The establishment of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) to achieve open source goals is gaining momentum in the public sector, in academia and beyond. We see these developments on a city, regional, national and supranational level. This matters because the OSPO construct was a key enabler in unlocking vast amounts of value for the ICT industry. Now the question is how OSPOs in government, academia and NGOs can help deliver value for citizens the world over at scale.
In industry, OSPOs are well established and typically provide legal and support services for an organisation’s open source efforts. Generally speaking, OSPOs are built to achieve and accelerate policy goals which rely on open source and open tools. This includes systemic policy goals including privacy, security, trust, diversity, participation, and access to technology.
At this event, the panelists will outline the state of thinking around institutionalising open source work in the academic and public sectors (and beyond) and discuss how different OSPO configurations can help institutions to:
- respond to demands for greater transparency and trust in technology and public institutions
- accelerate digital transformation
- participate, lead, and apply locally the enormous rivers of global innovation generated by OSS
- support the upskilling of EU’s developer community to participate in and lead in global OSS efforts
- enhance the EU’s strategic autonomy in the digital field
Roberto Di Cosmo
Roberto Di Cosmo is an alumnus of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Roberto Di Cosmo was associate professor for almost a decade at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1999, he became a Computer Science full professor at University Paris Diderot, where he was head of doctoral studies for Computer Science from 2004 to 2009. He is currently on leave at Inria.
His research activity spans theoretical computing, functional programming, parallel and distributed programming, the semantics of programming languages, type systems, rewriting and linear logic, and, more recently, the new scientific problems posed by the general adoption of Free Software, with a particular focus on static analysis of large software collections. He has published over 20 international journals articles and 50 international conference articles.
In 2008, he has created and coordinated the European research project Mancoosi, that had a budget of 4.4Me and brought together 10 partners to improve the quality of package-based open source software systems. Following the evolution of our society under the impact of IT with great interest, he is a long term Free Software advocate, contributing to its adoption since 1998 with the best-seller Hijacking the world, seminars, articles and software.
He created in October 2007 the Free Software thematic group of Systematic, that helped fund over 50 Open Source research and development collaborative projects for a consolidated budget of over 200Me. From 2010 to 2018, he was director of IRILL, a research structure dedicated to Free and Open Source Software quality. He created in 2015, and now directs Software Heritage, an initiative to build the universal archive of all the source code publicly available.
