This week, the United Nations hosted Open Source Week 2025 (16 – 20 June) at UN Headquarters in New York, expanding the event to five days of discussion and co-creation around open-source software, digital public infrastructure, and cooperative innovation.
Daniel Mazur, Councillor of the city of Prague for science, IT, and smart-city development, brought the voice of Europe’s local governments to the Open Source Week, stressing that open-source software and open data are indispensable tools for ethical, transparent, and interoperable digital public services.
Watch the video of the session here.
Three core messages
Speaking in the high-level meeting “Open source solutions in public governance“, held on the third day of the five-day conference, Mazur underlined three core messages:
- Open source prevents reinventing the wheel
“Open-source software can be the basis for not reinventing the wheel and finding a common solution to common problems,” Mazur noted, pointing out that the European Union’s 27 small and diverse nations need reusable code to scale solutions across borders.
- Local innovations can travel globally
He highlighted Prague’s city-owned innovation company Operator ICT (OICT), which has published its Golemio data platform, citizen portal and open-data hub on GitHub, where other cities have already begun adapting them.
- Policy support unlocks wider impact
Mazur urged national and EU-level authorities to “build and run the infrastructure, give us the open APIs we can follow, and put it in the legislature that sharing resources between public bodies is the right thing.”
The session fed into the broader themes explored during the week, including “AI & open source: building ethical and transparent systems,” “Breaking silos: open source and open data drive interoperability,” “The role of open source in digital public infrastructure (DPI),” and a closing panel “Looking to the future with the Global Digital Compact.”
About UN Open Source Week
Launched in 2023, UN Open Source Week has become the United Nations’ premier forum on open-source collaboration and digital cooperation. The 2025 edition’s expanded format responds to rising demand for deeper engagement, co-creation and networking among governments, technologists and civil-society partners tackling shared digital challenges. See more information here.