Heath Arensen
Heath is the Director of Open Source Programs at the UN Foundation’s Digital Impact Alliance. The international development and humanitarian community is increasingly embracing Open Source in developing digital solutions for global challenges. The Digital Impact Alliance’s Open Source Program was founded as a multi-stakeholder initiative to support open source products that have been invested in to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
Heath global nomad with an itch for entrepreneurship, having spent more than fifteen years founding and scaling tech-driven startups in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He thrives at the intersection of technology and social good, with experience in founding startups, in impact investing and in product incubation.
Heath is an active mentor in the Middle East and African technology startup scenes. Prior to joining the Digital Impact Alliance, Heath oversaw iHub Nairobi’s innovation hub launch of an internal software consulting unit and talent development platform. Prior to iHub, he led the East Africa portfolio for impact investment firm Invested Development. For more than 10 years, he served as the founder and ran Tanasuk Technologies, a software consulting firm and startup incubator with offices in Amman, Jordan and Nairobi, Kenya.
Heath holds an MBA from Loyola University Chicago and an MA in sustainable international development from Brandeis University. Understanding the unique challenges of building and managing digital projects in emerging markets, Heath brings diverse expertise in business strategy and technology.
Sessions
Open source is being increasingly embraced by the UN system, governments, and civil society organizations to develop applications to accelerate achieving the sustainable development goals. The sustainability of these projects is of critical importance and requires new frameworks for how open source projects can be maintained through full life-cycle financial support. This session will provide a background of initiatives underway by the Digital Impact Alliance at the UN Foundation, and other ecosystem partners, to support digital public goods and make the case for what institutional support for open source requires. We will address issues related to fiscal sponsorship, community governance, sources of funds, volunteer vs paid contribution, and how decentralized open source communities can connect to centralized control institutions. Will introduce the Govstack initiative to provide context of initiatives underway that promote the use of open source applications for national digital transformation. www.govstack.global