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United Nations Open Source Week

I’ve been fortunate to be able to attend the UN Open Source Week event again this year at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City where they bring the open source community together with government and policy folks to facilitate collaboration and information sharing. For these first several days, the overarching theme is around digital sovereignty with people seeing open source as a way to build public goods together. There were concerns about how technology has been consolidated into the hands of a few, but that open source and events like this one help us change that by embracing the freedom that open source offers. AI is seen as both an opportunity and a challenge with some AI cheerleading, while also expressing concerns that AI is trained mostly on the work of a few with many people not being represented in the training data. Overall, open source is seen as a partnership model to allow all of us to build public goods together. 

Dawn smiling standing next to the UN Open Source Week Sign

One of my favorite things about this event is how people use it as an opportunity to get people together outside of the main event. While it may not seem like FOSDEM and a UN event would have much in common, they both have many side events that spring up to take advantage of the people they bring together. Like with FOSDEM, some of my best moments at the event have been during the conversations that I’ve been having with other open source folks during breaks, lunch, parties, and the hallway track!

The first day, I took advantage of the Maintainathon, which was part of the main program, but was organized separately by the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA) who brought an entire maintainer delegation with them to the event. It was great seeing people talking and collaborating around the specific concerns that maintainers have ranging from governance issues to more technical concerns. This was covered well already in the STA’s LinkedIn post.

My Tuesday started with a breakfast hosted by the STA at the German House. We had short remarks from Sovereign Tech Agency Managing Director Adriana Groh, Parliamentary State Secretary Thomas Jarzombek from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, Amandeep Gill, UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies, Dr. Wolfgang Gehring, OSPO Lead at Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation, Bastien Guerry, Head of Partnerships at Software Heritage, and Tiffany Farriss, CEO of Palantir.net and longtime Drupal Association board member. You can read more in the STA LinkedIn post about the breakfast.

On Wednesday, I was invited by the CURIOSS crew to their side event hosted at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation offices as a special guest where we had some really interesting demos and discussions about measuring open source impact for academic OSPOs.

A few of us from CHAOSS started the day on Thursday with a breakfast meetup at a nearby coffee shop where I got to have interesting conversations with some awesome CHAOTICs before the main event!

OSPOs for Good

Thursday is the OSPOs for Good day, which is the main reason that I attend the UN Open Source Week. Again, the overarching theme has been about digital sovereignty. 

It started with a few keynotes. H.E. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Minister Delegate in charge of Digital Transition and Administrative Reform, Kingdom of Morocco talked about how open source plays a fundamental role for long-term control of critical digital services to produce contextualized solutions to meet the needs of Moroccan people and are making strategic investments in open source to benefit from international cooperation while remaining in control of their future. Angellah Jasmin Kairuki, Minister of Communication and IT, United Republic of Tanzania spoke about how OSPOs allow governments to share and reuse what works for digital public goods with open source as a critical trigger for digital sovereignty that puts citizens first to change the posture from passive consumers. Bernardo Mariano Junior, Assistant Secretary-General and Chief Information Technology Officer, UN Office of Information and Communications Technology talked about how this event brings open source passion to the united nations from across the globe with open source as a strategic enabler allowing us to move faster toward digital sovereignty. Jim Zemlin, CEO of The Linux Foundation talked about AI and open source making similar points as what he delivered in the recent Open Source Summit North America. Louise McKeever, Chief Information Officer, Department of Agriculture, Food, & the Marine in Ireland spoke about their policy of open source first and how open source provides transparency, flexibility, and resilience for digital sovereignty.

Up next in the main room was a panel about Open Source and Digital Sovereignty in a Connected World moderated by Ruth Suehle who opened by talking about how the UN charter reflects open source principles. Sachiko Muto talked about how open source is coming to the top of the agenda again as it has been before, but now public sector OSPOs are the key to turning these endorsements of open source into operational capability to make it a reality. OSPOs unlock the ability to collaborate across both private and public sectors with public sector OSPOs playing a key role. Adriana Groh spoke about how the STA shows that the government can play a role in supporting the open source ecosystem via public money for public code, but there is also a need to be able to demonstrate impact for how you’re spending public money. Volunteers don’t maintain public infrastructure, like roads and bridges, so we shouldn’t expect them to maintain our critical digital infrastructure, either. Frank Karlitschek talked about how open source is strategic and critical in today’s geopolitical environment, but challenges for adoption are not technical. Arun Gupta spoke about OSPOs as a catalyst for interoperability and choice. 

After this we moved into breakout sessions. The first one I attended was about Financing Open Source and Digital Public Goods: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach discussing how we pay to sustain the digital ecosystem that we need over the long-term with a multi-stakeholder approach. DPGs need sustainable business models and implementers acting in the public interest to support those DPGs over the long-term. It should be a state responsibility to support the digital infrastructure that we all rely on, and the STA is piloting an impact measurement framework based on CHAOSS metrics to show that the public money has been well-spent. Supporting open source is not about charity, and governments need to get involved. Using tax payer money requires accountability for open source, but needs to be done in a way that doesn’t place the burden on those open source maintainers.

For the second breakout I went to ‘From Policy to Practice: Establishing Government OSPOs in Low- and Middle-Income Countries’, because I’m interested specifically in learning more about the progress they’ve made since I last heard about the OSPOs in Kenya and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. These 2 OSPOs were funded by the EU as pilots to build capabilities to allow more use of open source and to do it in a way that is more likely to be successful. There are also many commonalities between these 2 OSPOs and how they were established. Here’s an overview of what each of them are working on:

  • Kenya OSPO: Embedded in the Ministry to be self-sustaining over time. Their implementation needs to be aligned with core strategies of the Kenyan government and data protection policies. Focus areas include: training programs for open source to build capacity, programs for the local developer community, German-Kenyan digital dialog on open source, and as a foundation for the Kenya open source sovereign stack to make it easier for the government to select from the many OSS projects.
  • Trinidad & Tobago OSPO: Aligns with key strategies and plans focused on digital sovereignty. They are also embedded in the Ministry to be self-sustaining and have a remit to support the entire government. Focus areas include: a new national open source policy (including procurement policies putting open source first), shepherding a government-wide repository and software asset management register, a partnership with the University of West Indies for training government staff, and advising on OSS projects (including NextCloud implementation).  Historically, many countries have relied on big, proprietary software companies because they don’t have the capabilities and the OSPO is designed to change this and build these capabilities locally both for public servants and school children to build the next generation.

The next main session was about Open Source at the United Nations. The digital divide remains a problem in many less developed countries. Open source isn’t a niche issue, it’s essential as a practical pathway to bridge digital divides, and the UN is working hard to strengthen their use of open source to go further, faster. Open source allows the different groups within the UN to collaborate together and share ideas to build transparent and resilient technologies while protecting the free flow of information. The UN has been shifting to using open source more strategically to address geopolitical risks with flexibility and independence.

The final OSPOs for Good panel is Strategic Independence Across Layers of Governance. Open source is central to the digital policy agenda at the EU, and it is a fundamental part of their digital sovereignty strategy. This requires a transition from consuming to participating and collaborating. It’s not about standing apart, but moving to shared stewardship around the world. Open source provides strategic independence for governments to choose the solutions that best meet the needs for their specific countries. Open source itself isn’t the end goal; it needs to meet the needs of a country and support their goals. Brian Behlendorf worries about the long-term sustainability of open source software built by governments where they could be a single election away from no longer supporting a particular technology, but by working together with the private sector we might be able to work together for more sustainable open source software. Nithya Ruff mentioned that OSPOs can serve as a function to direct changes and connect institutions across governments for strategic independence and collaboration in open source.

I really enjoyed the entire OSPOs for Good day, and I’m looking forward to the Open Source Week Community Day tomorrow!

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Thoughts on Governance

Having good open source project governance allows us all to collaborate and work together to build more sustainable, healthy and successful projects. It’s something I’m particularly passionate about, and I’ve frequently written about it here on this blog. I collected all of those links in this post: Good Governance for Open Source Projects. Writing those posts made me realize that I hadn’t given a full presentation about governance in a while, so I was excited to have the opportunity to speak about Proactive Governance to Build Sustainable Open Source Projects at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit NA in Minneapolis in May 2026. The slides and video for that talk are now available.

While I spend more time talking about open source project governance, I’ve also started thinking more about public governance and how open source can be a key part of a digital sovereignty strategy. But the open source impact on public governance goes beyond just digital sovereignty, which is why I was so excited to be invited by OpenGov Africa to talk more about the intersection between open source and public governance last week. The slides and video for that talk are also online.

Related Resources:


Image by the CNCF (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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A Strategic Approach to Demonstrating the Value of OSS Efforts

OSPOs and other open source teams often struggle to demonstrate the value of their work in a way that resonates with the people in leadership positions within their organization. The topic of demonstrating open source value is one that I’ve been blogging about and giving presentations about frequently over the past year, so this blog post is a way for me to collect all of that work in one place to make it easier for people to find.

In the CHAOSS OSPO Working Group, which I co-chair, the topic of how to demonstrate the value of our work in open source has been a popular topic since we started the group many years ago. However, given the current financial climate and the number of OSPOs that have been the targets of cutbacks and layoffs, this feels like a particularly important topic right now.  This is why we created a CHAOSS Practitioner Guide all about Demonstrating Organizational Value, which I blogged about when the guide was launched.  In a second blog post on the topic, More about Demonstrating Organizational Value, I talked about the episode of CHAOSScast where Bob Killen and I joined Harmony Elendu to share our thoughts about how organizations can more effectively demonstrate the value of their open source efforts.

I expanded on this topic in another blog post, OSPO Contribution Strategies to Demonstrate Value. This post highlights how to articulate the importance of your contributions to upstream projects as part of a broader open source strategy, which often has 2 components: 1) identifying which projects are most strategic / critical for your organization and 2) creating contribution strategies for individual projects. The blog post has examples of how I did this when I worked at VMware and Pivotal.

I’ve also presented on this topic several times recently, but I wanted to highlight the two most recent talks, since they are the most comprehensive examples of these presentations. I blogged about my talk for the folks from CURIOSS (Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs) where I expanded on the content in the guide to also include more about how to demonstrate value in a university context. I further expanded it beyond corporate and university contexts to include how government / public sector organizations can demonstrate the value of their work in my talk at the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. Here’s the video and slides for this most recent version of the talk.

If you want feedback or help with your open source strategy and how to demonstrate value for your organization, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Related blog posts:

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How OSPOs can Measure the Impact of OSS Funding

So much of the critical infrastructure that we all rely on contains open source projects that are under-resourced and struggling. One (of many) ways to help these projects is by funding development and maintenance so that contributors can focus on this work, but times are tough. Organizations and OSPOs are feeling the pinch, and it can be hard to justify continuing to fund open source projects. Measuring the impact of open source funding is something that I’m passionate about because the best way to continue to get leadership to give you money to fund open source is by showing them the impact of that funding. 

However, measuring the impact of funding isn’t easy, and there is no one approach, since the goals and objectives for funding vary widely for different types of funding organizations and different open source projects. It’s also important to consider that not all funding provides positive outcomes, since money can introduce tension within projects. In 2024 to help organizations navigate these challenges, I collaborated with several people to write an academic paper on this topic: A Toolkit for Measuring the Impacts of Public Funding on Open Source Software Development. We recently turned this paper into the CHAOSS Practitioner Guide: Funding Impact Measurement, which is much shorter and focused on practical steps that organizations can take to justify the impact of funding provided to open source projects and maintainers. 

The guide talks about the challenges of funding and the lessons we’ve learned along the way in addition to a section to help you navigate the actions that you can take to measure the impact. The “How to Take Action” section of the guide has three sections. 

  • First, start by understanding the context. This includes understanding the funding objectives and how the funding is structured for the projects being funded, considering project life stages and social structures, and accounting for salary structures and cost factors for different types of contributors across multiple regions.
  • Second, look at economic, social, and technological impacts across multiple dimensions. The potential social, economic, and technological impacts can be both positive and negative, direct and indirect, internal (i.e. within a project) and external (i.e. ecosystem), and manifest over different time horizons. The guide contains examples of how to think about each of these areas.
  • Third, using various methods to combine scalable quantitative measures along with contextual depth from qualitative data to better understand the funding impact. Mixed-methods approaches offer the best of both words: scalability and contextual depth. The guide and the paper have more details about how to do this.

This post doesn’t tell you how to justify getting new funding for open source efforts, so if you want to start funding open source projects, you need to demonstrate the value of that work to your leadership. There is a Demonstrating Organizational Value practitioner guide, and I’ve talked about demonstrating organizational value in several posts on this blog, which are linked in the “Related Resources” section below to provide a starting point. However, even if you haven’t yet started funding projects, you can still put together a plan for how you’ll measure the impact of that funding as part of demonstrating the value and making a case to your leadership along with the funding request.

I’ll conclude with a short quote from the guide:

“Funders need to be able to understand the impacts of past funding in order to secure buy-in for future funding as well as to adapting and/or innovating funding approaches whilst mitigating ineffective or even harmful approaches. We all benefit from more public institutions, philanthropic organizations, and companies giving money to open source; when done in a way that positive impact is the ultimate goal and objective. We hope that this guide helps organizations measure the impact of their funding initiatives so that we can increase the funding to open source projects to drive future improvements and allow these projects, and the people working on them, to become healthier and more sustainable over time.”

If you want help with measuring the impact of your funding or with other OSPO strategy topics, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Related Resources:

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CURIOSS: Demonstrating Open Source Value

The lovely folks from CURIOSS (Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs) invited me to join them in March as part of their Deep Dive series of talks. I gave a quick overview of CHAOSS before diving into one of my favorite topics: demonstrating the value of open source efforts. This is the first time I’ve given this talk with some additional content about how to demonstrate value in a university / academic context, which is a bit different from how we think about value in corporate environments.

The slides and video are available for you to enjoy!

Related resources:

General

Transitions

TL;DR version: As planned, my time as the CHAOSS Director of Data Science has come to an end, but I’ll still be around the CHAOSS community as a board member and Working Group (WG) lead. I’ll be taking April and most of May off before transitioning into open source strategy consulting starting in June.

The CHAOSS Director of Data Science role was funded by an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant for 3 years, so the plan was always to move on to something else when it ended in March 2026. I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished in 3 years, so a huge thank you to the folks at the Sloan Foundation for the funding that allowed me to focus on this over the past few years. When I started this work, one of the first steps was to create the CHAOSS Data Science WG, which has allowed us to grow the data science community. We started the Practitioner Guide series within the WG and have published almost a dozen guides on a wide variety of topics! We also launched several research projects in addition to the Relicensing and Forks project that I’ve been focused on over the past few years. You can learn more about what we’ve accomplished by reading our updates from January 2025, June 2025, and November 2025. I feel confident that the CHAOSS data science community and the WG are in good hands as I step down and leave the work in the very capable hands of the other 2 co-chairs, Cali Dolfi and Sal Kimmich, and maintainer, Ernest Owojori.

However, I’m not leaving the CHAOSS community. I’ll still be on the CHAOSS Governing Board and will continue co-chairing the OSPO WG, Funding Impact Measurement WG, and the Education WG. All of these WGs have co-chairs, so WG meetings will continue and nothing should change while I’m enjoying some time off to rest and recharge in April and May. The only exception to my time off is to attend the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis in May, since I didn’t want to miss it. I’m disappointed to need to say this, but I also wanted to make sure people know that this transition and the time off has been planned for over a year and has nothing to do with the current drama unfolding in the CHAOSS project this week.

What’s next? While I’ve enjoyed being able to focus on data and metrics over the past few years, I’ve found that I missed working on open source strategy, which has been my focus over the past two decades. The data science work was a fun diversion, but now I’m ready to get back to my roots. Starting in June, I’ll be shifting into open source strategy consulting. This is NOT a temporary solution while I figure out what to do next. My plan is to continue consulting on a part-time basis while I free up some time for my other hobbies (reading, working out / running, designing 3D prints, traveling), and to continue to do this for as long as I remain able to work. 

You can learn more about my consulting business on my consulting website, but here are a few focus areas:

  • Open Source Strategy: Crafting strategies for your OSPO, open source teams, or product teams that help employees focus their open source work in areas with the most impact along with demonstrating the value of your open source efforts to your executive team.
  • Contributor and Community Strategy: Strategies and techniques for growing your contributor base and improving sustainability for the open source projects driven by your organization and when working upstream.
  • Governance: Documenting and improving project governance processes for open source projects along with providing advice when there are governance issues or concerns.
  • Research and Data Analysis: Open to a variety of research and data projects to answer questions you have about open source projects from understanding an existing contributor base to doing audits of your GitHub organizations to understand the status of your repositories.

If you’d like my help in any of these areas, please reach out to me in June!

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Reflections from FOSS Backstage 2026

FOSS Backstage is one of my favorite conferences, and again this year, I had an amazing experience. I saw interesting talks, caught up with friends, met new people, and still missed talking to a few people!

As with most conferences in Europe, digital sovereignty was a hot topic with quite a few talks touching on various aspects of the topic. Mirko Boehm talked about the role that open source can play in digital sovereignty, but it’s not quite so simple, since it requires participation in addition to adoption. Nicholas Gates gave a nice overview of the OSOR Report on Open Source in European Local Governments. Jan Lehnardt talked about the Sovereign Tech Agency’s Bug Bounty program. Andy Piper introduced how Digital Public Goods (DPGs), like Mastodon, can be part of a digital sovereignty strategy. Jutta Kreyss had a very interesting talk about how the city of Munich has approached measuring digital sovereignty. Dr. Daniel Gerber talked about how a FOSS foundation is working with the state of Saxony in Germany.

Slide with 3 poodles in little red and black striped ties with white collars. Text reads: The CRA (canine responsibility act) as it applies to poodles. Nesbitt, Nesbitt, and Nesbitt Attorney-at-Paw. Andrew Nesbitt and Ben Nickolls standing on either side of the podium at FOSS Backstage 2026.

There were also many other interesting talks on other topics. Æva Black used an interesting story telling approach to cover some historical inflection points and what we can learn from them to improve the security of open source as we learn how to comply with the Cyber Resilience Act. Dr. Wolfgang Gehring shared some of what they’ve learned running an inner source program at Mercedes-Benz. Benjamin Nickolls and Andrew Nesbitt talked about how they dove into some ecosyste.ms data in an attempt to answer the question, “Is the InnerSource Commons good for open source?”, which they asked during a talk at last year’s FOSS Backstage event. Max Mehl and Cornelius Schumacher focused on the supply chain but by looking at how to balance risk, value, and people with the OSPO sitting at the intersection of all three. I also moderated a panel with Peculiar C. Umeh, Ruth Ikegah, and Stephen Walli to talk about educating the next generation of open source contributors.

These are just a few of the talks that I attended, and I heard that some of the talks I missed were also great! Videos of most or of the talks should be available soon, so I encourage you to have a look when they are published!

Related Resources:

If you want help with your open source strategy, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Keynote image of Æva Black by the FOSS Backstage photographer. 

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Power Dynamics, Rug Pulls, and Other Corporate Impacts on OSS Sustainability at SCALE 2026

As many of you know, this isn’t a new topic for me. I’ve written here about what your OSPO can do about power dynamics, rug pulls, and other corporate impacts on OSS sustainability along with a post on the OpenUK blog, The Shifting Power Dynamics in Open Source: Rug Pulls, Relicensing and Forks, and on The New Stack, Clouds, Code, and Control: The New Open Source Power Struggle. I’ve also given other presentations on this topic, so you can watch the video from the recent Open Source Summit EU (OSSEU) in Amsterdam, which Jon Corbett did a lovely job of summarizing in his LWN Coverage of the talk. 

I’ve been continuing to think about how power dynamics and rug pulls impact OSS sustainability, and I had an opportunity to talk about this at SCALE 2026 in Pasadena last weekend! I already blogged about how much I love SCALE, so I won’t continue to gush about how great it is. SCALE gave me a bit more time than I’ve had for the other presentations, so I added some new slides about other types of rug pulls beyond the relicensing and forks that I’ve previously focused on. I talked more about MongoDB, which kicked off the recent wave of relicensing when they relicensed under the newly created Server Side Public License (SSPL), which didn’t result in a fork. I also talked about some examples of rug pulls that came about when images / releases were put behind a paywall (Bitnami / Linkerd). My slides are a bit sparse, but available, and SCALE will also release the video of the talk if you want more details.

Resources:

I’m available for consulting engagements focused on open source strategy, contributor strategy, improving project governance, and related topics.

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Podcast: What Does a Healthy OSPO Actually Look Like?

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently reflecting on how Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) and our work in open source is evolving in a world where most of us don’t have as many resources as we need to support our open source work while at the same time, we’re experiencing an increasing reliance on open source as a key strategy for digital sovereignty. I started doing open source strategy work back in the very early 2000s at Intel, and in the 5 years before CHAOSS, I was in open source strategy roles at Pivotal and later VMware, so I’m looking forward to spending more time working with OSPOs as a consultant. 

My recent conversation with Rachel on the Contribute: Beyond the Code podcast was a great excuse to reflect on some of what I’ve been thinking and writing about related to OSPOs. You can watch the full episode on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify.

We talked about how OSPOs can:

  • demonstrate the value of open source work within an organization.
  • have a bigger impact in open source when they go beyond compliance 
  • scale their efforts through documentation
  • balance internal enablement along with external engagement
  • track the most strategic open source projects for your organization
  • responsibly sunset (archive) open source projects
  • develop processes that make it easy for employees to engage in open source

Additional Reading:

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Open Source Software: A Path to Building Leadership Skills

In traditional top-down employment structures, if a manager asks an employee to do something, there is an expectation that they will do what was asked. In the manager / employee relationship, the manager has quite a bit of power over their employees. The really great managers collaborate with their employees and lead with empathy, while less experienced and less competent managers rely on power dynamics to get employees to complete their work. In contrast, leadership in open source requires influence without power, which can help build skills in leading through collaboration, influence, and empathy to help people become truly great managers and leaders. I’ve been managing people within companies for 20+ years, and I’ve learned so much about how to be a better leader and manager through my work in open source.

A common pattern in open source is that a community member finds something to contribute and then contributes it, regardless of whether they are doing this as an individual or on behalf of a company. Those contributions are often followed by an interactive feedback process. A maintainer might review the contribution and request some changes, and the contributor will usually need to make some modifications before the contribution is accepted. In this case, the maintainer needs to be able to clearly communicate the request for modifications and use their influence (not power) to convince the contributor to keep working on the contribution until it can be completed. The contributor needs to collaborate with the maintainer and maybe even negotiate a solution that works for both of them. They both need to collaborate and use influence and collaboration, rather than power to find the best solution.

Another common pattern in open source is that there are activities that need to be accomplished, but the people involved in that part of the project don’t have the time or the skills to complete those activities, or they want to use those activities as a way to encourage newer contributors to get more involved. In this case, the people who want the work done will need to reach out to the community or to individuals and encourage others to contribute. This usually means convincing potential contributors of the value of these activities and using influence and negotiation skills to help people complete this work. Again, these are valuable managerial and leadership skills that can be learned and practiced by participating in open source projects. 

These skills can be developed even if you aren’t in a formal leadership position within a project. If you are a regular contributor, there is probably something you’re working on where you could use help from others. By getting others to help with this work, you can practice your leadership skills. I also encourage people to volunteer for leadership positions. There might be existing positions that need a leader, but you can also volunteer to lead something even when that leadership position doesn’t currently exist. You can volunteer to lead a user group, facilitate a meeting, start a podcast, manage a project, or anything else you can think of that might need doing. For those of you working within OSPOs, you can encourage your employees to think about using their work in open source projects to help build leadership skills, in addition to just considering open source work as a way for someone to gain new technical skills.

I know that some maintainers don’t like to think of themselves as managers or leaders, but a lot of maintainer responsibilities are more managerial than just writing code, and they require leadership skills. Even if you don’t aspire to become a people manager as a career, the leadership skills learned in open source projects can improve your interactions with other people both personally and professionally.

Additional Resources:

If you want help with your open source strategy, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.