Post by United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology

What an incredible day of innovation, collaboration and impact to kick off #UNOpenSourceWeek! UN Tech Over brought together innovators, maintainers, policymakers, researchers and community leaders to celebrate the power of open collaboration in addressing global challenges. The day began with opening remarks from Thomas Jarzombek, Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation of Germany; Prof. Tshilidzi Marwala チリツィ マルワラ [丸笑], Rector of the United Nations University; and Mandeep O'Brien, Global Director of Public Partnerships at UNICEF. Together, they underscored the growing importance of open source technologies and communities in advancing sustainable development and digital cooperation. Three events unfolded throughout the day, each highlighting a different dimension of the open source ecosystem. The Hack-A-Thon brought teams together to tackle real-world challenges through technology and innovation. Participants spent hours developing solutions, refining their ideas through a pitch workshop, and ultimately presenting their projects before a panel of distinguished judges. Among the winning projects was BEACON, a mobile-friendly mapping platform that combines official UN flood, population and infrastructure data across Bangladesh with a trained AI model that predicts where flooding is likely to occur, created by Team Valor 2.0: Akhil Mattaparthi, Aidan Yap, Shayan Shah, Aslan Wang and Justin Hong. The other winning team, Team SAGE, consisting of Olu Akinnawo, Prajwal Srinivas, Jeremy Straub, George Mihaileanu and Roshan Sharma, developed SAGE Governance, an open-source framework designed to strengthen governance practices and support the long-term stewardship of open source projects. The Edit-A-Thon brought together participants eager to contribute to the world's largest encyclopedia. With support from experts and mentors, attendees leveraged their research, documentation and critical thinking skills to improve selected Wikipedia pages, ensuring that important topics are represented with greater depth, accuracy, and reliability. The Maintain-A-Thon convened open source maintainers, stewards and policymakers to focus on one of the most critical and often overlooked aspects of the ecosystem: maintenance. From coding and editing to stewardship and governance, the launch of UN Open Source demonstrated that collaboration is more than a principle—it is a catalyst for impact. Congratulations to all participants, mentors, judges and organizers whose contributions made this inaugural day a remarkable success! Onwards with #UNOpenSourceWeek tomorrow for Open Source x AI Day! https://lnkd.in/eC47iRbS