2025-10-01 –, Auditorium
CERN, the physics lab near Geneva, operating the Large Hadron Collider, has a rich history of Open Source contributions and in Open Science. In this talk we will present the work the CERN OSPO has done over its first two years of existence, with particular attention to the impact of CERN's Open Source beyond high-energy physics, CERN's main area of research.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is considered the world’s largest physics lab and sits on the border of France and Switzerland, close to Geneva. It is known for operating the Large Hadron Collider, and also runs many other research projects as well as all the supporting infrastructure. CERN’s community is a strong user, supporter and contributor to Open Source and is proud to have been the founder of many Open Source innovations, among them being the World Wide Web. Open Source is one of the key elements of CERN’s Open Science activities.
In November 2023, CERN launched an Open Source Program Office to better support Open Source practices at CERN. In comparison to other OSPOs around, CERN’s OSPO takes a novel approach by including Open Source Hardware in it. The internal and external mandate of the OSPO underlines its a service “from the community to the community” to make sure CERN’s Open Source projects, contributions and usage is consistent, long-lived and following best practices.
Giacomo Tenaglia is a computer scientist with 25 years of experience in designing, building and running services based on free and open-source software components. He works at CERN IT department on the team responsible for configuration management and scientific computing services. Over the past few years, Giacomo has led the creation of CERN's Open Source Program Office, where he currently serves as chair.