Conference Agenda

This event brings together distinguished Nobel and Turing laureates, senior UN officials, senior leadership from leading international technical organizations, global tech leaders, and young innovators. Together, they will explore how open source technologies and AI can empower inclusive urban development – placing people at the center of digital transformation.
Key discussions will cover digital resilience, AI risk management, emerging governance challenges, and the role of open source in building transparent, interoperable, and locally owned digital infrastructure. The event will also feature a high-level dialogue on the future of open source AI and human-centered data, with a focus on empowering youth-led innovation ecosystems worldwide.

This high-level session brings together the right ecosystem stakeholders  for an African and inclusive conversation and agenda setting towards Africa's digital sovereignty, resilience, and transformation. It will provide a platform for building needed stakeholder support  and commitment to accelerate an open, interoperable digital infrastructure.  The session will co-create a short roadmap to address the critical infrastructure, resource  and governance gaps.

As generative AI rapidly transitions from experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment, the need for responsible, transparent, and governable systems has never been more urgent. This session explores how open source communities can play a foundational role in operationalizing Responsible AI at scale.In the first half, the Generative AI Commons will introduce its Responsible AI workstream and the Responsible Generative AI Framework (RGAF), a community-driven framework designed to guide the development, evaluation, and deployment of trustworthy generative AI systems. Contributors from the community will share insights into how RGAF translates principles such as transparency, accountability, and safety into actionable practices across the AI lifecycle.The second half features an interactive fireside chat with Kush Varshney, Ph.D from MIT, an IBM Fellow, and a long-time leader in AI research and development. Drawing from his experience at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Dr. Varshney will discuss practical pathways to implement Responsible GenAI using open source tools and ecosystems. The conversation will highlight real-world projects, emerging standards, and how organizations can leverage open collaboration to move from principles to production.Join us to learn how open source commons, frameworks like RGAF, and industry leadership are converging to shape the future of responsible generative AI.

Open source platforms underpin critical work in disaster risk management, climate resilience, and humanitarian response. Tools like DELTA, MapX, the Risk Data Library, and the Resilient Planet Data Hub depend on sustained maintenance, community contribution, and interoperable standards to function as reliable infrastructure. AI is now reshaping this landscape in contradictory ways: improving code quality, reducing maintenance burden, and enabling new modelling and analytics capabilities on one hand, while introducing structural pressures on the open source ecosystem these tools depend on, on the other. This session brings together the people building and sustaining these platforms alongside open source policy, DPG standards, and funding perspectives to examine what AI actually changes for open source risk and resilience tools, and what needs to be in place for that change to be sustainable.

As artificial intelligence becomes a defining force in shaping economies, governance, and development pathways, disparities between developed and developing countries risk deepening. While advanced economies rapidly adopt and deploy AI systems, many regions face limited access to infrastructure, data, technical expertise, and inclusive innovation ecosystems. This growing divide threatens to reinforce existing inequalities, particularly in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

At the same time, open source AI presents a unique opportunity to democratize access to technology, foster collaboration across borders, and enable locally adapted solutions. Youth, especially in emerging economies, are increasingly engaging with open source platforms to build, adapt, and deploy technologies that respond directly to community needs. However, their role remains underutilized in global AI governance and innovation ecosystems, where participation is often symbolic rather than structural.

This meeting aims to bridge these gaps by exploring how youth-led, open source AI can serve as a catalyst for inclusive and sustainable development. By connecting stakeholders across developed and developing contexts, the meeting seeks to ensure that AI innovation is not only globally distributed, but locally relevant, equitable, and aligned with long-term sustainability goals.

This session will explore how Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and open‑source Digital Public Goods are transforming international trade and transport. Organized by UNECE’s Transport Division in partnership with UN OHRLLS, the Czech Republic Customs, and the International Road Transport Union (IRU), the panel will highlight practical, interoperable, and legally grounded digital solutions supporting cross‑border operations.
 
The discussion will focus on ongoing efforts to digitalize key United Nations inland transport conventions—such as TIR, CMR and CPD—through open and reusable systems. Speakers will showcase the eTIR International System as a DPI for trade and transit facilitation, along with the eTIR National Application, one of the first UN‑developed Digital Public Goods available through the UN open‑source platform.
 
Drawing on real‑world implementation experiences, the session will demonstrate how open‑source solutions can reduce costs, enhance interoperability, strengthen public‑private collaboration, and deliver measurable economic and environmental benefits. The panel will also highlight how DPI‑based approaches can support inclusive digital transformation, particularly for landlocked and transit‑dependent countries, and offer scalable models that may be replicated beyond the transport sector.

Countries are rapidly adopting digital public infrastructure (digital ID, payments, data exchange) to deliver services at population scale. But as DPI scales, so do the risks: exclusion of marginalized populations, security vulnerabilities, privacy failures, and vendor lock-in, among others. Despite growing consensus that safeguards are essential, most implementers lack practical guidance on what safeguards look like in practice and how to operationalize them alongside design and rollout.The UN DPI Safeguards Initiative has been working across countries and ecosystem actors to build a shared language around DPI safeguards, influence organizations to integrate safeguards into their approaches, and activate actors to advance safeguards in their own implementations. The initiative currently works across countries and a growing network of ecosystem partners, reflecting strong and growing demand for practical safeguards guidance from implementers on the ground. This workshop draws directly on that work, bringing perspectives and emerging lessons into the room.This session is particularly timely in the context of UN Open Source Week, where the intersection of open-source approaches, digital public goods, and safe DPI implementation offers a natural convergence point for the community.

From Venezuelan migrants navigating Colombia’s Bre-B payment system, to Ethiopia’s rollout of Fayda ID, to the global push for digital public infrastructure, this session examines a critical question: when does digital public infrastructure actually expand inclusion, and when does it reinforce barriers?

By connecting real-world frictions in remittances, the evolving role of digital identity and how it can leverage and build on open-source systems, and the financial and governance trade-offs of DPI, this session will explore how design choices shape access, affordability, and trust for underserved populations.

As learning, health and scientific systems grow increasingly digital, the governance of digital commons and open infrastructure has become both an urgent public interest challenge and a strategic opportunity. This session explores these issues, including through a UNESCO Panel on Open Solutions and WHO/UNICC panel on Health DPI, which will highlight how Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and digital public goods—including open repositories, Open Access, and Open Educational Resources—can enable resilient, interoperable, and sustainable global systems.
 
Moving beyond open source as a mere licensing preference, the session introduces Sustainability by Design as a core governance commitment. This approach ensures that infrastructure outlasts any single donor cycle or vendor relationship by empowering stakeholders to use, reuse, share, and modify/contextualize tools to fit local needs. Central to this discussion is the role of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and interoperability in securing digital sovereignty and fostering locally-owned innovation.
 
The session features the official launch of the UNESCO Open Science Platform as FOSS, built in partnership with UNICC and constructed with CERN’s InvenioRDM as a core component. It also highlights learner-centered initiatives like the  ScholarRx platform, aligned with the 2019 UNESCO recommendation on OER, and how WHO’s health learning initiatives leverage this technology to accelerate impact for communities.

Countries are rapidly adopting digital public infrastructure (digital ID, payments, data exchange) to deliver services at population scale. But as DPI scales, so do the risks: exclusion of marginalized populations, security vulnerabilities, privacy failures, and vendor lock-in, among others. Despite growing consensus that safeguards are essential, most implementers lack practical guidance on what safeguards look like in practice and how to operationalize them alongside design and rollout.The UN DPI Safeguards Initiative has been working across countries and ecosystem actors to build a shared language around DPI safeguards, influence organizations to integrate safeguards into their approaches, and activate actors to advance safeguards in their own implementations. The initiative currently works across countries and a growing network of ecosystem partners, reflecting strong and growing demand for practical safeguards guidance from implementers on the ground. This workshop draws directly on that work, bringing perspectives and emerging lessons into the room.This session is particularly timely in the context of UN Open Source Week, where the intersection of open-source approaches, digital public goods, and safe DPI implementation offers a natural convergence point for the community.

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is increasingly becoming the backbone of public service delivery, and the decisions made at the infrastructure level will define children's access to health, education, and social protection. Access to birth registration, health care, school enrolment, and social protection depends not on any single system, but on the ability of multiple government agencies to share data securely and reliably across administrative boundaries.
Yet experience shows that children's specific needs, rights, and risk profiles are rarely made explicit at the DPI design stage. When this happens, DPI can unintentionally reinforce fragmentation, exclusion, or gaps in safeguards, despite strong intentions to improve efficiency and integration.

This session examines what makes DPI work for child rights in practice, from the core building blocks and safeguards to the implementation realities and governments’ choices that shape outcomes for children across health, education and social protection.

Pairing high-level country testimony with implementer-level tactics and insight from CDPI's advisory experience across national DPI deployments and UNICEF’s global perspective on child rights, the session surfaces operational gaps, institutional dynamics, and the speed-vs-safeguards trade-off that shape outcomes for children.

It aims to:
- Identify the DPI building blocks that are most critical for inclusive service delivery for children.
- Draw out country-level lessons that can advance better design and decisions on DPI.
- Explore practical implementation and deployment approaches, including rapid deployment, operational models, resourcing and pathways from pilot to scale.
- Examine the legal, technical, and institutional safeguards needed to protect child rights at the infrastructure level; and
- Consolidate field-tested implementer tactics and a potential roadmap to develop DPI around an agreed child-centred public problem (e.g. ensuring every child is counted and continuously served from birth registration through school enrolment to social protection)

Open source software (OSS) is a foundational pillar of today's digital infrastructure. Yet the ways in which countries participate in and contribute to this ecosystem vary significantly based on their unique cultures, industrial structures, and historical backgrounds. This session systematically presents the "Japan Model," detailing how Japan has engaged with open source and steadily accumulated contributions over four decades.The essence of the Japan Model lies not in centralized control, but in sustained collaboration forged among industry, government, and academia. By resolving local challenges first and feeding those outcomes back into the global ecosystem, Japan has steadily expanded the reach and quality of open source. Since 1984, Japan's contributions have spanned Japanese typesetting and vertical text rendering on the web, the implementation of Linux in embedded devices, and the establishment of compliance infrastructure for software supply chains - generating benefits for users worldwide through solving the technical challenges it faced domestically.Following an opening that presents the overall vision of the Japan Model, the session comprises three sub-sessions exploring specific initiatives from the perspectives of government, academia, and industry.Japan's experience offers a practical answer to a question relevant to many nations: how can a country that is neither a platform superpower nor part of a large multilateral bloc sustainably contribute to the open source ecosystem while securing its own technological autonomy? This session provides participating countries with concrete insights and inspiration to advance open source initiatives tailored to their own contexts.

This workshop explores how data governance can better serve the public good in an increasingly digital world. As governments, institutions and communities embrace digital transformation, the role of open ecosystems grounded in open source and open data has become essential to fostering innovation, transparency and inclusive development.The session focuses on a central question: how can data governance models become more equitable, participatory and responsive to the needs of the communities they impact? It highlights the importance of involving diverse stakeholders, particularly Indigenous Peoples and local communities, not only as beneficiaries, but also as active stewards and decision-makers in data ecosystems.Bringing together policymakers, practitioners, civil society actors and technical experts, the workshop creates a space for dialogue and co-creation across sectors. Participants will examine how openness can enable fairer digital ecosystems, share experiences and challenges, and explore collaborative approaches to strengthening trust and accountability in data governance.The workshop aims to move beyond discussion by identifying practical pathways for action. Through collective exchange, it seeks to contribute to emerging global efforts toward more inclusive digital cooperation and to advance governance models that ensure data serves society as a whole.

Open source software is a critical enabler of digital public infrastructure and the Sustainable Development Goals, yet its adoption and contribution remain uneven across regions. This session introduces the Open Source Enablement Compass (OSEC), a UN-led initiative designed to provide an evidence-based framework for measuring and strengthening national open source ecosystems.

Developed in collaboration with UNU, RISE, and GitHub, OSEC aims to help governments benchmark progress, identify good practices, and build capacity to use and contribute to open source for digital transformation.

As digital public goods (DPGs) and open-source solutions become central to sustainable development, the question of how to finance, sustain, and scale them remains a critical challenge. This session brings together a diverse coalition of multilateral development banks, philanthropic funds, governments, and global digital networks to explore innovative financing frameworks, new business models, and cross-institutional collaboration strategies for open-source ecosystems.

Drawing on real-world experience from across regions and sectors, the session will examine how stakeholders can align incentives, pool resources, and de-risk investment in open-source infrastructure and DPGs. It will explore what sustainable financing looks like in practice — from enabling policy environments and sovereign demand to implementation on the ground — and how the broader ecosystem can move from fragmented pilots to globally scalable digital solutions that serve the public interest.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be considered a type of Digital Public Good (DPG). However, alongside its significant potential, it introduces new challenges compared to traditional DPGs. The existing DPG standard does not fully accommodate AI, as safeguarding principles - such as “privacy by design” and “do no harm”- must be rigorously enforced and elevated. At the same time, the concept of “open source”, which is central to DPGs, was originally developed for code and does not fully capture the complexity of AI, which also includes data and model weights.Building on the work of the Community of Practice (CoP) on AI as Digital Public Goods (AIDPG), co-led by DPGA and UNICEF, this session aims to present new research findings on AIDPG, sharing a set of actionable recommendations for definition, standard, and governance of AIDPG. The research is commissioned by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), in partnership with the United Nations University Institute in Macau (UNU Macau) and the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (UN ODET), and in close collaboration with DPGA.

Over the past few years, the number of OSPOs and OSPO-like activities in universities and research institutions has grown significantly. Many of those activities are designed to help deliver the SDGs. This session is an opportunity to explore what has been done, share what is in progress, and think together about how academic open source can do more to drive real SDG impact.

The session will begin with some lightning talks highlighting initiatives that show what this looks like in practice. The UN's Reboot the Earth hackathon series has brought university OSPOs into direct collaboration with students and communities working on climate and food security challenges: at CMU Africa in Kigali, students from the University of Rwanda built open source tools connecting rural farmers to markets; at UC Santa Cruz, the UC OSPO Network brought together students, CAL FIRE, and emergency responders to build AI tools for wildfire detection and response. We will also hear from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), whose NSF Leadership Class Facility (tacc.utexas.edu) gives researchers worldwide access to high performance computing, with active global partnerships and programs like Advanced Computing for Social Good that connect this infrastructure directly to public benefit.

These framing talks will be followed by an interactive workshop to identify shared priorities, surface connections across institutions, and explore what it would take to do more of this work together.

This session will explore the relationship between democracy and open source, with a particular focus on the role of Cities. It will examine how promoting open-source technologies can help democratise cities by enhancing transparency, auditability, and digital autonomy, while enabling more participatory and inclusive digital policies. The discussion will also address why open source is a key element in building stronger democratic systems and how cities can better engage citizens in shaping public digital infrastructures.Bringing together some internationally leading cities, the session will foster in the exchange of strategies and practices, as well as encourage cooperation in technological innovation and sharing digital policies. Among them, Barcelona will present one of its flagship initiatives, Decidim, as a concrete example of how open-source tools can empower citizen participation and strengthen democratic governance at the local level.

While the Open-Source Programme Office (OSPO) model is established in the private sector and parts of public administration in North America and Europe, its adoption in low- and middle-income country governments is only just beginning. This session brings together practitioners from Trinidad and Tobago and Kenya - two governments pioneering the OSPO model in their regions - alongside UNDP and ITU, to share what it takes to move from open-source policy to institutional practice. We will examine governance choices, financial sustainability, change management, and the role of international partners in supporting sovereign digital capacity. The session is designed for government leaders, donors, and open-source practitioners looking for concrete pathways to institutionalise open source in government.

This Industry Spotlight session brings together leading players from the automotive industry to highlight the pivotal role of Open Source in shaping the future of global mobility. We will discuss how Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) drive collaboration across the entire automotive supply chain, accelerating the development of software-defined vehicles. Join us to discover best practices and opportunities for leveraging Open Source to achieve sustainable development and digital transformation in the automotive sector.