2025-11-19 –, Main Room
Collaboration on public sector Open Source Software (OSS) projects is steadily increasing along with demands for sovereign and interoperable technology stacks. Still, practice has yet to catch up compared to industry and the broader OSS ecosystem, whose ways of working need to be tailored to manage the many challenges falling on the public sector.
To help accelerate the public sector's use and development of OSS, we investigated six successful cases of public sector OSS projects from different countries and levels of government. In this talk, we will provide insights on how development is commonly concentrated and performed with the use of national and local service providers. We will talk about different funding models, either involving one or a few central actors, or a wider set through different setups of crowd-funding. We will further elaborate on sustainability challenges related to the various ways of working, and potential approaches to addressing these proactively.
Attendees will walk away with concrete and live examples to reference, as well as insights on how their organizations can start to engage and collaborate on new and existing public sector OSS projects.
Collaboration on public sector Open Source Software (OSS) projects is steadily increasing along with demands for sovereign and interoperable technology stacks. Still, practice has yet to catch up compared to industry and the broader OSS ecosystem, whose ways of working need to be tailored to manage the many challenges falling on the public sector. To help accelerate the public sector's use and development of OSS, this paper investigates six successful cases of public sector OSS projects from different countries and levels of government. The paper provides insights on how development is commonly concentrated and performed with the use of national and local service providers, discussing different funding models, either involving one or a few central actors, or a wider set through different setups of crowd-funding. It then elaborates on sustainability challenges related to the various ways of working and potential approaches to addressing these proactively.
Senior Researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Lund University.