// foss.events

The grand challenges cannot be tackled by any company or country alone. Climate change, current and future pandemics, digital autonomy, market concentration, and reaching the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are all pressing issues that underscore the need for new institutional set-ups. But the world’s stakeholders have not been idle: modes of collaboration at a completely new scale are needed to find solutions to complex problems. This takes place in a day-to-day reality that is increasingly digital, where software is ubiquitous, and while we see increased concerns over autonomy in a multi-polar world.Open Technologies and Open Source are at the heart of this new reality and are a source for optimism. ‘Open’ lowers the barriers to competition, delivers collaborative innovation, increases welfare, while letting end-users maintain control and autonomy. Open and collaborative digital innovation is no longer a theoretical concept. It is the modus operandi of companies and countries that engage at the cutting edge of the technological and societal innovation needed to tackle the grand challenges.