Robin Delaloye and I were honored to represent GW at the United Nations OSPOs for Good conference a few weeks ago. The heat in New York city and the revered UN building brought the urgency of our global challenges into focus. Germany and Kenya hosted the two day conference along with the UN and the large room was filled with about 600 open source experts from government, industry, NGOs, and academia.
Here are my top three takeaways.
Governments have started to embrace open source and they are sharing digital public goods with their citizens to help govern better. France implemented an “open by default” principle for data (which includes code) and Switzerland recently implemented a similar policy. Germany and the US are also improving procurement policies to support open source software and the United Nations itself is fully committed to open source.
The participants believe the open source community is a great place to innovate and collaborate across borders which enable us all to tackle the worlds most important challenges. Specifically, the United Nations is hopeful that people all over the world will create and contribute to open source projects to address the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Finally, the audience and the panels were filled with open source experts that are passionate about sharing knowledge and working hard to improve our world. I was honored to meet Remy DeCausemaker, who started the first US government OSPO at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Qianqian Ye, who is the lead maintainer of a great open source project called p5.js for teaching artists and others how to code and make art, Karen Sandler from Outreachy, and many more fascinating people. There were also two impressive GW cybersecurity PhD students in attendance, Katrina Rosseini and Jeanine Johnson, who recently started a company together, but nevertheless, generously agreed to be GW OSPO stakeholders.
The GW OSPO is following up with many of the connections we made at the conference. We hope to launch some exciting new initiatives this upcoming school year and we invite you to connect with us if any of this resonates with you. We need your help supporting the UN’s call to action and we hope to report back at next year’s conference about all the work that GW is doing to address the SDGs.