Imagine Europe's policy process had a CONTRBUTING.md. How would you get a pull request merged, and what would count as a useful commit?

For decades, the FOSS4G community has built and maintained the geospatial digital commons Europe depends on. Today, this work is increasingly recognized and open-source is moving into policy agendas, funding programmes, and institutional strategies, including Europe's emerging tech sovereignty agenda.

This creates an opportunity for FOSS4G: not only to be recognised, but to shape the conditions under which open geospatial tools are funded, procured, trusted, adopted, and maintained. It is one way to secure the long-term relevance, sustainability, and impact of the digital commons we build and maintain. But are we ready to engage?

Contributing to policy is a skill. It is learnable, and closer to contributing to open-source software communities than it may first appear. Understanding decision-making processes upstream may even help us bring better governance practices back into our own community. We will look at how European decision-making works in practice, and why your next most valuable contributor might be a policy specialist or business developer.

This keynote invites the FOSS4G community to treat governance with the same rigour as code. It will offer concrete recommendations for making better policy 'commits', while opening a discussion on how we maintain the tools, values and conditions that allow open geospatial commons to thrive as part of Europe's digital infrastructure.

Europe is entering a new geopolitical and economic phase. Resilience, competitiveness, and digital sovereignty are moving to the centre of public debate. In that context, open source is no longer seen only as a software development model or a community ethos. It is becoming part of how Europe thinks about digital capacity and sovereignty.

For the geospatial community, this shift matters deeply. Open-source geospatial software forms part of the operational backbone through which data is processed, interpreted, and turned into public value. Despite Europe’s strong communities, mature projects, and world-class technical leadership, cybersecurity, scaling and long-term sustainability remains fragile. This is now being recognised more explicitly at European level, including through the European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy and the Horizon 2026 Work Programme. The former is a component of the upcoming European Commission’s Technological Sovereignty package, whose adoption is expected for Q2 2026; the latter offers an opportunity for the community to address sustainability considerations through economic leadership.

This talk reflects on that changing landscape through the lens of research, innovation, and Europe’s evolving strategic context. It explores how emerging debates on digital sovereignty, AI, and open digital ecosystems are beginning to reshape the wider landscape for FOSS4G in Europe. Together, we will discuss what digital sovereignty may mean in practice for geospatial open source, what kinds of support structures are needed to move from individual project success to durable ecosystem capacity, and how developers, communities, institutions, and companies can help define models of sustainability that preserve openness while strengthening European capacity.

The aim is to look beyond policy slogans and consider the deeper shift now underway. If geospatial open source is becoming part of Europe’s strategic future, would the community be ready to respond, and how? What are the existing gaps to fill, challenges to address, and opportunities to be aware of? And what kind of European digital future does it want to help build?

• Call for Evidence on the European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/16213-European-Open-Digital-Ecosystems_en

• A services and business incubator for geospatial open-source developments: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/HORIZON-CL6-2026-03-GOVERNANCE-06?keywords=incubator&isExactMatch=true&status=31094501,31094502,31094503&programmePeriod=2021%20-%202027&frameworkProgramme=43108390&order=DESC&pageNumber=1&pageSize=50&sortBy=relevance

• Di Marco D., Thabit S., Kotsev A., Christensen A., Minghini M. et al., Open but Not Powerless:
  Towards a Common Understanding of EU Digital Sovereignty, European Commission Ispra, 2025, JRC144908: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC144908