Duration:

60 minutes (this can be adjusted and shortened if necessary)

Format:

Participatory workshop

Context:

OSS has become a cornerstone of innovation, collaboration, and digital sovereignty in Europe. However, its widespread adoption and integration into both public and private sectors face numerous challenges. Despite its benefits-including enhanced transparency, reduced costs, and technological independence-various actors, from corporations to grassroots to public entities, remain hesitant to adopt OSS solutions.

Objectives:

This participatory workshop aims at answering two pressing questions.(i) How do we increase Open Source Software uptake and awareness by companies? and (ii) How do we remove existing barriers for Open Source Software uptake in the EU? By together addressing barriers to adoption and exploring actionable priorities, which also include ethics and sustainability, the session seeks to contribute to the transformation of the ongoing discussions between the OSS community, industry stakeholders, EU policymakers, and end-users.

Expected results:

Through insights gathered from this co-creation session, the workshop aims to contribute to exchanges with the European Commission’s Units dealing with the European digital ecosystem, providing grassroots perspectives that reflect the real needs of OSS users and contributors. The outputs will feed into the work carried out by Martel Innovate and Digital for Planet on EU-funded cooperation projects in shaping policy roadmaps. They will directly inform projects like OpenVerse, NexusForum.EU, and NGI Commons, which aim to bridge the European digital ecosystem and communities with European Commission priorities.

Structure:

We will work in groups to first identify the main challenges hindering the adoption of OSS, and then to come up with a list of proposed key priorities to support the spread and uptake of OSS solutions in both private and public sectors.

We propose to structure the session as follows: 1. Short introduction providing context and outlining expected outcomes of the session (2 mins) 2. Interactive session: each participant will be asked to provide input on a few questions framing the OSS adoption issues, and looking at both potential benefits for users and factors limiting adoption. Questions will also touch upon sustainability aspects (including environmental, social, and economic sustainability, and looking from both the end-user and the OSS contributors perspective). (20 mins) 3. Group work: participants will brainstorm in four groups and come up with a list of points which they think are strategic to foster the uptake of OSS solutions in both the private and public sectors. (20 mins) 4. Policy pitch and wrap up: a person from each group will have two minutes to pitch the policy priorities they identified. (8 mins) 5. All participants will vote on the set of policy priorities they consider the most interesting/relevant. This section of the session is meant to gather the temperature of the audience on each of the approaches proposed. (10 mins max)