Open Source Takes the Stage at the UN’s Internet Governance Forum
GitHub recently participated in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the United Nations’ annual gathering where civil society, governments, and the private sector debate the future of the internet. Alongside partners including OpenForum Europe, the World Health Organization (WHO), Ranking Digital Rights, and Article 19, GitHub co-hosted three panel discussions covering open source’s role in digital sovereignty, inclusive participation, and human-rights-based content moderation. The sessions were aimed at connecting the global open source community’s interests with the international policy community.
Digital Sovereignty Through Open Collaboration
In a discussion co-hosted with OpenForum Europe (OFE), panelists examined how open source software (OSS) can serve as a strategic tool for governments pursuing digital sovereignty. The conversation opened with data from a European Commission-sponsored study indicating that OSS contributes between €65-95 billion to the European Union’s GDP. Mike Linksvayer, Head of Developer Policy at GitHub, noted that while OSS can help governments achieve sovereignty with local benefits, rising tech adversarialism risks cutting off collaborative communities and starving OSS as a global commons.
Other speakers highlighted OSS’s role in building local economic and technical capacity. Laurence Moroney from Google discussed widening AI access through open source education and tools like TensorFlow 2.0. Nataliya Langburd Wright, a researcher at Harvard Business School, presented cross-country findings linking increased GitHub commits and contributors to stronger national entrepreneurship, including more startup creation. Abhishek Singh, who leads India’s eGovernance Division, explained how his government uses OSS to drive innovation and improve citizen services, while warning that misconceptions about open source must be addressed to build trust. Jeremy (Zhihui) Liang of the China OSS Promotion Union echoed that sentiment, arguing that OSS can strengthen trust among digital sovereignty partners.
Inclusive Design for Broader Participation
A separate panel co-hosted with the WHO focused on models of open source participation as a blueprint for more inclusive internet governance. Mala Kumar, GitHub’s Director of Tech for Social Good, opened with insights from GitHub’s research on OSS in the social sector, emphasizing that inclusive design must account for the end users of a tool from the outset of development.
Samson Goddy, Co-Founder of Open Source Community Africa, detailed the challenge of localizing OSS across a continent with more than 2,000 languages. Kriti Mittal of Omidyar India described her work on Open Digital Ecosystems, stressing that open government-citizen platforms need to balance innovation with citizen protection and rely on communities for transparency and accountability. Dušan Milovanović, Chief Intelligence Architect for the WHO, traced the organization’s open source push back to the 2015 Ebola outbreak and described the new WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence as an effort to apply collaborative intelligence to pandemic detection and response.
Grounding Content Moderation in Human Rights
The final discussion, moderated by Veszna Wessenauer of Ranking Digital Rights, tackled how platforms can use human rights frameworks to shape content moderation policies. Abby Vollmer, GitHub’s Director of Platform Policy, described GitHub’s developer-first approach, which uses human rights as a baseline and applies the least restrictive measures available, guided by the principle of proportionality. She stressed that context—such as content’s visibility based on placement—matters significantly.
Berges Malu, Public Policy Director at Sharechat, discussed his platform’s moderation strategy for its 300 million users, noting that free speech has limits on private platforms and that transparency is essential. Vladimir Cortés from Article 19 argued that although platforms are private entities, they function as public squares, and takedowns can infringe on human rights. Brenda Dvoskin, a Harvard Law School researcher, offered a critical view that human rights frameworks are not automatically aligned with the public interest. Allison Davenport of Wikimedia highlighted the governance challenge for international communities like Wikipedia, which operate across language-based wikis that often develop distinct standards; she suggested that despite their limitations, human rights frameworks are a solid foundation for global platforms.
With more than 73 million developers collaborating on open source projects worldwide, GitHub sees the open source ecosystem as a critical resource for addressing shared global challenges. By bringing developer interests to forums like the IGF, GitHub aims to keep open collaboration central to the internet’s governance and future development.
