Open Source and the European Union | Cyprus | OFE Capital Series

Master of ceremony: Chrystalleni Loizidou& Marios Isaakidis

Welcome & Opening Remarks

Welcome speakers:  Laszlo Igneczi, His Excellency Christoph Burgener, Prof Stavros Malas

As the EU prepares a new wave of initiatives to strengthen its digital sovereignty the focus is shifting from regulation to building and sustaining Europe’s digital infrastructure. In this context, open source is increasingly recognised not just as a policy preference, but as a strategic enabler of security, resilience and control across the digital stack.

This panel will explore how Europe can move from ambition to implementation, including through ongoing discussions on the EU Sovereign Tech Fund (EU-STF) and the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). Speakers will examine how public investment, procurement and industrial policy can better support the development and long-term sustainability of open technologies, helping to reduce strategic dependencies and strengthen Europe’s capacity to act.

Bringing together perspectives from policymakers, industry and the open source community, the discussion will address what it takes to build a truly sovereign digital ecosystem, one that is secure, interoperable and competitive, and where control is defined not only by ownership, but by openness, transparency and the ability to shape and maintain critical technologies.

In light of the EU’s effort to re-shape its cybersecurity framework through instruments such as the Cybersecurity Act and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), the role of standards and implementation becomes increasingly critical. This panel will explore how Europe can translate the proposed regulatory frameworks into effective, secure, and scalable digital solutions.

Bringing together policymakers, standardisation bodies and industry, the discussion will focus on the interaction between regulation and technical standards, the challenges of implementation, and the role of open source in ensuring security, transparency and resilience. Speakers will also examine how Europe can build a coherent and future-proof cybersecurity ecosystem that supports innovation while maintaining high levels of trust and protection.

Across Europe open source is moving from the margins of technical practice into the centre of digital sovereignty, public-sector resilience and digital public infrastructure. Yet for these ambitions to become meaningful they must be grounded in local capacity: the people, institutions, communities and infrastructures that can build, maintain, govern and share public-interest technology. This panel asks what this means for Cyprus. Rather than treating open source only as a European policy priority, the discussion will examine the local ecosystem that already exists: FOSS communities, research centres, universities, open science initiatives, digital innovation hubs, technical practitioners, SMEs and public-sector actors. The aim is to understand how these capacities can be connected into a more coherent strategy for public digital infrastructure and digital commons.

The discussion aims to explore what a roadmap for Cyprus might look like, including the establishment of Open Source Programme Offices (OSPOs), stronger coordination between universities, research centres, public administrations and FOSS communities, and the development of shared capacities around digital public infrastructure and the digital commons. Our focus is: How can Cyprus turn existing research, technical, civic and institutional capacity into a coherent FOSS ecosystem for public digital infrastructure?

Switzerland’s “Trust by Design” approach is more than a concept—it is a coordinated ecosystem where government, academia, industry, and open-source communities actively build systems together rather than working in isolation. By embedding transparency, collaboration, and clear regulation from the outset, Switzerland shows that trust can be engineered, not assumed, creating digital infrastructure that is secure, scalable, and globally relevant.