OSPOs for Good – A symposium at the UN.

I, together with Malvika Sharan and Arielle Bennett from the Alan Turing Institute / The Turing Way and Neil Chue Hong from Software Sustainable Institute, attended at the beginning of July OSPOs for Good symposium at the United Nations Headquarters, representing research institutions from the UK.

What’s an OSPO?

An Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) is an entity within an organisation that looks after their Open Source strategy and operation. OSPOs have been set in the industry for many years (and under many different names), but it’s only till recent years when academic and research institutions as well as government and world organisations have also started to create them. Certainly, the goals of all these different OSPOs differ, but by having a common name helps to develop a fabric across them to promote collaboration.

OSPOs for good?

At the symposium, OSPOs from different entities – national and local level government, institutions and private sector – together with open source communities, think tanks, and activists, joined together to discuss how Open Source and through those varied programme offices can be used to help tackle the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ideas ranged from those that can run within specific communities, companies, or institutions to collaborations across all of them. 

For over two years now, the UN has been running an OSPO, and this event is part of their commitment to working with the whole world. The symposium gave details about how OSPOs were formed and their motivations, as well as advertise initiatives from those attending. For example, the OSPO at the UN started by a survey to all its sub-organisations to know their positions on Open Source Software, whether that’s from a user, creator, maintainer, community member or stakeholder point of view. They have grown fast and highlighted that Open Source is more than Open Source Software! Open Source covers open communities, knowledge, data, science, …. On the digital front, these were referred to as Digital Public Goods (DPGs), which I think conveys more weight than open source software or open data. A person may not understand what open source software is, but a public good resonates that it has something good for them!

On open source communities, however, many of us have the tendency to focus on the software and forget to look beyond it. How can we go an extra step and check how what we are creating can be relevant to the SDGs? That may look too hard (and even ambitious?), if that’s the case, we should have a commitment to no harm – I firstly heard it from Malvika’s talk: Applying Do No Harm principle to enhance open source sustainability at SOOCon24. That’s where many of us need to start with, reviewing our practices and applying do-no-harm principles within our communities to work towards Open Source for good.

Though many people see the goods of Open Source for the world, not everyone at is an open source advocate! Even within the UN, they’ve got challenges and myths against Open Source that are common in many other communities. Some of these are based on trusting more big tech companies or using privacy or security concerns as an excuse to prevent opening their source (whether it’s data, code or knowledge). Regarding security, however, a recent event that caused a worldwide mayhem demonstrates that vulnerabilities are not exclusively on open source software.

From understanding how UN’s OSPO works within a multi-organisation level, we moved into a state/local government level. In Germany, they are working to unite much of the different wheel-reinventions at different states into a more collaborative approach where the tools and processes are shared (such as platforms like openCode). This has not only stopped there, but they are collaborating with France too! There, the BlueHats initiative helps to promote and recognise the community behind Open Source development within government. Funding open source is a big problem, and that was discussed too – people from Sovereign TechFund and ZenDiS gave an overview of the current successful model that’s being used in Germany.

Initiatives within foundations and cities were also discussed, as well as the opportunities universities can have collaborating with their local communities on that.

One of the UN’s OSPO star activities mentioned and praised was Reboot the Earth. Five hackathons that happened around the globe to come up with ideas that can advance the SDGs. The winners from each of them presented their ideas to us, and now they are taking part in a coaching programme to scale their solutions. This was very inspiring!

Once the symposium finished, I, together with many of the attendees, participated in a 1-day workshop: What’s next for Open Source? There we had more time to interact and collaborate between us and come up with various lists of actions to keep pushing forward the idea of Open Source for good. At least, one thing was easily done: we made connections between various organisations that will convert into future collaborations.

What’s next for UCL?

Well, glad you asked! At ARC we are starting to build an OSPO to provide Open Source guidance and support to research, education, and e-infrastructure projects through the whole university. At the moment we are scoping our vision and midterm goals, but hopefully soon we can advertise our plans to the rest of the university and the whole world. Would you like to be involved? Write to us at open.source@ucl.ac.uk.

Where can I read more about the event?

You can check the event highlights, the event recordings and reports from other attendees such as Nicole Martinelli at OpenSource.net, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at The New Stack and at The Register, Nithya Ruff at the Linux Foundation, and Henriette Litta at the Open Knowledge Foundation,