I was thrilled to be invited to attend the United Nations Open Source Week in New York joining a few hundred people from over 40 countries to talk about open source. 

The OSPOs for Good day on June 18, kicked off with a keynote by Amandeep Singh Gill, Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies, UN-ODET, who talked about how the UN sees open source as a foundation for digital transformation, but one that requires the UN to move beyond its historical focus on governments to engage multiple stakeholders. Looking around the room, you could see this reflected in the event attendees who represented governments, companies, universities, not for profit organizations, individuals, and more. Later in the day, Dmitry Mariyasin, Deputy Executive Secretary, UNECE, talked about how he sees open source as an inspiration for how the UN can operate more broadly in their role to create public goods using digital solutions to improve sustainability and increase transparency and trust. 

You can watch the livestream of the event, but here are a few highlights or common themes from the OSPOs for Good day.

• Historically, many open source conversations were about cost savings, but this wasn’t the case at this event. The conversations have shifted to collaboration, innovation, and using open source to build trust.
• Several of the people representing governments talked about how having an OSPO helped them build connections to other people involved in open source within their organizations while also allowing them to build connections and partnerships to collaborate and learn from others. Many countries view open source as being critical to their success as a country and in serving the needs and improving the livelihoods of their people.
• The newly formed Trinidad and Tobago OSPO and Kenya OSPO are part of an initiative to create a replicable, scalable model of OSPOs across the global south with a goal of serving countries beyond just their governments to promote open source. 
• Governments want to use open source, but struggle with procurement processes, which requires different policies to contribute, add new features, and maintain open source projects. Governments have been more willing to fund new features, but often struggle to fund the invisible maintenance of the software that everyone uses, which creates risks for the public that they represent. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund (now under the Sovereign Tech Agency) was created as one way to address these risks and make strategic investments in core digital infrastructure.

So far, I’m really enjoying the event and am looking forward to the next two days!