UN Open Source Week 2026 agenda
Citation
United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET) and United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT). “Agenda, UN Open Source Week 2026.” Web page, unopensource.org, date not stated. https://www.unopensource.org/agenda. Read 2026-10-26.
Bottom line
- The June 23 AI day had three relevant sessions:
- “Open Source, Digital Sovereignty, and Public AI Infrastructure in Africa”
- “Responsible GenAI at Scale: Open Source Commons and Governance”
- “AI’s Impact on Open Source”
- UC Santa Cruz spoke twice. Emily Lovell, Associate Director of the UC Santa Cruz OSPO, was on a university OSPO panel. Its text says the UC OSPO Network “brought together students, CAL FIRE, and emergency responders to build AI tools for wildfire detection and response.”
- The agenda is long (about 14,700 words).
Background
See UN Open Source Week homepage and UN Open Source Office.
Key claims
- Opening of the AI day: Amandeep Singh Gill, “Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies, UN-ODET”, and Yann LeCun.
- “Open Source, Digital Sovereignty, and Public AI Infrastructure in Africa”: led by Burkina Faso, Kenya, South Africa and others.
- “Responsible GenAI at Scale: Open Source Commons and Governance”, led by the Linux Foundation and the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence (AESIA). Nithya Ruff, “Chair, Linux Foundation Board”, spoke. She is also on the CROSS advisory board (CROSS About).
- “AI’s Impact on Open Source” covers “licensing and compliance ambiguity that threatens copyleft protections”.
- “Building Open Source Capacity at Scale — University OSPOs as Engines for SDG Impact”, led by the Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs (CURIOSS). Speakers include Emily Lovell (UC Santa Cruz), Jennifer Schopf (Texas Advanced Computing Center), Zach Chandler (Stanford) and Sayeed Choudhury (Carnegie Mellon).
- The agenda lists Mithusa Kajendran as “Open Source Adoption Consultant, UN-OICT”.
Evidence and method
The organizers’ own agenda. Session texts are short descriptions, not records of what was said.
Limits
- An agenda, not a report. It shows who was to speak, not outcomes.