2026-09-03 –, Phoenix Hall
Open-source communities keep asking how to sustain what they give away for free. Beyond donations and commercialization, this keynote brings in a third reference point rarely examined in depth: the cooperative. Three speakers explore what a bounded solidarity can teach an unbounded gift.
Open-source communities — including the global geospatial community that gathers at FOSS4G — keep returning to one hard question: how do you sustain something that is given away for free? The usual answers are donations or commercialization. This keynote session introduces a third reference point the field has rarely examined in depth: the cooperative.
The session does not claim that cooperatives simply "solve" sustainability. Its heart is a genuine tension worth exploring honestly. A cooperative is a bounded solidarity — a defined membership sharing ownership, governance, and surplus. Open source is an unbounded gift — a common good offered freely to everyone, member or not. What can a bounded solidarity teach us about sustaining an unbounded gift, and where do the two part ways?
Three 20-minute talks approach this from different angles. Seki Haruyuki-san (Code for Japan) opens with community-driven open source in practice. Ela Kagel (SUPERMARKT Berlin, Platform Coops eG) speaks on the meeting point of technology and cooperation, and cooperative ownership as an alternative to the extractive platform economy. Lander Jimenez Ocio-san (Mondragon University) brings the empirical and scholarly view of how the cooperative model has worked across seven decades, and where its limits lie.
A 20-minute panel follows, moderated by A.J. Koikoi-san (Eukarya Inc.), exploring democracy and scale, inter-cooperative solidarity and its limits, and how cooperatives live with capital. The session runs in English with Japanese interpretation for the audience.
Ela Kagel is a digital strategist and board member of Platform Coops eG, a Berlin-based organisation that supports the digital-cooperative economy across various sectors.
Ela has been instrumental in developing networks and platforms that challenge extractive models of technology and economics. In 2010, she co-founded SUPERMARKT, an independent hub for digital culture and collaborative economy in Berlin. There, she has spent over a decade curating conferences, workshops & research projects that explore cooperative practices and equitable digital infrastructures.
Ela is also co-founder of Poetic Technologies, a collective enterprise dedicated to reimagining digital infrastructures beyond bureaucratic constraints.
Hal Seki is one of Japan's leading figures in the civic tech movement. In 2013 he founded Code for Japan, a nonprofit bringing citizens, technologists, and governments together to solve public challenges through open collaboration—now a nationwide network of local brigades. His work began with sinsai.info, the volunteer-run crisis-mapping platform he launched after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. A longtime advocate for open data, open source, and open geospatial technology, he has advised national and municipal governments on digital transformation. He also founded Geolonia, a company advancing open location infrastructure.
Lander Jiménez Ocio is a teamcoach and researcher at Mondragon Team Academy (MTA), Mondragon University, where he coaches young "teampreneurs" in the LEINN degree program. His work centers on team entrepreneurship, the impact economy, and climate action through cooperative ownership.
A Chartered Civil and Environmental Engineer with over 25 years of global leadership in sustainable development, Lander co-founded MTA Afrika and Impredecible Basoa to drive social and green ventures. An ardent cooperative advocate and former ALE Board Director, he is dedicated to democratizing disruptive team-entrepreneurship education to foster equality through diversity worldwide.