OFA Symposium 2025: Open Technology Impact in Uncertain Times

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) models become increasingly prevalent and released under various forms of open and permissive licenses, there is a critical need to understand how they are built and who contributes to this process. Currently, there is limited research that maps open collaboration practices across different stages of the development or reuse of models and their constituent artifacts (e.g. training datasets, software, model weights, evaluation benchmarks). Our research, therefore, aims to map and characterize open collaboration (specifically, the “collaboration on-ramps”) at different stages in the development and reuse lifecycle of open generative AI models, with a focus on open large language models (LLMs). Through qualitative interviews with 12 open LLM developers (i.e. Allen Institute for AI, EleutherAI, Cohere Labs, Hugging Face, Meta, Alibaba, the BigScience Workshop, AI Singapore, SpeakLeash, SCB 10X, Fraunhofer IAIS, and the National Library of Norway), this study presents a comprehensive cartography of collaboration practices throughout the lifecycle of open LLMs across diverse organizational contexts, from grassroots initiatives to large technology companies, and world regions. This study provides researchers, developers, business leaders, policymakers, and the wider community with empirical insights into collaboration practices, including motivations, opportunities and challenges, in the emerging open source AI community as well as practical recommendations for participation in or promotion of open source AI collaboration.

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.