector OSPOs, can play a key role in enabling that. So thanks.

That's a great segue to some thoughts I think Adriana has for us about what happens after the OSPO. So for a lot of government agencies building their open source capacity, they create the OSPO. But from where the sovereign tech agencies sets? What's missing if they stop there? What does it take to support the ecosystem beyond that?

Um, so we thought about the roles we see in the open source ecosystem and the sovereign tech agency being a company basically underneath the German government. Um, we had long conversations back in the day with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, in our case in 2021, about what is the role of a government in securing this ecosystem, this open-source ecosystem that they rely on. And I think for many here in this room, being part for 20 or even more years, or 10 years, we heard about this, of this ecosystem, they understand it way better than, maybe by now, but a few years back, many governments did. So we really started from a really high-level point talking about, Well, why should you invest public money in the public interest in public code? And why is it not enough to just think about tools or services that you're using? So we always used that analogy, which of course has its shortcomings, but it works well for a starting point of physical infrastructure, of the roads and bridges. And we said, well, you would never expect volunteers to maintain it in the public's interest. That's not sustainable. You need to have some level of agency here and represent the public's interest and invest. So we see the sovereign tech agency as an instrument that we also believe should exist in every government that is complementary to what an OSPO doing. So the OSPOs are basically managing the institution's own relationship with open source software, whereas the Sovereign Tech Agency is looking at the upstream, at the commitment to the commonly shared foundation that, yeah, we all rely on. And we need to do this because We have a failure here, a structural failure in this ecosystem. And it's incredible. And because of the work of many, if not all people here, that it worked so extremely well for such a long time. But volunteer open source community members shouldn't become involuntary suppliers. To, yeah, services that are extremely critical, not just for businesses, but also for governments, for everyone, really. So when I said roles, we do see roles for companies, businesses, definitely. We also see a very important role for governments, for public institutions, and of course, a continued very, very important role for the open source community, but one where you are not burdened suddenly by caring for incredibly critical software components and not having a way out. This is not how it works. So this is what we need to fix. And that's the role of the sovereign tech agency in this ecosystem with others.

Absolutely. Thanks. Let's talk a little Agree.

So let's dive a little more into the, the digital sovereignty topic. Uh, so as I mentioned, while there's a lot of passion now for the ways that open source can help with digital sovereignty, the reality is that we live in a highly interconnected global technology ecosystem. So Arun, how can institutions balance those two things?

Yeah, if you think about Digital sovereignty, I think Assistant Secretary General really called it out very well. You know, if the antidote of open source is not there, some would win, but many would lose. So, I think that's the essence to me that I'm going to carry back with us. So, it's essential that when we think in terms of the corporate, you know, and I work at NVIDIA, we always think about sort of the sovereign AI aspect of it. You know, how there are players all across the industry. Players like Nebbius, players like CloudWeave, who are running really sovereign clouds. So this enables the companies that are running, governments, institutions that are running their local data, they should own it. They should own the compute, they should own the data, they should own the infrastructure, they should have the skill. I really enjoyed the discussion that the person from Morocco was saying earlier. They're going to train 100,000 people every year until 2030. That is what gets you ready to be sovereign in that sense. So I think it's a collective impetus on the overall institutions, the commercial institutions, on how do you enable it. And I think the other element that I would like to say is we, of course, have an AusPO essentially. So the way to think about this is if digital sovereignty is where we want to get to, OSPO is really the intention that allows you to get there. And I think Ruth talked about, Margaret, you talked about how OSPOs help it out essentially. Transparency, auditability, all of those are critical elements, you know, that how do you really own it so that in case there is a CVE, you can trace it, that where is it happening, and you can then work with the right players in this room. You mentioned this, there's probably a few thousand years of collective open source experience in this room. So if we cannot solve this together, who else will? So I think it is a collective impetus on us and the corporate side as well.

We should add that up. We'll make a little form somewhere everybody can write down their years of open source experience. We'll add— oh, my light went off. Well, we'll add up the collective years of open source experience of everyone in the room. Uh, so Frank, I've, uh, I've heard you talk about what you've built at Nextcloud the cloud in terms of its benefits to digital sovereignty versus the alternatives? I don't think we can solve all of everyone's problems in the next few minutes, but in practice, what are the biggest struggles when making that transition? Is it technical? Is it organizational?

Yeah, thanks a lot. First of all, I want to say it's really great to be here at this event. I'm not here for the fourth time, only the third time, so I feel like a newcomer now. But yeah, I mean, It's really great. Open source is like so important, more important than ever, especially now in the geopolitical climate. And I mean, I start— I'm one of those people who do open source for 30 years. And of course, 30 years ago, this was a nerdy topic, was done by IT guys and mostly guys in the basement. And yeah, it's crazy to see that we are now here together at the United Nations. So you can really see how something that was was just some boring infrastructure thing is now strategic and geopolitical. And this is really interesting to see. And Osmo, so far, play a critical role for this transition, that more and more people understand what it is, the benefits, how it is, and yeah, to bring it to more and more people. I find it also very interesting that the whole open source model with the licenses and the way everybody collaborates over the internet was like created by engineers for engineers basically, to work together over the internet on the same thing that everybody is sharing. Everybody has a place on the table. Everybody has a level playing field. And it's so cool and great that the same model actually also works on this geopolitical stage where you can all collaborate and we all have the same rights on the code. We can use it for whatever we want. And it's really interesting that open source model really was able to make this transition. So this is really great. So you ask about the challenges. That's interesting. So because as an engineer for a long time, I thought that the challenge with adoption of open source is technical, right? And we just— the software needs to be better. But I mean, now it's clearly no longer the problem. I mean, solutions— Nextcloud, many others— they're clearly like good enough for everybody. And then I thought, okay, what's then holding back the adoption? Maybe it's some difficult procurement or some marketing or other things. But it's, for me, it's really clear that what's needed now, there are no longer excuses. It's just everything is there and what is needed is someone who has the will and the commitment to actually introduce open source strategies into organizations. And we have many, many examples nowadays and this is really good as references. But what we, what's needed nowadays is to just do it. There are no long excuses to not have an open source strategy. Thanks. Yeah, I—

Frank, I think at the beginning of what you were saying, you, you sort of accidentally and humorously touched on what I think is one of the biggest problems facing the entire open source ecosystem now. So many of us are absolutely delighted that what used to be our nerdy passion, building the infrastructure— we didn't set out for that to run the world, but here we are— that open source became the underpinnings of all global digital infrastructure. And it is both exhilarating but also a huge challenge. And that's, that's where we are and what we're here talking about. Adriana, I'd like to come back to you. So we often hear sovereignty framed as about control or independence, but in reality, the infrastructure we fund is globally maintained and interdependent, as Arun was talking about. So can you talk a bit about your thoughts on how public institutions can look at sovereignty as more than just self-sufficiency?

Mm-hmm. I think we heard a A good definition from the Irish CIO about the definition. And it's important to us to always come back to making it extra clear that we don't mean independence, because that's a myth. You will always be dependent on each other. It's rather about strategic dependencies. Have more than just one. Have many. With partners and be active in them and see it as a clear strategy to be dependent in an ecosystem where you have agency, where you can change, where you can contribute, where you're not just a passive consumer of software. And it's about co-creation. It's about openness. It's exactly about the opposite that I think some people hear when they— when they hear sovereignty, because it's not isolation. So how I'm trying to bring that point across sometimes is also a simplified picture, but saying you need to think about layers. So there's a competitive layer that is great, because we want to have the best possible services and products. So we want to have competition. So I, as a consumer of software products, I want to— be able to decide for one tool over another because I like it better, because the technology works better, or it looks better. That's all my choice. The same goes for governments. And that's what we need to protect. But in order to do so, we need to recognize and really strengthen, I think, a cooperative layer in this whole ecosystem, which is the production of software. Because if that is not commonly maintained in our shared interest, we will end up in a situation where only a few are in a position with the most resources, with the most power to actually provide services. And that weakens my choice as a government, as a consumer, as an individual. It weakens my, ability to also contribute, shape software development. And that's precisely not what we want. So when we talk about sovereignty as the Sovereign Tech Agency, we look at the cooperative layer in this competitive system of software production where we all win if we work together and almost all lose if we don't. And Sovereignty in the end means having choices, and we can only have choices if we maintain a common foundation to start with.

Thanks. So piecing these two parts together, the OSPOs and the digital sovereignty and all of the other goals, Arun, can you come back around to how OSPOs can help with this? Give us thoughts on how international organizations, government, public institutions can build OSPOs that genuinely contribute back to this ecosystem?

Absolutely. I think, Adriana, you touched it very well. Sovereignty is not about competition, it's about interoperability. It's enabling that choice. And I think Under-Secretary-General Amandeep also called it out that imagine somebody in Rwanda has the compute skills, somebody in Senegal has the actual human skills, Somebody is the data, and they're all able to work together to get the job done. And as I said earlier, OSPO is really the catalyst for that. And so several roles that OSPO can play. For example, as you start consuming open source, they need to make sure that, you know, your CVEs vulnerabilities don't go unidentified, and they build mechanisms in that sense so that you're a good consumer of open source. That's step number 1. Step number 2 is you don't want to fork the open source and keep it inside because then you're going to create technical debt. Then you're going to build your own engineering resources to maintain that work and that's going to be expensive because then you're not going to be able to tap into the innovation that is happening out in the community. So they educate, they build the system, contribute back. They build the processes, the approval forms, whatever that needs to be done so that they can contribute back. Another important point, which is often not highlighted enough, is how did they do open source advocacy within the organization that they're part of? Whether it's academic, whether it's corporate, whether it's government, they become the open source champions. They tell people what is the right language. Don't create your own languages. When we talk about open source, OSI has defined 4 freedoms. Talk in that language. Like, do not create your own languages. So in that sense, they truly play that bridge role between the outside world and the inside world, some of which may be accurate, but then again, make sure that it is fully aligned with the outside world so that when the corporate people goes out in the outside world, they're fully tuned, they're fully aligned, they're fully ready, and they're able to kind of talk the exact same language when in the same room. Thanks.

So adjacent to that, Margaret, though, what are the organizational barriers that are preventing the wider adoption of OSPOs in these institutions.

I think you could almost tie that to what is— what are the barriers to, you know, the open source adoption, because I think it goes hand in hand. And I think a lot of it is we become too performative in our words and use of open source or openness, but we go back to where we feel safe, which is, you know, the black box closing in isolation. And so I, I think the, the biggest barrier is we don't take the true value and promise of open source and open culture, uh, which is interoperability, which you just spoke to, transparency. I always say you can't secure what you can't see. Um, you know, in the early days— and I am one of those people, as, as Ruth mentioned, that has been doing open source over 20 years, I'll say, just to be safe. I think when I add it up, I get closer to 30, which sounds terrifying. Uh, but the reality is, you know, I've always said open source is more secure. And even if you look at all the vulnerabilities we've recently had in Linux, the effort globally that came together to fix those vulnerabilities just can't happen when you're a single organization with a code base that you have. Even if you had 10,000 engineers. You don't have access to literally the global mindshare of that. So, take that back into an organization, you know, within your own government or your own enterprise and what is keeping you from that collaboration. The same thing happens in our governments and organizations. We become siloed, right? We don't share information and that keeps us from innovating. So, I love what was just said about the competitive and cooperative layer because I truly believe, and maybe I'm an optimist, but there is so much white space. There is not scarcity in this world from a technology perspective or a digital transformation or, you know, our ability to be both collaborative and sovereign. There is so much potential and space for us all to win. And I think it takes things like this where we are looking at the power of the village, the power of collaboration. So, how do we keep this momentum going in communities like this? And then how do we take that back to our countries and to our organizations to keep that going and be that influencer, be that disruptor, frankly, because in some situations it is not a popular sentiment because people feel very safe within their silo or their black box, and so you're asking them to think differently. But I think the more that we can do to think about technology and our organizations in a more modular, composable, flexible way— someone said it earlier that I think was beautiful, that, you know, the spirit of openness and open source is that flexibility, that choice. And that isn't at odds with sovereignty and security.

They go hand in hand. Thanks. So if it makes you feel better, Margaret, uh, or anyone else in here, technically speaking, the term open source for software was coined on February 6th, 1998. So under that name, I love that none of us can quite say 30 years yet. So technically speaking, and we're all big fans of technically correct here, right? The very best kind of correct. So I, I want to ask everyone everyone before we take questions for your, your final thoughts, if there was something you wish I had asked you and didn't, or the one takeaway you'd like to get— give everyone. So while you're thinking about that, I do have one more question from Adriana. So folks who are here on Monday may have come— we had a little bit of a session about the future of the open source ecosystem, particularly from the perspective of underfunded projects, in some cases volunteer maintainers burnout. What do you feel like is the role that public investment can play in addressing this structural problem? And I think you touched on it, but I'd love to hear a little more.

Well, I can say I'm also a helpless optimist, um, and I think actually pessimism is a waste of time. So, uh, I believe that, um, the past 4 years— 5— being here, so much has changed, um, already in, uh, governments, like recognizing the value that has been created, recognizing the, the structural challenges, and that even maybe we, we are— we have an ecosystem that is reaching a tipping point and that we need to be extremely careful. We also heard about the impacts of AI on, on the open source ecosystem. We need to be extremely careful right now, not pessimist, but careful about losing something that is incredibly hard to measure in its value. There has been attempts, have been attempts to measure what's the worth of it, but the worth isn't just in the monetary, in the business models that all rely on it, in the innovational strength or the competitive I think the value is also in the whole mode of how we work together, collaborate, and that we won't be able to succeed if we are not doing it that way. And it's incredible that it has been created during the past 20 years, longer than that, but it's a beautiful thing. And I believe that businesses are taking up their part, doing— creating hospitals, realizing that they need to invest, contribute back, but I'm also hopeful that governments understand that if they are not playing a role in this ecosystem, protecting it, believing that this is a public duty that they should fulfill, that, that is a key priority. It's a tough sales pitch sometimes because it's so invisible. It's so decentralized. And then we're talking about how it has to be like this because that's what makes it successful. But governments using public procurement, investing in open source software, that is crucial for them and crucial for all of us is, I think, one key pillar for, um, the open source ecosystem. Not just— it's not a vice versa, it's not about driving anybody out, but private interest, public interest, and the communities together, I think, can really create a healthy, sustainable structural model for, um, using and producing software in the future.

Amazing, thanks.

Okay, 1 or 2-minute final thoughts before we take questions, Arun. Sure.

I think I would go with the quote that Minister of Tanzania said earlier. This is about ownership in partnership, but not independence. When we open our solutions, we multiply them. Let's put our solutions at the center, not vendors. And I love that quote. My guidance would be when you are thinking about your solutions, think about why not open source. Put open source first as the philosophy, put that as the rule, and non-open source as an exception which has to be justified. Think about it hard, create mechanisms. Don't say this is a guideline, create mechanisms, create policies, create rules within your organization, corporate, whatever role you are, encourage that behavior. So that is the way we're going to achieve digital sovereignty. Thank you. Agree. Thank you.

I, I think of it as default to open. Margaret?

I'm going to go to my second passion in the world beyond technology, which is diversity and inclusion, because this is quite rare to see a panel like this on open source. I will be to be honest. So Frank kind of spoke to the fact this started in many basements. But the one thing we can all do is make open source communities more diverse. And that can mean different perspectives, different cultures, different ethnicities, different genders, all of those areas of diversity. And importantly, more inclusive. Open source communities are not always safe spaces. And the only way we're going to truly succeed and innovate and become both sovereign and have that flexibility and choice is by creating safe spaces where everyone feels that they can participate and innovate together. And kind of going just one step forward on that, what I say you can also do is with your vendors, which are critical to this overall supply chain in our success is to make sure that they are not locking you in, that they are also looking at interoperability using emerging standards like the MCP proxies and gateways and other parts of the AI ecosystem. There's already a lot of closed source that is happening, uh, in the AI, uh, innovation spectrum. And the more all of you as consumers and community members force your vendors and your partners to stay open and work together, the more successful we will be.

Thanks. And if I may give a brief shout out to the open source initiative, has been working on an open source AI definition for the last couple of years, and, and conversations about refinement of that are continuing. So would invite everyone to participate on that topic at opensource.org as well.

Adriana, I feel like I said enough, but maybe, um, be proud about your work, because it might have started in, in a basement, um, and as a little, you know, just my personal nerdy little hobby. But although the open source community isn't in the news, there are other names in the news, this community is literally running the world, and there's power in this community. So understanding that and not feeling shy or like we're, we're weak. I think, you know, we— it's actually— this is a testament to it. We're really powerful.

Thank you, Frank.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Ruth, for pointing out the age of open source. I wanted to make the point that technically before open source there was free software, right?

Yes, but that goes into the '80s and then we all get old again.

I suggest to keep this can of worms closed for now. Yeah, so I think the benefit of open source and free software is it's so broad, there are so many points. Oli pointed out lots of things here, like from vendor login, for benefits from an economic perspective, from an innovation perspective, it has so many benefits. And as I said before, there is really no reason to not do software in an open source way. So why not?

Thank you. And Sachiko.

Yeah, so I'm going to close on an exciting topic, which I wish we had discussed a bit more, which is on public procurement, right? Is you? Yes, everybody gets very excited. Standards, public procurement, that's a good way to alienate people in Brussels. So, but because really for me, this is where we're going to operationalize digital sovereignty. And I think also tying that to the work that Adriano is doing at the Sovereign Tech Agency, I think that we cannot rely on charity for sustaining and maintaining, you know, critical digital infrastructure. And I think we have to work with various market mechanisms, including public procurement, to make sure that this is not an afterthought and that the public sector doesn't procure the cheapest solution with one, you know, on the one hand, and then on the other hand has to finance the maintenance of critical infrastructure. So I'd like to see rules around, you know, in public procurement where we can have a preference for sustainable digital solutions when we procure software and services. And really to make sure that it's possible for governments to make, to have a preference for vendors who can show that they're making meaningful contributions to our shared digital infrastructure. So that's a kind of low-hanging fruit for me, and I think that that's where I'd like to see some concrete, you know, developments until next year.

Great, thank you. Thank you to all of you. I'd like to open it up if anyone has questions for our panel. Oh, we have lots of questions for our panel. Let's start right here.

Thank you very much.

My name is Matthew Saunders. I've been working in open source since 1999, mostly in Drupal. I currently work for a company called Amazee.io.

It's an open source company that has been focused on hosting, open source hosting.

And most recently on AI. Several of you compared open source to public infrastructure like roads and bridges, which I absolutely love. If governments and companies increasingly depend on open source as critical infrastructure, how do we press them that they have an obligation to fund its long-term maintenance? And if so, what does that model actually look like?

Who would like to take that?

Oh, yeah, I think it's—

I think it starts with awareness, first of all, right? Because I think that we are— it's nice to have high-level ministers recognizing that open source is not just about, you know, saving on licenses, etc., but that comes with other considerations. I think that was the minister from Jamaica who really listed some of the obligations and some of the concerns and capabilities that you have to have in place in order to make this shift. So I think it starts— it's nice to see that here, but I don't think that that's prevalent in all the member states. And I think that it starts with an awareness that we are relying on this infrastructure. Then I think to some extent, once that sinks in, then there is going to be an opening for some of the solutions. And, you know, obviously Adriana, the sovereign tech agency, and maybe possibly a European-wide sovereign tech agency is part of that solution.

Yeah, I could not have said it better. But to say it in different words, we always say that we see like 3 steps in this mission here. One is rightly awareness, because it is not as obvious for everybody, as it might be in this room, how software is produced. That it's not like raining from the heavens or just starting from scratch. Every time you build a new service, you have a blank page and you start coding. That's not how it works, but that's not obvious. So you need to find people who take their time to listen and understand a system and why the system works well or doesn't work well. And that's the first step. The second step is then we need a new set of public instruments. We don't have them yet. Public procurement even isn't yet designed really to maintain decades-old software components. That is, that is a challenge. And also what kind of like funding or procurement rather mechanisms we need. And the third, of course, you need to then demonstrate that it actually has impact because you're working— in a political system, you're spending taxpayers' money. You need to be able to concretely say, 'This has been invested and this was the impact.' It's not as obvious, unfortunately, as a new road or bridge that citizens use and see every day, but I use that analogy as well in saying, well, we would never just build a bridge and then have a few maintainers— not maintainers, a few volunteers check it irregularly and go like, "Yeah, okay, that sounds fine." So yeah, it's a conversation that we need to have, and we're having it right now. We're having it on the European level too, which is, I think, a good sign how this mission is expanding.

And if I add a perspective to that, you know, I've been in the corporate side for about 30 years. This was not common 10, 15 years ago where the corporates would actually fund maintainers on the open source project. For the last 10, 15 years only, you know, I've worked at Amazon, Apple, Intel, NVIDIA. All of these companies were funding full-time maintainers just to do the chop wood, carry water work, because that's what makes open source projects sustainable. So I'm hoping to exactly what, you know, Sachiko and Adriana are talking about, that the way corporates have evolved over the last 10, 15 years, you know, maybe in the next OSPO for Good or UN Open Source Week, you know, One of the ministers come and say here that, "Hey, you know what? We pay this full-time maintainer just to contribute to the open source project because this project is critical for us." So I think it's an evolution that's gonna happen over the years. Thanks.

I think we had a question over here.

Yes.

Hi, I'm Vinny Jaiswal. I also have been fortunate enough to work with some of the panelists and people here in the room. So thank you for the opportunity to be in this room. I know we came a long way. So my question, to piggyback on what the panelists already covered, we have spent quite a good amount of time about digital sovereignty through the lens of open source software. AI introduces a new dependency stack— compute, capital, energy, proprietary data, and multi-billion dollar infrastructure investments. So as foundation models become increasingly expensive to build and operate, is software— I don't think software openness alone is enough. What can we do? Because here in this room, we have governments, public sectors, and private sectors as well. What role can we play to make more investments towards compute sovereignty, investment sovereignty, as equally important as digital sovereignty? Yeah.

I'll just start with one place you can begin, is that anyone who has managed a data center before can tell you that no one runs at 100% utilization. And the one thing I've seen for both governments and the enterprise is the place you can start is start to look at where you have capacity you can reuse today. So usually— this is universal— that I've seen for 30 years, that most servers and data centers run at somewhere between 40 to 50% utilization. So where I would begin, because I'm guessing governments and enterprises don't have unlimited new funds to invest in AI, right? This is the challenge. And you're probably not getting all of the, the hardware, and there's huge supply chain issues right now. So start to think about how do I move off potentially proprietary systems, systems I'm not fully utilizing, some of technical debt, leverage open source, leverage existing capacity, create a phased roadmap to modernization including your AI investments, um, or if nothing else, that allows you to reduce cost and technical debt so maybe you can invest more in innovation like AI. So I would just say that's a place that anyone can start today.

Thank— Frank, you have additional thoughts?

Yeah, um, so as some of you might know, Nextcloud is solution for decentralized collaboration. So we actually work a lot with decentralized infrastructure. I think maybe a controversial statement for me, but there's also a bit of a marketing problem because our hyperscaler friends, they really market the narrative that only they can provide the infrastructure that's needed for the future. And this is not true. This is not true. I'm personally not a fan of the term hyperscaler hyperscaler at all because hyperscaler means that you need to be hyper to scale. This is totally not true. There are like millions of Nextcloud instances in the world running on non-hyperscalers, totally fine.

And if I were to add an angle, you know, NVIDIA works with a lot of NVIDIA cloud partners. You know, these are all local sovereign cloud partners. And we just launched a new platform called DSX that really tells you exactly how from LAN PowerShell all the way to token generation, that entire stack. And my job really is to make sure that stack stays open source. So I think that is the way instead of us facilitating, enabling partners and our customers and our competitors, see what they want to do, keep that stack in the open source, and let the innovation happen over there. So I think it's gonna take time, but the head is in the right direction at least.

Thanks. More questions? Yes.

Yes.

I would like to bring this into also the social aspect of government and government hospitals.

And someone mentioned, you know, that you're not really able to be digitally sovereign without collaboration. And that's of course, Hannah Arendt, uh, you can't be free without being with other people. And that's something that's really central to, to government as well. And also with open source, community-based open source, how can government, OSPOs, help create sustainable open source communities around software? Because when I speak to government, uh, open source projects, they often struggle with creating communities.

And when you have a community, a community is democratic collaboration.

It is freedom. It is peaceful coexistence. It is really these fundamental values that we have in government and also the United Nations.

Thanks. Go ahead. Yeah, Matthias, thank you. I agree with your definition also. Freedom is not possible without internet. Independence, or, you know, maybe I'm paraphrasing now, but I think that that's also where the European Commission has landed finally. There were a lot of discussion around sort of by European, and now it's more potentially by, you know, with Europe, if you will, and really making sure that we are not dependent for critical infrastructure on one single country. There is an ecosystem recognition that we should play a bigger strategic role in an interdependent, you know, supply chain. But so I think to your question, I think that again, OSPOs can play a role there, and if we really designate public sector officials as some sort of tech diplomats, if you will, with the sort of mandate to collaborate externally, I think this is, this is really, I think that we see that with some countries already having a sort of a tech envoy or tech representative or something like that. But within public sector institutions, you could see that, that OSPOs should have this, not just this internal, be an internal center of excellence, but also have this mandate to collaborate with other OSPOs and other organizations. And I think this really you could create a sort of a diplomatic corps, if you will, of open source professionals. And so I think this is, you know, again, I'm bringing the European perspective, but we had a tech sovereignty package and an open source strategy published just this month. And there you can see that one of the concrete commitments from the European Commission was actually to establish a network European network of government OSPOs. So I think this is something that could be replicated elsewhere. And once you start to connecting those OSPOs with each other, you can also, I think, leverage some of the learnings for how to collaborate also with third parties.

Thanks. I think we have time for one more brief question. Second row there. You, yes. Yes.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes.

Thank you so much. This was really very insightful.

I had two quick questions. One was regarding, I think, the challenges starting to use open source for people who are looking at, you know, moving their existing systems onto open source. One that was already shared was on open data, that data is not—

data aspect is not that mature.

And my other quick question is, for those who are new to OSMOS, how would you encourage them to get started, and where should they go to get started?

Thank you.

I can maybe address the second question, is really quick answer. The Linux Foundation has this to-do group, and as part of the to-do group, they have very extensive research studies, playbooks, guidebooks on how to build an OSPO, different levels, what should that funding look like, start with one person, two person. So highly recommend that. I will let somebody else answer the first question.

I, I'm told we have no more time, so unless you have the quickest answer in the world, I'm going to wrap things up. Uh, so I would like to thank all our panelists. I'm also going to thank you in advance for what I'm about to volunteer you for, which that, uh, in, in the Apache Software Foundation, we have a bit of an unofficial motto. It's also the name of our conference. It's community over code. And that's because we recognize that in open source, the community is the important part. A good community can fix bad code, but only with a good community do you get the security and the resilience and the long-term sustainability. And the reason I tell you that is because I've known— I don't know all of these people super well, but I've known some of them for a very long time, and I know they all believe strongly in that, as do many other people in this room. And I know that for every one hand that we didn't get to answer a question, there are two or three more who didn't even raise their hands. Do not hesitate to talk to any of these people or anyone else in this room that you think hasn't answered your questions. Feel free to look me up on the internet. I will talk to you. I'm pretty sure all of these people will as well, and we're happy to help. Thank you all.

Thank you. That was fantastic. Really enjoyed it. Thank you, Felicity. Good job done.

Wow, I learned so much. This was an amazing discussion. Come on, guys, you could do better than that. Another round of applause. This has been an incredible discussion, and thank you so much for all our panelists. While they're taking a picture, I just want to remind— share with you what's going to happen next. As you know, As I mentioned earlier, we decided to not have panel, panel, panel. That was too long, so we are now starting our breakout portion of the program. There are 4 sessions that's starting now in few minutes, and they're going to be in 4 different rooms. If you want to stay here, here will be a great session about Country Spotlight Japan, where we're going to learn from the the University of Kyoto, private sector, government, the digital agency, how they are handling all the problems that we've been talking about today. That's going to be here. If you want to go to Conference Room A, there's a great session called Data Governance for Public Good: Equity, Openness, and Community Stewardship. That's done by UNODET, UN University, and a UN agency called UNCTAD for trade and trade conference. If you want to go downstairs, also Conference Room 11. Please remember with me, Conference Room 11. We have some slides, maybe you could put the slide up. It's Unlocking the Power of Open Source for Sustainable Development. It's introducing the OSEC, Open Source Enablement Compass. That's a project that will be launched today by UN Office of Digital Emerging Technologies and the Research Institute of Sweden. So please, if you want, you should check it out. It's room— conference room number 11 downstairs. And the last session that is also happening downstairs, conference room number 9, is about financing, financing open source and digital public good, a multi-stakeholder approach that is run by Inter-American Development Bank and have number of other multi-development banks. So thank you very much for all of you. Oh, sorry, let me also summarize. If I can have your attention for a few seconds. So there are those 4 sessions that is an hour each till 1 o'clock. The Japan session is the only one that is hour and a half till 1:30. After that, we all gonna break for lunch and then let's come back again at 3 o'clock. There are 4 other sessions that are taking place. You can see them on the agenda. I don't think we have them here on the slide. Yes, from 3 to 4, there are 4— please take your phone, take a photo, snap a photo so you know where you want to be. So from 3 to 4, there are 4 other breakouts, no, actually 5, because there's one about universities. So we'll meet here from 4 to 5 where we have the first panel of the afternoon that is about open source at the UN., and then there's a followed by second panel about level of governance. So thank you very much. I wish you two nice, great breakout hours, and then we meet here at 4 o'clock. Thank you.