UN Open Source Week 2025. Part II: OSPOs for Good, Institutional Shifts, and the Architecture of Trust

This is Part II of a five-part series covering UN Open Source Week 2025. If you missed Part I (where we recapped the hackathons, early debates on AI, and the first side event at LinkedIn) you can read it here. Today, we shift to Wednesday’s full-day track on Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs): what they are, why they matter, and how they’re being reimagined across governments, nonprofits, and the private sector. Ahoy!

There’s a quiet kind of diplomacy in how open source moves through institutions. Policies are rewritten. Tech stacks are rebuilt. But the work often starts with something less visible: someone inside deciding it’s worth organizing.

Wednesday’s “OSPOs for Good” track made that work visible. The first full day of multi-track sessions inside the UN shifted the mood. There was more movement, more structure and more formal dress wear; accompanied by keynotes and breakout sessions.

Across five of these sessions, government officials, nonprofit leads, and corporate advocates pulled back the curtain on how Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) are evolving; not just in tech firms, but across ministries, municipalities, and multilaterals.

Being the first day of official sessions at the UN, it was also the first real day for many of us that didn’t partake in the hackathon. And from Ghana to Germany, we saw how OSPOs are becoming unlikely stewards of digital trust. As one speaker put it, “If governments are serious about public code, then they need to get serious about open source governance.”

Let’s trace what they shared, where they disagreed, and why this institutional model is gaining ground.

Setting the Tone from the UN Floor

The day began with an invitation: to keep things open, even when it gets messy.

Omar Mohsine, Open Source Coordinator at Open Source United, kicked off the morning with warmth and a bit of wit. He welcomed attendees from over 40 countries, many returning for their second or third Open Source Week. “The best thing about open source,” he quipped, “is that everyone can contribute. The worst thing? Everyone can contribute.” That mix of celebration and caution quietly framed the day.

Then came the keynote from Under-Secretary-General Amandeep Singh Gill, head of the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies. Gill walked the room through how far this community has come. From the early days of working sessions to this year’s full-scale, multi-day forum, he described a shift from conversation to implementation. The Global Digital Compact, adopted by member states in 2024, was central to that story, and to this week. In his words: “This is version two of the software for cooperation around digital technologies.”

Under-Secretary-General Gill praised the earlier hackathons, edit-a-thons, and maintainer gatherings, highlighting real outputs: tens of thousands of Wikipedia edits, 15+ sessions with open source maintainers, and UNICEF-driven climate tools designed on-site. But he also pushed toward the bigger picture. Open source, he said, isn’t just a method: it’s a shared foundation for public digital life. “If we want this transformation to be inclusive,” he said, “it has to be open.”

Building the Bridges: New OSPOs in Action

How do you make open source stick in large institutions? That was the guiding question behind Wednesday morning’s first panel, where representatives from Amazon, GitHub, Carnegie Mellon, France’s DINUM, and South Africa’s Digital Services Unit compared origin stories and growing pains.

Sachiko Muto, Chair of OpenForum Europe, opened with a reflection on why OSPOs (Open Source Program Offices) matter: they offer an institutional home for openness, a place where code, compliance, and community can actually coexist.

For some, like Carnegie Mellon’s Sayeed Choudhury, the OSPO grew out of recognizing software as central to the university’s research mission. For others, like GitHub’s Avni Khatri, the focus was operational: creating guardrails around licensing, security, and contribution. What united them was the shift from ad hoc enthusiasm to formal, resourced programs.

But structure alone doesn’t build trust. South Africa’s Richard Gevers traced his government’s OSPO-like unit to a different starting point (a crisis of public confidence during the pandemic) and spoke candidly about designing for “sovereignty, trust, and inclusion.” France’s Bastien Guerry credited civil society pressure for moving from patchwork to policy, while Amazon’s Nithya Ruff described how their OSPO had to speak both internal and open source “languages” to succeed.

Across sectors, panelists agreed on one thing: an OSPO’s job is to hold the tension between systems that resist change and the open practices that demand it. And when done right, it becomes a space where shared governance meets real delivery.

Trust by Design: Open Source, AI, and the Ethics That Shape Them

The panel “AI and Open Source: Building Ethical and Transparent Systems,” moderated by Hannah Aubry of DIAL, brought together researchers, technologists, and policymakers for a grounded conversation on what ethical AI really looks like; in practice, not just in principle.

It opened with a pre-recorded keynote from Meta’s Yann LeCun, who made the case for open source as a democratizing force in AI: one that fosters transparency, accelerates global collaboration, and “can’t be done by a single actor alone.” The sentiment echoed across the panel.

GitLab’s Sabrina Farmer reminded us that AI should augment (an not replace) human creativity, freeing engineers from maintenance drudgery and enabling more innovation. But she also warned of a growing disconnect: “People are trusting AI too much without understanding what it's doing with their data.”

From the policy side, UNESCO’s Guilherme Canela challenged the room to resist shiny-object syndrome. The tools may be new, he argued, but the values guiding their use shouldn’t be. “We don’t need new principles, we need to hold the line on the ones we already fought hard to establish.”

TII’s Hakim Hacid spoke candidly about the need for better-quality training data and deeper cross-border collaboration on regulation and technical standards. PwC Germany’s Frederik Blachetta, reflecting on government implementation, pointed to the risk of “digital sovereignty being confused with isolationism.” The better path, he suggested, is shared infrastructure and open ecosystems, not parallel silos. That, and a shift toward vertical AI solutions that serve real public needs.

Together, the panel offered a simple but urgent call: the AI we build now will define how equitable (or extractive) the next decade becomes.

Breaking Silos, Building Commons

In a world awash with data, the question isn’t whether information exists — it’s whether systems, people, and institutions can talk to each other.

This panel on interoperability, “Breaking Silos: Open Source and Open Data Drive Interoperability,” moderated by Mehdi Snene of UN-ODET, offered a wide-angle view of why open data still struggles to deliver on its promise. A keynote by Dmitry Mariyasin (UNECE) laid out the UN’s own barriers to interoperability. Citing legacy systems, siloed mandates, and “193 shareholders” — UN-speak for member states — he painted a picture of governance inertia colliding with technical ambition. But he also made the case for open source as more than just code: “It’s a governance model,” he said, “one that fits the complexity of our time.” From e-customs infrastructure to low-code standards, Mariyasin’s examples grounded the abstract in institutional realities.

From there, the panelists explored how those ideas take root. Rebecca MacKinnon of the Wikimedia Foundation described Wikipedia as part of an interdependent knowledge ecosystem: radically open, reused widely in AI, and only as good as the information and infrastructures that feed it. “If we’re not protecting the rights of the people who create data (journalists, scientists, editors) we’ll get models full of hallucinated garbage,” she warned.

Mozilla’s Nabiha Syed brought nuance to the “transparency vs. openness” debate: showing code isn’t the same as enabling participation. Her metaphor landed sharply: “Data is less like oil, more like uranium. It needs governance.” She spotlighted Mozilla’s Common Voice and the new Mozilla Data Collective as examples of rebalancing power by design.

Japan’s Masayuki Yamada and the African Development Bank’s Momar Kouta rounded out the discussion with regional insights. Yamada emphasized Japan’s open-by-default data policies and cross-ministerial coordination, while Kouta described the African Data Highway as a pan-continental bet on open data as infrastructure; not just for statistics, but for AI readiness. Both underscored a simple truth: open data is not inherently interoperable, and interoperability is not just a technical fix. It’s about trust, shared standards, and real collaboration across silos.

From Airports to Code Commons: The Infrastructure Behind the Interface

By Wednesday afternoon, the week’s big themes (trust, transparency, inclusion) converged in a single session: “The Role of Open Source in Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).” And if previous panels explored the surface of these ideas, this one dug into the foundations.

A video keynote by Tshilidzi Marwala of UN University opened the discussion with a clear premise: DPI isn’t a technical sideshow. It’s sovereign terrain. Whether it’s digital IDs, payment rails, or public data systems, these tools now shape how people engage with their governments. “This is where open source has a unique and powerful role to play,” he said, reminding the room that transparency isn’t just a feature. It’s a form of governance.

Moderator Ruth Ikegah set a lighter tone (joking that maybe the UN would offer lunch next year) before guiding the conversation into deeper territory. Miller Abel of the Gates Foundation offered a metaphor that stuck: if airlines are private services, then airports are DPI: a shared base that enables competition, interoperability, and service delivery above it. “Open standards aren’t a constraint,” he noted. “They’re how we scale trust.”

Adriana Groh of the Sovereign Tech Fund echoed that sustainability means stewardship. “We don’t fund roads just once,” she said. “We maintain them.” She urged governments not only to fund open ecosystems, but to grow new muscles for doing so: with humility, longevity, and real community alignment.

The Linux Foundation’s Gabriele Columbro added that most proprietary platforms already rely on open components. The real issue, he said, is control: “It’s not either-or. It’s about who owns which layers.” Franck Greverie of Capgemini grounded that view in procurement realities, listing what makes open source viable at scale: a strong technical core, active communities, enterprise uptake, and someone to call when things break.

Wolfgang Gehring of Mercedes-Benz closed the corporate loop, pointing to their own products. The latest E-Class, he noted, runs on more than 3,000 open source components. “FOSS is not an add-on,” he said. “It’s foundational.”

And in a final intervention, Peter Ganten of Univention made the case for procurement models that lift up (not edge out) private open source companies. “Governments shouldn’t build everything themselves,” he argued. “They should empower ecosystems that scale across borders. That’s how we move beyond budgets, and beyond silos.”

Code Without Borders: Layers of Governance in a Shared Digital Future

The final panel of Wednesday, “Navigating Digital Cooperation Across Layers of Governance,” closed the day with urgency and momentum. Lucy Harris of the Digital Public Goods Alliance set the pace: a “lightning panel” to make room for the reception that followed. But the speakers didn’t coast. Instead, they delivered one of the sharpest conversations of the week.

Roberto Di Cosmo of Software Heritage opened with a sweeping, data-rich keynote. Drawing on an archive of over 180 million open source projects, he laid out the scale and velocity of code creation today, not as a trend, but as reality. With over 9,000 programming languages and global contributions from UN agencies mapped in vivid detail, his message was clear: cooperation needs infrastructure. Transparency isn’t optional. And resilience depends on global stewardship.

The panelists took it from there. Nancy Norris (UN/CEFACT) called open standards “a lingua franca” for distributed coordination. Without them, interoperability falters. Sergio Gago (Cloudera) pushed into future terrain, warning that AI agents will soon perform many state functions; but only if sovereign data is discoverable, portable, and intelligible to systems beyond borders.

From the public sector, Belfor Fabio García Henao reflected on Colombia’s stalled open source legislation. What was once a dormant bill, he noted, is gaining renewed attention in the AI era, where digital autonomy has become a national concern. Prague City Councilor Daniel Mazur offered a local government lens, arguing that open source is essential for horizontal coordination in Europe. His ask was direct: let cities scale what works by legislating for reuse and building common API backbones. “Don’t make us reinvent the wheel,” he said. “Just help us drive further.”

By the end, the panel had mapped a layered, practical vision of digital cooperation: one where open source isn’t just an ethic, but a structure. A living system of code, governance, and collaboration that quietly shapes how the digital public sphere is built.

TWC Insight

Open governance isn’t just about transparency, it’s about accountability, scale, and trust. OSPOs, open standards, and shared infrastructure form the backbone of public digital cooperation. But they only work when institutions learn to listen, adapt, and contribute.

Takeaway

From national ministries to city councils, from GitHub repos to global standards, open source is already shaping how digital power is shared. What we call “infrastructure” is not just technical: it’s social, political, and deeply human. If we want digital systems that serve the public, we need public values at the foundation.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is an OSPO?

An Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is a dedicated team inside an organization (company, university, or government) that manages how it uses, contributes to, and governs open source. It aligns strategy with stewardship.

2. What was the role of OSPOs at UN Open Source Week?

Wednesday’s track, “OSPOs for Good,” focused on how OSPOs support sustainable, ethical, and open digital infrastructure — from research universities to national tech agencies and the private sector.

3. Why are OSPOs important in the public sector?

Because they help institutions navigate policy, procurement, and participation. OSPOs can bridge legal teams and developer communities, making openness viable — not just aspirational.

4. What’s the difference between transparency and openness?

Transparency is about visibility (can I see the code?). Openness is about participation (can I contribute, adapt, and benefit?). Both matter, but they’re not the same.

5. What does “infrastructure” mean in this context?

Not just servers or software, but the shared systems that underlie services like identity, payments, and data governance. Think of it like digital roads and bridges, but with code and standards.

6. Why does funding open source matter?

Because most critical open source projects are underfunded, even though governments and companies rely on them. As Adriana Groh said: “We don’t fund roads just once. We maintain them.”

Wrap-up

We’ll be back on Monday with Part III, diving into Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI Day) — a packed Thursday of panels, debates, and breakout sessions focused on identity, payments, data exchanges, and the safeguards that hold them together.

If you joined us at UN Open Source Week, we’d love to hear what stuck with you. And if you’re reading from afar, we hope this series helps surface the nuance, people, and decisions shaping the future of public digital systems.

Until then — keep contributing, keep questioning.
— Jorge