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.