Sovereignty Beyond the Licence
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.
In Sierra Leone, UNICEF Office of Innovation supported the government across six things rather than one:
- A national open source policy prioritising open source in procurement and requiring government-built software to be open by default
- Enforcement written into procurement
- Open source and DPG curriculum introduced as a university elective, building technical capacity that the state can eventually hire
- A local student developer community around it
- A DPG accelerator lab supporting locally built solutions
- A pathway into UNICEF Venture Fund investment for companies building on genuinely open solutions with no proprietary core
I am not claiming Sierra Leone has solved this. Several parts are early and some have not worked. The claim is narrower and I think more interesting: this is the only place I know of where all six were attempted on purpose rather than hoped for.
We will explore policy failure modes like no enforcement, open but no capacity to use it, and demand with no local supply.
This talk will walk us through the sequence of conditions through which an open source first commitment becomes an operating ecosystem:
- Policy adopted
- Procurement clauses with enforcement
- Public sector technical capacity to specify and evaluate
- Domestic developer supply
- Local firms with viable business models
- Sustained maintenance funding
Another challenge is that the systematic assessment of government open source adoption remains thin, and digital government maturity indexes are only now beginning to include open source indicators. We are declaring progress against something we do not measure.
It builds on existing work on the conditions for public sector open source success, but it is deliberately sequential and deliberately uncomfortable.
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.