In September 2025, the Université Grenoble Alpes became the first French university to officially launch its OSPO.
Situated at the intersection of research labs, higher education, and the public sector, academic institutions face a unique set of challenges, constraints, and opportunities when working with open source and open science. Building on their real-world experience, Violaine Louvet (CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes) and Boris Baldassari (Eclipse Foundation, OSPO Alliance) teamed up to develop practical guidelines and recommendations for academic OSPOs, extending the OSPO Alliance’s Good Governance Handbook with field-tested feedback.

In this session, we will present this new paper, outline the key specificities of academia, and share actionable best practices to plan, build, and deploy an OSPO within research and higher education entities. This talk is tailored for anyone interested in open source and open science within European universities, regardless of their current progress or maturity level.

Public sector organizations are increasingly embracing open source software to drive digital sovereignty, enhance transparency, and eliminate vendor lock-in. However, moving beyond simple adoption toward sustainable governance requires a structured framework that aligns policy, legal compliance, developer workflows, and institutional strategy.

This session introduces the OSPO Alliance and its flagship framework, the Good Governance Initiative (GGI) Handbook. Built as a modular and flexible blueprint, the GGI methodology offers public administrations a pragmatic roadmap to establish an Open Source Program Office (OSPO) or structure existing governance efforts. Through real-world implementation examples, we will explore how the handbook and its 25 core activities enable public sector entities to assess their organization's open source maturity, and design, deploy, and scale effective open source policies.