As it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a global open ecosystem to build a Euroshack. Inspired by the Frugal Manifesto, we envision the Euroshack as the first agile prototype of a truly open EuroStack: modest in form, ambitious in purpose. Grounded in pragmatism and powered by free and open software, the Euroshack avoids nationalist overtones and instead champions a scalable, dependable core. “Shack” is a humble name, but it reflects a bold mission: to secure digital sovereignty and protect our electronic freedoms in Europe from the mood swings of oligarchs. With its modular, adaptable structure, the Euroshack is built to grow, evolve, and empower.
Europe has bold ambitions for open source and digital sovereignty, yet most initiatives struggle to deliver meaningful change where it matters: at the level of local institutions. Despite strong strategies and political commitments, implementation stalls because the policy frameworks guiding European digital transformation ignore a simple truth. Europe is built on a multi-level governance system where local actors carry the responsibility for execution but lack the incentives, support, and capacity to act.
Drawing on hands-on experience from Denmark’s OS2 (os2.eu) community, where more than 85% of municipalities jointly develop and maintain open source solutions, this talk examines why current EU-level open source policy risks failing in practice. It unpacks three systemic barriers:
The talk ends with practical policy recommendations: risk-bearing EU capital for local transitions, stronger alignment between EU-level commitments and local implementation realities, and a cultural shift where every new digital project must explicitly break with “doing things the way we always have”.
Rasmus Frey is Chief Executive and Secretary at OS2 (os2.eu), Denmark’s open-source community for public digital collaboration.
He works at the intersection of governance, innovation, and technology, helping municipalities and public institutions co-develop and reuse digital solutions through open collaboration and shared ownership.
Rasmus contributes to European networks on open-source governance and digital sovereignty, with a focus on institutional design and democratic digital infrastructure.
Roundtable discussion with policymakers and the community: how can the public procurement framework, that is currently being reformed, be used to achieve digital sovereignty goals? Open Source provides many answers to the questions digital sovereignty raises, but how can public procurers be empowered to buy more Open Source, what are their expectations, and what hurdles exist?
In this talk I will share which steps Nextcloud took to become compliant with the AI act. We will also cover briefly how the AI act is structured, which resources were helpful for us, and what problems we faced during the implementation. Link to project: github.com/nextcloud/
The recently proposed Digital Omnibus aims to simplify a series of digital regulations, such as the GDPR, the Data Act and other laws, such as the ePrivacy directive. The goal of this legislative package is to reduce administrative burdens on organisations and boost innovation, although it can have significant impacts on open source communities, foundations and SMEs building open-source software.
Using Matrix as a case study, this talk will go through the areas of the Omnibus proposal which might have potential impacts on the wider FOSDEM community, namely proposals around redefinition of key concepts, changes to incident reporting requirements (and how they align with CRA requirements) and data sharings. It also aims to identify opportunities which might be brought on by the Omnibus, particularly around standardisation of approaches and improved collaboration.
This panel will bring together lawmakers who worked on the Digital Services Act and the Fediverse community for a panel on the challenges modern social media bring, from disinformation to hate speech and censorship, and how the EU's Digital Services Act and the Fediverse try to solve them.
Further information on speakers and content will be provided shortly.
We present HowTheyVote.eu, a free and open-source website that makes roll-call votes in the European Parliament more accessible and transparent. We briefly showcase the site’s features and how we built it, focusing on the different official data sources we combine. We will discuss good and not-so-good practices of the European Parliament’s websites and take stock of what we learned from four years of scraping parliamentary data. Lastly, we present examples of HowTheyVote.eu data being used in journalism, research, and civil society, showcasing how accessible voting records can inform debates and thus ultimately strengthen European democracy.
The European Parliament is the only directly democratically elected EU institution, and, as such, the voting behavior of its members is of particular interest. With a significantly larger number of right-wing MEPs since last year's elections, keeping an eye on the developments in Parliament has become more important than ever. Although the Parliament publishes information such as roll-call vote results and plenary minutes on its website, it can be difficult to find out what exactly MEPs voted on or how a particular vote turned out, as the data is scattered across multiple sources, published in different formats, and made available at different times.
We started HowTheyVote.eu in 2021 as a free and open-source project to address these problems. On HowTheyVote.eu, users can search for votes and view results. We also publish our entire dataset under an open-data license.
A talk on how to engage with policymakers from a variety of Brussels-based advocacy organisations.
Details to come
What if open source software projects could receive ongoing and sustaining funding from the corporations that use those project commercially — without changing the license or charging a fee for usage? This may sound self-contradictory; soon, it may be more than theoretical.
In Article 25 of the Cyber Resilience Act, one can see that the European Commission has the opportunity to create a Delegated Act for Voluntary Security Attestations. This could open a path for open source project maintainers, stewards, or third parties to reduce manufacturer's cybersecurity compliance obligations in exchange for sustained funding. The exchange benefits companies by reducing their compliance costs, but without turning the open source foundation into a manufacturer itself, without assuming liability, and without jeopardizing a steward's non-profit status.
In this presentation, Æva Black will introduce their ongoing work with the Eclipse Foundation to develop an understanding of how such a programme might function and how it might impact different segments of our community-of-communities.
This presentation is part one of a two-part series. Part two will feature a panel discussion with representatives of open source foundations and the European Commission.
What if open source software projects could receive ongoing and sustaining funding from the corporations that use those project commercially — without changing the license or charging a fee for usage? This may sound self-contradictory; soon, it may be more than theoretical.
In Article 25 of the Cyber Resilience Act, one can see that the European Commission has the opportunity to create a Delegated Act for Voluntary Security Attestations. This could open a path to reduce manufacturer's CRA-related compliance costs in exchange for support for the volunteers maintaining open source projects -- and to do this without becoming a manufacturer, without assuming liability, and without jeopardizing a steward's non-profit status.
In this panel, we will hear different perspectives on how this could improve the sustainability of open source across Europe, explore the potential impacts of different approaches, and invite audience participation and questions.
This presentation is part two of a two-part series. In part one, Æva introduced their ongoing work with the Eclipse Foundation to develop a holistic view of how such a program might function.
In this short talk, Jordan Maris and Simon Phipps of the OSI will explain how the Open Source Community can get involved in building the standards for the EU's Cyber Resilience Act, and why you should!
The European Commission’s report on Regulation 1025 openly acknowledges what practitioners have long observed: the EU standardisation system is struggling to deliver the kinds of outcomes needed to support the Union’s ambitious push into digital regulation. In this presentation, Tobie draws on his long experience driving large-scale standardisation efforts in organisations such as OASIS, W3C, JDF, Ecma, and the WHATWG, as well as on his work introducing open-source development practices within them. He will discuss why these practices work, the benefits they bring, how they could be adopted by the European Standardisation Organisations, and which transition mechanisms could help bridge the gap until the ESOs are able to catch up.