Building Together: Why Public Sector Collaboration Needs Open Source

Open source communities have spent decades building software collaboratively across organisations and countries. They have developed both shared code and shared practices, such as transparency by default, peer review, reuse, and contribution instead of duplication. This talk explores what the public sector can learn from that tradition of collaboration. While governments frequently talk about cooperation, digital projects are still too often developed in isolation, even when the underlying challenges are nearly identical. Using ZenDiS’ platform openCode as an example, the session shows how public institutions can collaborate more like open source communities: sharing and improving solutions openly and building digital public infrastructure collectively instead of agency by agency.