Building Bridges for Open Science, Cybersecurity and Transparent AI: A Strategic UN Open Source Week in New York

From June 16th to 20th 2025 took place in New York the UN Open Source Week: it was a unique opportunity to meet a very broad panel of participants, and to build and deepen collaborations at the intersection of open science, open source, cybersecurity, transparent AI and digital public infrastructure.

At IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, a legendary site in the history of computing, I gave a plenary talk on how Software Heritage is transforming the way we approach open science, cybersecurity, and transparent AI. We then explored concrete avenues of collaboration in multiple intense meetings with several teams and we had privileged personal time with Ruchir Puri, IBM’s Chief Scientist. Luckily, we also managed to have a few breaks and during one of these we went to see the IBM Quantum System Two—which is today accessible online. Special thanks to Nirmit Desai and all the team for organizing this very rich day!

Then came three dense and productive days at the UN Open Source Week, hosted by the Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology, where I was accompanied by Morane Gruenpeter. This global gathering brought together leaders from UN agencies, governments, academia, and the open source community to align efforts for digital cooperation and sustainability. Special thanks and congratulations go to Omar Mohsine and all the team that organized this high level event!

On June 18, the program focused on Open Source and Open Source Program Officese: it was great to see contributions to the panels from people like Adriana Groh, Bastien Guerry, Hakim Hacid, Nabiha Syed, and many others.

Here I delivered the opening keynote for the high-level closing session with thought leaders from UNECE, the Colombian Ministry of Digital Transformation, and the City of Prague. The (too short!) talk presented the assembly with hard facts that highlight the central role of software in science and society and made the case for building a global, nonprofit, multi-stakeholder infrastructure for source code archiving, powered by Software Heritage.

🔗 You can find the slides online, which include:

• Data from the French Open Science Monitor showing the pervasive use of software in all research domains

• The global geography of open source contributions (Rossi & Zacchiroli, 2022)

• Insights on the exponential growth of original source code and the evolution of programming languages (Desmazières, Di Cosmo, Lorenz, 2024)

This kind of empirical evidence is essential to inform policy, community engagement, and global cooperation—and the Software Heritage archive is now increasingly the reference infrastructure to produce it.

Indeed, earlier that day I had the pleasure of presenting Under-Secretary-General Amandeep Singh Gill with a newly released report that identifies the contributions of UN agencies to open source software—a first-of-its-kind mapping that reinforces the need for shared digital commons across the multilateral system.

On June 19, we met with Bernardo Mariano Junior, UN Chief Information Technology Officer. We discussed how Software Heritage can serve as a universal enabler for source code access and traceability across UN initiatives.

On June 20, we wrapped up with a series of side events:

• An intense day full of parallel sessions at PwC, with a special shoutout to Clare Dillon (CURIOSS) and Morane Gruenpeter (SWH) for the one on Open Source for Open Science.

• An afternoon event at IBM Madison One, hosted by the AI Alliance, where we called for a global initiative to develop consensus-based operational mechanisms for transparent management of opt-out preferences in generative AI systems

Alongside the events of this packed week, it was a real pleasure to reconnect with key partners like AdaCore and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, whose continued support is key for moving forward.

We return home full of energy and new connections, more convinced than ever of the importance of our mission: to collect, preserve, and make maximally useful the source code of all publicly available software, for the benefit of research, innovation, cultural heritage, and society as a whole.

Let’s keep building the Software Heritage shared infrastructure for the common good.

#OpenScience #SoftwarePreservation #TransparentAI #Cybersecurity #DigitalPublicGoods #UNTech #AIAlliance #OpenInfrastructure #SoftwareHeritage #DigitalCommons #EvidenceBasedPolicy #OpenSource