UN Open Source Week 2025

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Breakout Session 1: Open Source Skills in the AI Era — Perspectives from the European Open Source Academy

Open source is undergoing a generational shift—especially as AI transforms the future of work. This session explores how the open source ecosystem, industry, education, and government must collaborate to rapidly upskill a global workforce and sustain innovation.

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Breakout Session 2: Advancing Open Source AI for the Public Good

This session explores how open source AI can serve the public good, focusing on requirements for qualifying as a digital public good (DPG) and aligning with the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID). Presentations and group discussion will examine definitions, principles, and their implications.

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Session 1: Open Standards, Open Source, Futures: Lessons Learned from FIWARE for Open Source DPI

Session 2: Digital Public Goods as Infrastructure — Use Cases and Practical Considerations

As digital infrastructure becomes increasingly central to public service delivery and civic engagement, Digital Public Goods (DPGs) offer a promising path toward inclusive, transparent, and collaborative digital ecosystems, including Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). DPGs are open source software, data, standards, and content that help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while respecting privacy, fostering equity, and enabling interoperability. This session offers an introduction to the DPG framework and its core values, through the lens of real-world implementations. Participants will hear from organizations behind recognized DPGs, who will share perspectives on how those DPGs are being adopted by the public sector as infrastructure. This track will provide a space for discussion on the practical benefits, challenges, and future of DPGs for DPI, highlighting how open collaboration and governance can support digital sovereignty, public accountability, and sustainable innovation, without prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach.

Session 3: DPI in the Global South: Perspectives on Open Source and DPI from Beyond the North

The Global South faces both significant challenges and immense opportunities when it comes to building Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). While DPI has emerged as a key potential enabler for inclusive development – offering scalable, open, and interoperable solutions tailored to local contexts – the localisation of DPI to the needs and challenges of specific countries across the Global South remains critical. This session seeks to explore how the Global South can localize open digital infrastructure to drive inclusive socio-economic growth, regional integration, and sustainable development. Africa stands at a critical juncture in its digital transformation journey. This track explores how DPI is being reimagined and implemented across the Global South, with a special focus on Africa and community-led approaches. Through deep dives and an integrated panel discussion, participants will journey from global-local adaptation strategies to community-driven models, open-source development, and AI-powered public sector transformation.

Session 4: DPI Governance – Navigating Law, Ethics, and Safeguards in Open Source DPI

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is emerging as a cornerstone of inclusive digital transformation, enabling countries to modernize service delivery, promote financial inclusion, and strengthen governance. Yet, building trusted DPI requires more than just technical innovation -- it demands robust safeguards that balance openness with protection in a world shaped by nationalism, xenophobia, and geopolitical tension. This session will explore how countries are leveraging open source and open protocols to develop citizen-centric DPI, drawing on examples from India, Brazil, Estonia, and Ukraine. It will also examine the complex governance challenges of maintaining sovereignty and diversity while fostering global collaboration in the digital commons. Through real-world cases and critical discussion, participants will gain practical insights into strengthening DPI ecosystems with transparency, trust, and resilience.

Session 1: Building Sovereign Digital Workspace

The interest of sovereign digital solutions is increasing drastically across the globe. Countries have started implementing and collaborating on both full stacks and specific solutions in their aim to regain control of their digital spheres. Companies, especially Small and Medium-sized, are leveraging the increased interest and supporting the accelerating interest through both innovative and scalable solutions. Typically by providing a brick in a larger puzzle, using the device, do one thing good and keep it modular. Open Source Software and Open Standards are the tools of trade that are enabling the evolution. In this session, we will hear both the government and vendor perspectives on first-class examples running live and at scale, including both the up- and downsides, and challenges needing collective attention.

Session 2: Securing the Supply Chain Through Global Collaboration

This mini track explores the critical role of global collaboration in securing the modern software supply chain. We will hear about how standardized practices can help organizations to better align with regulatory requirements, enhance cross-sector collaboration, and ensure the integrity of digital public infrastructure. We will further join representatives from leading open source foundations as they discuss strategies and collaborative efforts to enhance the security of the open source ecosystem worldwide.

Session 3: Invisible Work, Critical Code – The Role of Maintainers in Open Source Digital Infrastructure

While much attention is given to the launch of new digital public goods, less is said about the work it takes to keep them running. This session, hosted by the Sovereign Tech Agency, centres on the essential but often invisible labour of open source maintainers—those who ensure the long-term security, usability, and adaptability of the open-source foundations of digital infrastructure. Drawing on real-world insights from maintainers attending UN Open Source Week as part of our “Maintain-a-thon” earlier in the week, the session will highlight the realities of sustaining critical code: security patching, community governance, dependency management, and burnout. We’ll explore how policy, funding, and institutional design must evolve to better support the maintenance of open technologies, not just their initial development.

Session 4: Fostering Resiliency in the Digital Public Infrastructure

This mini track brings together global perspectives on building resilient, sovereign, and collaborative digital public infrastructure through open source innovation. Sessions will explore the foundational principles of digital resiliency—such as robustness, adaptability, and transparency—and examine how both public and private sector OSPOs can enhance the security and sustainability of essential digital services. Participants will engage with the pioneering example of Africa’s STEM Garage, which empowers local inventors and community tech hubs to overcome systemic barriers and drive homegrown technological solutions. We will also learn from European initiatives such as the IPCEI-CIS ApeiroRA project and NeoNephos Foundation, which are advancing sovereign cloud-edge platforms.

Session 1: Open Trusted Data

This session explores the ethical use of data in AI through the lens of the Open Trusted Data initiative. It highlights key challenges such as data provenance, copyright, and responsible reuse, emphasizing the importance of transparency and accountability. Participants will gain insights into emerging practices for building trustworthy AI systems grounded in ethically sourced data.

Session 2: Advancing Inclusive and Sustainable Solutions with Open Source AI

This session showcases practical applications of responsible AI from around the world, highlighting how open, inclusive, and sustainable approaches can drive positive social impact. Topics include AI agent interoperability for the visually impaired, an AI assistant supporting women in crisis, open source TinyML for sustainable AI use, and regional strategies for workforce and environmental resilience in the age of AI.

Session 3: Responsible AI

Presentation of the LFAI Data Responsible Generative AI Framework followed by an interactive workshop exploring the ethical tradeoffs public sector organizations face when deploying open source AI within digital public infrastructure—where innovation directly impacts citizen rights and democratic accountability.

Session 4: AI Security, Risk, and Safeguards

This session explores emerging approaches to AI security and safeguards, with a focus on transparency, risk mitigation, and responsible deployment. Presentations will cover open metrics for quantifying trust in AI systems, managing security risks in open source AI, and real-world applications of risk assessment tools for humanitarian contexts. A concluding Q&A will invite broader reflections on building safe and sustainable AI ecosystems.

Session 1: Impactful Open Source in Academia

Open source plays an important role in helping academic institutions address their goals related to research impact, education, and skills. Open source enhances research impact by enabling greater visibility, reuse, and collaboration across institutional and disciplinary boundaries, accelerating the dissemination of knowledge. In education and skills development, open source offers students real-world experience with industry-relevant tools and practices, fostering critical technical and collaborative competencies. In this session, we will hear from two panels on the topics of Open Source for Education and Skills and Open Source for Research Impact. Panellists come from a diverse set of global organizations with practical experience enabling these goals.

Session 2: Open Source Enablement in the Public Sector

This session will focus on how open source adoption, development, and collaboration can be enabled in governments and the public sector at large. We will hear examples of how public sector Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) enable open source policy and grow the culture and processes needed. The session will also introduce the Open Source Enablement Compass (OSEC), a new index guiding open source enablement in governments globally. An interactive panel will discuss how OSPOs, the index, and other elements can help grow the capabilities needed to leverage open source as a tool for transformation and innovation.

Session 3: National Responsibility for Fundamental Technologies with Open Source

This collaborative workshop explores the tension between independent open-source development and the responsibility of public institutions to maintain, secure, and scale such technologies. Using real-world case studies – ranging from AI development to critical vulnerabilities like Log4Shell – we will discuss how governments can support open-source ecosystems while ensuring digital resilience.

Session 4: Measuring the Impact of Open Source for DPI

Come along to hear from those actively working on how to measure the impact of open source for digital public infrastructure (DPI). The session will include presentations from STEM Garage Africa, a network of innovative learning centres for kids, and the CHAOSS SDG Working Group, who are working on measuring open source impact in the context of the UN's sustainable development goals. This session will include an interactive segment to map the work ahead and practical next steps for consistently measuring open source software in DPI contexts.

Session 1: Open Source in the UN System

This interactive session will bring together members of the Community of Practice "Open Source United," which groups all the open source leads in the UN System agencies. The community was created to coordinate and promote large-scale adoption of open source within the UN. This session will allow the community to share their work and projects with the wider open source community and explore partnership opportunities.

Session 2: Youth & SDGs

This interactive session brings together young innovators who are translating the Sustainable Development Goals into open source reality—from climate-action tools and inclusive education platforms to projects fostering equitable economic growth. Participants will hear how these young technologists are not only writing code but also building transparent governance models, mentorship pipelines, and fellowship programs that lower barriers for their peers to join and scale impact-driven projects.

Session 3: Open Source and Open Data

Open data is the raw material that fuels today’s most impactful open-source projects, from real-time dashboards to AI-driven climate models. Open source, in turn, keeps that data accessible, interoperable, and trustworthy. In this session, you will hear from data professionals turning public datasets into digital public goods.

Session 4: Open Technologies in Healthcare

Healthcare’s most urgent challenges—equitable access, data fragmentation, and rising costs—are increasingly met with open, collaborative solutions. This session spotlights how open source software, open standards, and open-hardware medical devices are reshaping everything from electronic health-record systems to AI-assisted diagnostics and low-cost point-of-care tools.