Open Source Summit Europe 2025

There are so many open source projects and not enough contributors to sustain them all over the long term. With many open source projects desperate for contributors, how do we educate the next generation of open source contributors to grow the contributor base for all of us?

In this panel, we’ll talk about education programs for school children and university students. We’ll discuss the landscape of open source contributors in the different regions along with the motivations for participation in open source and how those differ across regions. Because we want contributors who will continue contributing, we’ll also talk about some challenges that prevent sustainable contributions over the long term.

Our panelists have experience teaching open source to university students, school children in New Zealand, and building new open source communities in Africa. In this panel, we’ll talk about what we’ve learned, what’s worked, and provide tips for you to grow the next generation of contributors from within your local communities.

In heavily regulated financial services, automotive industries or other large enterprise institutions, developers can transform from open source "takers" to strategic "makers." 

This presentation showcases GitLab's Co-Create program as a proven contribution framework for organizations. We'll also teach oyu how to reproduce this program for your OSS project or company.

This is not a product pitch. Rather, Nick is drawing from 15+ years in open source communities and experience as an OSS foundation board member, he will present a model that could inspire other open source projects to engage regulated industries often excluded from contribution ecosystems.

Attendees will discover how structured onboarding, engineering collaboration, CLA frameworks, and maintenance-free contributions create sustainable participation models that maintain regulatory compliance while driving innovation.

Through case studies from Thales (where "two developers saved time for 30 million users" in just two months), Siemens, Scania, and a FinOS member, I'll demonstrate how structured contribution programs deliver measurable value while addressing the unique compliance, security, and innovation challenges.

Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly recognized as a crucial enabler of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and digital transformation across the globe. Yet, adoption and contribution remain uneven, with certain regions and actors underrepresented, especially in the global south.

With initiatives such as the UN’s Digital Global Compact and Open Source Principles, there is growing momentum and an opportunity to better understand and measure OSS’s role in digital infrastructure and government strategies. As part of this effort, we are exploring the development of an Open Source Adoption Index, published annually to track adoption trends, highlight successes, and identify challenges faced by UN Member States.

The adoption index will be collaboratively designed through a series of geographically distributed workshops to collect dimensions relevant across various contexts and use cases. In this panel, attendees will be actively engaged, as part of this extensive co-design process, and be urged to provide thoughts and feedback to the panel of representatives from the UN, researchers and stakeholders.

Several high-profile incidents have raised global awareness that single-maintainer projects can become single points of global risk. However, a similar risk exists among established and mature projects – the attrition of a small “core” group of maintainers can be just as damaging to downstream dependencies.

Today, many established projects are facing significant maintainer attrition while vibrant and younger communities have formed around derivatives and forks. Meanwhile, entire new ecosystems have emerged and become characterized by generational divides.

Why is this happening, and what can you do to prepare to pass the mantle of project leadership?

We will discuss factors contributing to a rising participation barrier, then explore strategies for community growth and educate policymakers on ways to support the longevity and security of mid- and large-sized open source projects.

Launching an open source initiative within a company is more than just publishing source code. It involves shift in mindset to foster a culture of openness, gaining support from leadership, establishing governance policy and infrastructure to facilitate it. In this talk, we will share how our OSPO enabled teams to take their first steps to open source, from internal advocacy to successfully publishing their repositories. We will dive into the key challenges like promoting a collaborative-development mindset, leadership buy-in and bringing enablement teams together to set up necessary process ensuring security. We will share the strategies that worked - teaming up with the right pilot team, building InnerSource maturity internally, recognizing contributors and maintainers of open source and innersource projects, gaining support from the leadership, conducting events like InnerSource hackathon to spread awareness about reuse and co-creation. Whether you are looking to start an open source initiative in your organization or to improve existing processes, this talk will give you insights on innovative strategies that worked for us and that can be leveraged by other organizations too.