What I Want to Learn in Brussels

I'll be at CHAOSScon (January 29), the Open Source Policy Summit (January 30 although still on the waitlist), and FOSDEM (February 1-2). If you're around, I'd love to connect over coffee ~ learn from and share with you!

Digital Sovereignty in Canada

There's growing momentum around digital sovereignty - the Open Source Policy Summit reflects that energy. Europe's Sovereign Tech Fund is a concrete example: direct investment in the open source infrastructure that governments depend on. Germany recognized that democratic societies must invest in digital foundations the same way they invest in physical infrastructure. Canada has nothing like this. We have open source directives, and the Open Data Multi-Stakeholder Forum, but no equivalent investment in the underlying open source infrastructure that runs our country (that I know of!)

What I want to learn: How do you activate these conversations with government? How do you build momentum toward something like a Sovereign Tech Fund? Are there efforts underway in Canada I haven't found? I'd love to connect with anyone who's navigated this.

Thanks to fellow-Canadian Greg Wilson for inspiring this section.

AI Alignment for Open Source

I co-lead the AI in Open Source Alignment Working Group at CHAOSS. We're exploring what it even means for AI to be aligned with open source - with what we've built, what we know, what we value, what we expect, and in ways that honor the labor and intention of communities. Some early tide lines of misalignment are visible: moderation challenges from AI-generated contributions, knowledge enclosure as questions move from public forums to private LLMs. We're launching the CHAOSS AI in OSS Alignment survey to expand collective understanding for innovation, advocacy and resistance.

What I want to learn: What does AI alignment mean to you? What is open source AI anyway - what does it enable (whats missing)?

I'm hosting BoFs at CHAOSScon (January 29 evening, remote participation available) and FOSDEM (Sunday, 14:00, H.3242) - I hope you'll join us.

Grassroots Community Organizing

I've been running Open Source Practitioner calls to fill a gap I feel around grassroots organizing. So much of what happens in open source right now is in service of product, dollars(for billionaires), seeking developer perspective only. I want to understand how we get back to - or make visible - organizing that combats the injustice, extraction and exploitation in and through technology; all while protecting safety, privacy of organizers.

What I want to learn: What's already happening? Where can I plug in? How do we build out the practitioner community to fill gaps? How do we bring in educators, librarians and others who drove the early democratization of technology? How do we keep people safe, what decentralized, sovereign and privacy-respecting technology should we e using. Are there grants to support this kind of organizing that aren't centered in the US?

Funding Open Source

Corporate direct sponsorship of open source projects feels like it's declining, even as supply chain criticality increases. I've built Open Source Wishlist as community infrastructure to connect maintainer needs with practitioners and funding (based on my experience as both a funder and a maintainer). I have hypotheses about what's working and what isn't, but I want to validate them.

What I want to learn: How do maintainers actually want to ask for support? What if any supplementary support helps? Is sponsorship on the decline? Why? How might digital sovereignty efforts drive new policy for investment.

Attribution

Attribution is one of my focus areas for this year, and with that focus - I have a hyper awareness of the different contexts in which that is showing up (acknowledged or not by the industry) I'm trying to understand how they connect:

• Policy attestation - compliance requirements like the EU's Cyber Resilience Act
• Contribution attestation - something I've written about before - tracking who actually did the work in open source
• AI attestation - the missing gap of attribution for creators whose work trains models - this isn't going away

What I want to learn: Beyond licensing, how does attribution actually happen? What role does policy play?

I'll be in Brussels from January 29 through February 2, then spending a few days in London as a tourist.

Available for all the coffees ☕️