The UN’s Open Source Week in New York City brought people together from around the world to discuss the promise of Open Source and how it can be leveraged to build sustainable digital public goods and infrastructure. Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director of the OSI, was joined by board directors Tracy Hinds, Ruth Suehle, and Sayeed Choudhury, as well as staff members Katie Steen-James (senior U.S. policy manager), Ariel Jolo (program manager), and recently joined U.S. policy intern Gabriel Toscano. The week included side events focused on openness and AI and two full days at the UN dedicated to Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) and Digital Public Infrastructure. 

Articulated throughout the week among UN participants was the idea that our “North Star” should be actively engaging the public in the development of digital public goods and infrastructure to ensure we are meeting the needs of citizens. Put simply, technology should make lives better, with public well-being at the heart of adoption. Guilherme Canela, Director of UNESCO’s Division for Digital Inclusion and Policies and Digital Transformation, put an even finer point on this idea during a session on AI and Open Source: “Maybe the real innovation is doing these things with no one left behind.” 

On Monday, Suehle helped organize the UN Tech Over Hackathon on behalf of the Apache Software Foundation. With the theme “Ahead of the Storm: Open Geospatial Analytics for Children-Centric Climate Emergency Response,” the three challenges had participants working to accelerate progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through Open Source innovation.

On Tuesday, the OSI joined our partners at the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) for a side event on “Advancing Open Source AI for the Public Good.” DPG Standard Lead Amreen Taneja discussed how AI systems can meet the criteria to be part of the Digital Public Goods Registry and officially opened a call for AI submissions. Maffulli explained the co-creation process for the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) and outlined the components of version 1.0 of the definition. Participants then gathered in small groups to discuss policy solutions to incentivize the creation and use of open AI systems. The session emphasized the need for standards and definitions to organize the governance of and use of AI. 

On Wednesday, Choudhury participated in a panel titled “How They Did It: A Look Behind Newly Launched OSPOs,” where he shared the OSPO origin story at Carnegie Mellon. He offered a compelling insight: if you ask a university researcher, “Do you care about Open Source software?” they might say no. But if you ask, “Do you care about research, education, and social impact?”, they’ll say yes, of course. Making the connection that Open Source software directly fosters the university’s core mission of research, education, and social impact proved to be a key argument in demonstrating the value of Open Source to academic institutions.

OSI also had the pleasure of meeting with the Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies at the UN, Amandeep Singh Gill, to share what we learned from developing the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID). He leads the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET) and is responsible for implementing the Global Digital Compact, including the section on AI governance. In our meeting, we discussed the existing gaps for AI training data governance strategies that are flexible enough to apply in local contexts and respectful of indigenous knowledge, privacy, and copyright, among other considerations. Several challenges discussed included training data: the absence of or inadequate technological standards and global legal frameworks to handle data governance. Both the OSI and the UN are exploring the concept of data commons to tackle these challenges.

On Friday morning, Choudhury spoke about the Open Forum for AI (OFAI), including its connection with OSI and the OSAID. The presentation covered the importance of openness as a design principle for infrastructure, including the development of AI. In particular, OFAI has convened universities and non-profit organizations, which help raise the voice and impact of academia and civil society organizations.

On Friday, OSI participated in the AI Alliance meeting, where Roberto Di Cosmo, CEO of the Software Heritage Foundation, presented the challenges of building a training dataset based on code. He mentioned how difficult it is to track ownership of source code copyrights, correctly recognize licenses and attributions, and manage opt-out and take-down requests. 

This year’s UN Open Source Week marked the third time participants convened to talk about the power of Open Source. Echoing throughout the sessions was a sense that people understand the benefits of “open.” However,​​ challenges still exist in the implementation of Open Source policies and projects, especially when collaboration is required with individuals who may not understand the benefits of Open Source. This is where the UN’s power to convene experts from around the world is so important. Through the UN, people from Kenya to Spain shared challenges and successes in implementing Open Source projects as Digital Public Goods.

From left to right: Gabriel Toscano, Katie Steen-James, Stefano Maffulli, Amandeep Singh Gill, and Moritz Fromageot.

Source: opensource.org