Event Opening by Pierre-Yves Gibello, OW2 CEO.

Orange International Networks Infrastructures & Services is the division responsible for international networks, including fiber, satellites, submarine cables, and higher digital layers.
Since 2022, Orange has adopted an open-source policy for its network functions. By implementing open-source solutions in this area, we strengthen our digital sovereignty, avoid vendor lock-in, and achieve significant cost savings.
This presentation by Jean Louis Le Roux, Senior Vice Président for OINIS, is a true journey through Orange's transformation in adopting open-source within its ecosystem.

Many public services, including healthcare, significantly depend on proprietary products and infrastructure. This tends to inflate the service costs enormously – to a simply unaffordable degree, especially in the global South. The Open Source Imaging Initiative (OSI²) has developed an MRI scanner – which allows everyone to use, study, share, and improve it – thereby counteracting the MRI oligopoly and opening up processes for clinical certification. This talk will give an overview of the OSI² initiative and outline the concept of democratic, sovereign technology for critical infrastructure.

2026 started with a bang: the EU Commission's consultation for a "European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy" attracted more than 1600 submissions – making it one of the largest ever and underlining the demand for more Open Source in the EU! Can the EU Commission's proposals finally realise the potential of Open Source to deliver digital sovereignty?
In this APELL EU policy update, we will discuss current proposals like the Cloud and AI Development Act, the new Open Source Strategy and more, and find out what we can do to contribute to positive change.

A growing awareness is emerging amongst policymakers and, to a lesser extent, business leaders that we must reconsider our relationship with technology and the technology industry, which has created a comfortable but constraining dependency. For many, the rallying cry is "open source", which by its very nature promises greater digital independence. However, this call obscures several stark realities that clash sharply with the prevailing narrative.

In this talk we will show the power of collaboration between Open Source projects in the development and collaboration space and how this can change the narrative for European Digital Autonomy.

We will show multiple collaborations providing key alternatives, such as XWiki/OpenProject, openDesk, partnerships between companies, or building research projects together.

Open Source will strive if more projects work together to provide full offers.

AI-driven digital platforms create a critical paradox: expanding capabilities diminish enterprise control, resulting in 'black boxes' vulnerable to security and compliance risks. This paper introduces glass-box AI for customer experiences, detailing architectural control points for observable, explainable and auditable AI.

Organisations often face a difficult choice: the collaborative convenience of the cloud, or data security. Collabora Office bridges this gap, offering a secure, open-source suite that unites desktop power with online collaboration. Integrated with EFSS and LMS platforms, it ensures sovereignty for your data and documents. This session covers recent updates, enhanced cross-platform UX, improved APIs, and strategies for deployment for easier administration. Whether on desktop or browser, see how Collabora provides a powerful, sovereign, document editing alternative for your organisation.

to come soon.

The CRA (Cyber Resilience Act) is an ambitious European Union regulation aimed at improving the cybersecurity and cyber resilience of digital products marketed in Europe. Economic players have until September 2026 to comply with certain critical obligations, and then until December 2027 to adapt to all the other requirements. This workshop will introduce last updates on the guide proposed by CNLL and inno³ and an illustration through the concrete Use Case of LibreOffice.
More details and agenda: https://www.ow2con.org/view/2026/Breakout_Sessions/CRA_impact_open_source.

Our internet access can be cut off at any time by accidents, natural disasters, and armed conflict. Climate change and current geopolitical threats make this increasingly likely in Europe. How can we prepare our communities to cope with a temporary loss of internet connectivity, and perhaps help speed the return of internet access? This talk describes how to start your own Internet Resiliency Club using LoRa radios, mesh networking, and community management

Open source was never just about code, it was about care, context, and trust. But AI-generated contributions are flooding projects with plausible-looking noise: slop PRs, hallucinated bug reports, vibe-coded patches no one understands. We are having multiple testimonials of examples where maintainers are overwhelmed. This talk argues we must redefine "contribution" beyond lines of code. In the age of AI slop, the real signal is human judgment, review rigor, and community stewardship. We don't need more code, we need more care.

The integration of AI into collaborative tools raises major challenges in terms of sovereignty, transparency, and control. This talk presents a feedback-based experience on integrating useful, controlled, and ethical AI within an open source digital workplace. It will address data control, the use of multiple AI models, and an open governance approach ensuring technological independence. A customizable ecosystem of AI assistants, based on a “human in the loop” principle, will illustrate how open source enables a progressive and controlled adoption of AI within European organizations.

At the crossroads of strategic autonomy, open source, supply chain security, and day-to-day high-attack-surface component, we only find one element: the browser.

Building on the Declaration of human rights of 1789, current Access to Information laws (in France, but in many other countries too) require public administrations to disclose (certain) documents when requested by citizens, companies and more.

After a short presentation of the legal context, this talk will show examples of documents that can be obtained to help FLOSS companies to find potential clients and more. Ma Dada (and its sibling platforms built on the OSS alaveteli app) will be demonstrated as a practical solution to navigate the minefield of Access to Information requests.

OSPO Alliance is working on add-ons to the Good Governance Initiative handbook.
Add-ons are topics that aim to help, boost, anchor the open source strategy in your organization.
The purpose of this workshop is to share early work and gather feedback on content, prioritize the most valuable or impactful topics and enrich with brainstorming:

Target attendance : everyone somehow familiar with those topics, whatever the profile of your organization.
Agenda is available on the full description.__

Today, most local events are published on massive platforms owned by tech giants. It’s time to shift direction — to build ethical, decentralized alternatives that are just as powerful and easy to use.
That’s exactly the mission of Mobilizon, initiated by Framasoft and supported by the European “Next Generation Internet” program.
On Mobilizon’s collaborative websites, users can create pages, groups, and events. But what truly sets it apart is its powerful interoperability: Mobilizon allows events to be imported and exported to any website, rather than locking users into a single space.

In an open source project like PrestaShop, about 15% of contributions come from the community. However, contributions can take time to process, practices vary, and aligning contributions with the roadmap is not straightforward. To turn this into consistent impact, we introduced a "call for contributions” focused on roadmap-driven topics, informed by user feedback and technical readiness. This talk shares one year of results: how we select topics, support contributors, and improve throughput and quality. A practical case study for open source organizations handling high contribution volumes.

What does it take to be a company that is both built on a sustained by open source? How are the balances found between customer focus and community contribution? In this talk, I'll walk through the story of DataBene, which is a PostgreSQL-based technical support and consulting company. The audience will hear our perspective of the importance of a dedicated R&D division, as well as the benefits and challenges of working with large projects such as Citus and IvorySQL.

The OW2 best project awards recognize and reward "best of breed" projects and successful implementations of OW2 technologies.

As the EU accelerates its push for strategic autonomy, the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework (v1.2.1, Oct 2025) has emerged as the definitive standard for digital services. But what does "sovereignty" actually mean in a technical and legal audit? This session explores the framework’s core components—the 8 Sovereignty Objectives (SOVs) and the 5 SEAL levels—to demonstrate why Open Source is not just a preference, but a mandatory foundation for reaching the highest levels of digital resilience and EU compliance.

We use NVIDIA SPARK GB10 for Students Projects to be offline capable.

Projects include :
+ Code Generation and Code Analysis with Open Weights Models like LLMs (we use Mistral / Codestral),
+ Robotics with HuggingFace / LeRobot or
+ Medical imaging.

We think it is important for Education to train students aware of Sovereign AI.

During short talks of around 10 minutes, several beneficiaries of the NGI Zero European funding program will present their innovations. Quick demos may also be proposed.
The project leaders will explain how the NGI program helped them in their development process, where do they fit in the project life cycle and key lessons learned as an innovator.

Millions of learners earn credits yet never receive the credentials they deserve. The barriers are infrastructural: transfer audits are laborious, systems remain siloed, and the communication gap between institutions stubbornly persists.

This session will introduce the Learner Information Framework (LIF), an open source approach to portable, learner-centered records. We treat credential portability as a semantic and trust problem as much as a technical one. We will share emerging use cases, early patterns, and open questions as well as how AI can accelerate data mapping between systems.

Europe’s path to technological sovereignty can be accelerated by transforming telecom networks into distributed AI Factories. By moving AI inference from centralized hyperscale clouds to trusted edge infrastructure, operators regain control over data while leveraging 5G’s low latency and proximity. An open source orchestration layer unifies cloud and edge, enabling secure, scalable, and interoperable sovereign AI environments across jurisdictions.

In 2024–2026, the Xerte community integrated AI into its open-source e-learning authoring tool—while safeguarding accessibility, transparency, and user control. This session offers a behind-the-scenes look at how educators, developers, and accessibility experts defined real use cases and guardrails together. We’ll share lessons learned and challenges (also financial challenges), plus early examples of AI-supported authoring in Xerte. A practical case study in responsible, community-led innovation.

In a landscape increasingly dependent on proprietary virtualization (high costs, limited transparency, low reversibility), this talk explains how Proxmox VE helps organizations regain control with a unified open-source platform (compute, storage, networking, backup), no hardware lock-in, and a strong REST API. It highlights key Proxmox VE 9 improvements (live migration, GPU sharing, SR-IOV, SAN support, easier migrations from proprietary stacks), resilience with Proxmox Backup Server, and closes with roadmap perspectives and practical feedback for a successful transition.

Active Directory provides a bundle of services. Most have mature open-source equivalents. However, GPO functionality for Linux desktops remains fully unaddressed. When talking about sovereignty, we can't ignore this issue.
That's why Linagora designed a full replacement for AD, mostly based on existing project but with a new project to fully replace it.

Xerte Online Toolkits, developed by the University of Nottingham, provides a fully open-source environment for creating interactive learning while collecting meaningful Learning Analytics. This presentation shows how the dashboard, Adaptive Content Page, and Learning Analytics Suite enable educators to monitor engagement, support adaptive pathways, and use transparent, ethical data to improve teaching. It highlights how open-source analytics provide institutional control, flexibility, and evidence-based improvement without proprietary platforms.

Agenda and list of NGI Success Stories presented:

• Miru, by Taye A.
• Podlibre, by Benjamin Bellamy, Ad Aures
• Torch Lens Maker, real-world optical system design, by Victor Poughon, TLM

Finally technology independence and digital autonomy are in the spotlight, and we question our IT usages, with collaborative suites, AI, hosting and storage in mind.

But what about identities?

Can we still accept to use Active Directory or EntraID, Okta, or even Google and Facebook to handle the most risky process of our digital life: authentication?

OW2 has the chance to have a strong IAM stack with LemonLDAP::NG, LSC, LDAP Tool Box, FusionDirectory. We will present them and you will be able to say: yes IAM free!

DatWeb is an open-source, peer-to-peer platform for building custom data tools on top of versioned datasets. This talk explores how decentralized infrastructure can improve reproducibility, collaboration, and access in science and education. We’ll share practical examples of lightweight, domain-specific tools built with minimal code.

This session will provide a quick overview of the business consulting and mentorship services offered to NGI Zero funded projects. Topics may include:
- Market needs,
- Market Readiness Levels,
- Software testing,
- OSS packaging,
- Licensing and compliance,
- Business models,
- Community Building.
The session will also explore and introduce the next European funding opportunities and the "Restack" project funded in the framework of the new Open Internet Stack European program.

The Open Source Software Qualification and Selection (QSOS) method is a method for evaluating free software under a free license. After being dormant for several years, a new, updated version with new tools has been implemented.
An MVP has been launched on a modernized stack. The code has been released under a free license, allowing anyone to contribute. The purpose of this conference will be to rediscover this evaluation methodology, which has been used for many years for french interministerial market monitoring studies (among other things).

Traditional software analytics often uses the concept of a “funnel” to describe the user journey. Many people may be considering using a piece of software, some of those people will eventually try it, and some of those people will eventually use it regularly. In open source, quantifying this funnel is much harder, as the data signals in open source are very different from what a proprietary SaaS platform might see. In this talk, we describe a novel framework for describing and measuring the open source adoption lifecycle, and explore practical applications of this information.

Funding open source development through grants, public policies, and community donations is important — but it is only part of the equation. The long-term sustainability of open source projects also depends on whether real organizations adopt them, rely on them, and are willing to invest in their ecosystem. Understanding the customer's perspective — and the role that OSPOs can play in lowering the barriers to adoption — can unlock a powerful and often overlooked driver of open source success.

Open science depends on open source research software—but most of it isn’t built to last. Drawing on findings from a U.S. National Science Foundation-sponsored Apereo Foundation-hosted workshop, this session explores why research software struggles to persist and how to sustain it. We’ll examine funding, practices, and community models, and share practical approaches, including recognizing software as scholarship, supporting as infrastructure, and improving attribution and discoverability, in order to make open science durable, scalable, and truly collaborative.

to come soon.

Open Discussions with open source commit fund investors: how projects are selected, the support offered, exit strategies, case studies, and more.

Europe needs alternatives to dominant foreign solutions, like digital workplaces or cloud platforms. An ecosystem of alternatives exists: but users, who need full-fledged solutions, expect more consistency to adopt them.
Open Interop, initiated by the “CSF” French digital industry coalition and hosted by OW2, aims at defining and promoting open standards, test beds and reference implementations to make EU solutions interoperable, allowing seamless integration of platforms, with the objective of a European outreach and consensus that fosters digital independence and sovereignty.

Many regulations in many vertical industries as well as horisontal regulations like the EU Cyber Resilience Act point out the need for a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). But what is the state of the SBOM universe with competing standards and a growing set of tools, all with a different perspective on usage, content and clarity. The use of SBOMs vary from basic license compliance to advanced documentation of the development and build process with signed attestations.
In this talk, we give an update of where we are, what you can expect today and the next steps on your SBOM journey!

The French Ministry of Education has provided LaForgeEdu a GitLab software forge, specifically intended for primary and secondary school teachers. However, this software forge was not designed with teacher’s practices in mind, and it’s interface and the terms it uses (eg: fork,commit, merge request) are difficult to apprehend. With the help of educational professionals, our aim is to lower the entry barrier for using software forges by providing a new teacher-centered interface called ForgeEditor. This paper presents the new ForgeEditor interface and two first user studies with 24 teachers.

The open debate will be moderated by Emiel Brok, Sovereignty Ambassador, SUSE / DOSBA.

In this interactive session we want to look beyond the sovereignty buzz and better understand the articulation between open source, digital sovereignty and technical independence. We will explore open source as a path to digital freedom, and how resilience influences technological choices. Does open source systematically allow independence ? What about reversibility issues, disaster and shutdown recovery? Is technology independence now a driver for strategic choices?

OW2con'26 Closing.