Vipul Siddharth
I help governments, universities, and communities build with Open Source.
At UNICEF Office of Innovation, I shape open source strategy across the UN system, guide Venture Fund startups, and work hands-on with policy, licensing, and Digital Public Goods standards. My work spans setting national open source policy with governments, building DPG academia programs with universities, and developing holistic community capacity.
Currently leading Open Source within the UNICEF Office of Innovation while staying close to the code, the licenses, the metrics, and the people.
Session
Sierra Leone has a national open source policy, an open source curriculum running as a university elective, a student developer community, a DPG accelerator lab, and a funding route for local companies building on open solutions. UNICEF has been working with the Sierra Leone Government on all these, and this talk will cover those as a case study for what a digital sovereignty roadmap can look like.
Most countries with an open source first policy have the policy and nothing else. That is the argument of this talk: an open source first mandate is just the start of sovereignty - not the achievement of it. A government can mandate open source, procure it, deploy it, and remain entirely dependent, because the capacity to read, modify, evaluate, and maintain the code sits somewhere else. The licence is open. The dependency is intact and sometimes concealed by what we call vendor-controlled open source software (VCOSS).
I will set out the sequence of conditions that has to follow a policy for it to become an ecosystem, why almost everyone stops at step one, and what Sierra Leone got right and wrong attempting the full sequence.