The award is given to a person who contributed to the introd uction of the culture of Free Software.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL: TRACK:SFSCON - Main track TYPE:SFSCON - Main track CATEGORIES:SFSCON,Main track DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:SFS Award 2026 - Track: SFSCON - Main track DTSTART:20261113T101500 DTEND:20261113T103000 UID:6aac41e6ae2bc29e18c8e25481c0306405d838f69d193 DESCRIPTION:Every year the Linux User Group Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan assigns the “\;South Tyrol Free Software Award”\; (SFS Award). The awar d is given to a person who contributed to the introduction of the culture of Free Software in the Province of Bolzano.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL: TRACK:SFSCON - Main track TYPE:SFSCON - Main track CATEGORIES:SFSCON,Main track DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Keynote speaker - Track: SFSCON - Main track DTSTART:20261113T103000 DTEND:20261113T110000 UID:6aac41e6af250112c43cd379167023e51c9e25bc4bcc7 DESCRIPTION: LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL: TRACK:SFSCON - Main track TYPE:SFSCON - Main track CATEGORIES:SFSCON,Main track DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Sovereign AI in Production: Blueprint for a Globally Distributed De v Team - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T110000 DTEND:20261113T113500 UID:6aac41e6b040972707d607911c8954498892c80526abc DESCRIPTION:Large Language Models (LLMs) offer unprecedented opportuniti es to accelerate software development\, but for organizations handling sen sitive code\, public AI APIs are a compliance minefield. When data confide ntiality and regional sovereignty are non-negotiable\, how do you scale AI assistance to a globally distributed team?
\nIn this talk\, we shar e Linaro’s ongoing journey of designing\, deploying\, and adopting a mul ti-tier\, on-prem\, and regional LLM cloud-node infrastructure. We will di ve into the architectural compromises made\, the open-source AI toolkits w e leveraged\, and how we balanced privacy with scalability. Beyond the tec h stack\, you will learn how we measure developer adoption\, track success metrics\, and draw real-world lessons from the transition from design to daily developer use. Attendees will walk away with a practical framework f or building their own confidential AI infrastructure.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/sovereign-ai-in-production-blueprint-for-a- globally-distributed-dev-team/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:From Smart Traps to a Sovereign National Insect Database: Open-Sour ce Local AI for Pest Monitoring - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T110000 DTEND:20261113T111500 UID:6aac41e6b169d34e15f5007ad79e72da09476f51a0ba0 DESCRIPTION:Europe needs pest-monitoring infrastructures that keep strat
egic agricultural data\, software and operational know-how under European
control. Building on the experience gained through INSTINCT\, a project co
-financed by the European Union under the ERDF 2021–2027 Programme of th
e Autonomous Province of Bolzano–South Tyrol\, this talk presents a scal
e-up scenario centred on a national\, cloud-based insect-monitoring databa
se fed by smart traps\, environmental sensors and expert-validated observa
tions. The proposed infrastructure would be governed by a Bolzano-based pa
rtnership bringing together the research expertise of the Laimburg Researc
h Centre and Eurac Research\, the academic expertise of the Free Universit
y of Bozen-Bolzano\, and the local technological capabilities of FOS S.p.A
.
\nA local application can acquire trap images\, perform AI-based in
sect detection and counting using open-source tools and models such as YOL
O and GNU Linux OS\, support expert review and correction\, and then trans
mit validated data to the central national repository. The application may
also include project-specific software components that are not distribute
d as open source. The architecture separates local analysis from national
data consolidation: processing may remain on premises or at the edge\, whi
le authorised observations are collected in a single controlled database h
osted and managed under European jurisdiction.
\nThe presentation wil
l discuss interoperability\, traceability\, data quality\, model reuse and
long-term independence from extra-European proprietary platforms\, using
Cydia pomonella as the initial use case and extending the approach to othe
r insect species and territories.
Last year at SFSCON I argued that if AI is the mind\, roboti
cs is the body. This year: who owns the body?
\nDigital sovereignty i
s usually about data and the cloud. But as autonomous robots spread into l
ogistics\, cleaning\, hospitality and agriculture\, sovereignty becomes ph
ysical — and uncomfortable. At Telmekom we sell and deploy these robots
today\, and today the best platforms on the market are not European. There
is no mature European alternative ready to ship\, and a business serving
real customers cannot wait for one: the warehouse\, the hospital floor and
the harvest don’t pause for industrial policy to catch up.
\nThis
talk makes the case for pragmatic sovereignty. The danger is not using for
eign hardware — it is using it unconsciously\, with no leverage and no e
xit. Naming the dependency is the first act of sovereignty\, not a betraya
l of it. The market gap is itself the argument for open standards: the rea
listic path to European capability runs through open middleware\, auditabl
e firmware and the right to repair — the layers that let a European inte
grator add value on foreign hardware now\, and let European hardware plug
in later without rebuilding the whole stack.
\nIn fifteen minutes I
ll show what it means to buy the body abroad while keeping the nervous sy
stem — the software\, the data\, the ability to audit\, repair and migra
te — under your own control\, and name concrete levers for decision-make
rs in regions like South Tyrol.
The EU Cyber Resilience Act of 2024 will be partially in eff ect as of this year’\;s SFSCON\, but the reality of its implementatio n and enforcement will continue for many years. As one of the most visible and immediate efforts at EU technological sovereignty the CRA is a politi cally important regulation\, but it is also an incredibly ambitious one on its own\, adding safety regulation to the software industry. Most notably for the SFSCON audience the CRA is also a regulation where the FOSS commu nity has provided a great deal of input\, advice\, and has had some succes s in shaping both the law and its implementation.
\nWith the standar dization and many of the other implementation necessities for the CRA draw ing to a close\, a look at their successes and failures\, and FOSS’\; s role in them can provide a road map for the future of FOSS interactions with tech sovereignty regulation. This talk will point out some of the fri ctions and struggles of CRA implementation\, noting the very real ways tha t FOSS contributions have mitigated them\, and highlighting additional way s open source voices and values might further improve the standardization.
\nBeyond how FOSS can help the EU implement its cybersecurity\, sov ereignty\, and privacy goals its equally important to understand how these goals can help open source projects\, companies and developers. Again usi ng the CRA as a model I hope to point out ways that its regulatory burden on manufacturers may benefit open source projects and communities both fin ancially and provide them with a greater voice in future technology regula tion.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/opportunity-standardization-sovereignty-and -foss/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open Tools for Environmental Monitoring - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T112000 DTEND:20261113T113500 UID:6aac41e6b658af8e455c8298504b4f3e68dd400e80a8b DESCRIPTION:Environmental contamination poses significant challenges for sustainable land management and informed decision-making. This talk prese nts an open-source web platform\, developed by Gruppo FOS in Italy\,as par t of the PoLaRecCE European project\, designed to simplify the collection\ , management\, and visualization of environmental monitoring data. Through an interactive map-based interface\, the platform enables researchers\, p ublic authorities\, and other stakeholders to explore contamination data\, monitor affected areas\, and support evidence-based decisions. The presen tation will also discuss how open technologies improve transparency\, coll aboration\, and accessibility in environmental data management\, making ad vanced monitoring tools available to a wider community\, also how the open -source software contributes to European digital sovereignty by enabling o rganizations to retain control over their infrastructure\, data\, and soft ware stack while avoiding vendor lock-in.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/open-tools-for-environmental-monitoring/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Autonomous Logistics: An Open-Source Approach For Integrated Wareho use Automation - Track: Open Hardware DTSTART:20261113T112000 DTEND:20261113T113500 UID:6aac41e6b7f8d6b5af458a7d808ad760dc88b5c1118fb DESCRIPTION:This talk presents the ground (AGV – Autonomous Ground Veh icle) and aerial (UAV –Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) robot software stacks of an industrial automation project where a mobile manipulator robot (AGV) a nd a drone (UAV) operate together to support warehouse and palletizing wor kflows. The presentation focuses on how a practical robotic system can be built by combining robust open-source technologies\, reducing development time while keeping the architecture modular\, transparent\, and adaptable to real-world requirements.
\nThe presentation is split into two com plementary parts:
\nThe UAV stack highlights two key open-source rep ositories that played a central role in the robot architecture: PX4\, used as the flight control framework\, and NVIDIA Isaac ROS Visual SLAM\, adop ted to provide visual localization and mapping capabilities in GPS-denied or structured indoor environments. The presentation will show how these co mponents were integrated into the drone stack\, why they were selected\, a nd which advantages they provided in terms of flexibility\, maintainabilit y\, and performance.
\nThe presentation also highlights the percepti on framework adopted across the robotic system\, based on the open-source YOLOv11 network and the Ultralytics framework. This section focuses on how these technologies were integrated into both the AGV and UAV software sta cks to provide a common perception layer supporting collaborative operatio ns. The presentation will show how the camera mounted on the robot gripper is used for box detection and pose estimation during palletizing tasks\, while the camera mounted on the drone provides information about box prese nce and approximate location on the target pallet\, contributing to a coor dinated aerial-ground robotic workflow.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/autonomous-logistics-an-open-source-approac h-for-integrated-warehouse-automation/ TRACK:Open Hardware TYPE:Open Hardware CATEGORIES:Open Hardware DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open and free software meets C2C design - Track: Digital Sovereignt y DTSTART:20261113T114000 DTEND:20261113T115500 UID:6aac41e6b99fb4f0b74ced890f921c26b80fddc7751ee DESCRIPTION:Electronics are among the fastest-growing waste streams worl
dwide. While much attention is paid to recycling and material efficiency\,
one critical prerequisite for truly circular electronics is often overloo
ked: openness. Products that cannot be repaired\, updated\, or maintained
due to proprietary software\, closed interfaces\, or missing documentation
will inevitably become waste\, regardless of the quality of their physica
l materials.
\nThis session introduces the Cradle to Cradle Electroni
cs Initiative (C2CEI) as a pioneering framework to solve this crisis . The
speakers will outline how this pre-competitive network of industry leader
s\, NGOs\, and researchers is actively working to establish new standards
for circular hardware.
\nDrawing on the C2CEI’s latest work framewo
rks and illustrating them with practical industry insights\, such as the T
eufel MYND speaker development. This talk demonstrates how software freedo
m directly extends product lifetimes\, improves repairability\, and enable
s continuous innovation across global value chains. Participants will gain
firsthand insights into how the C2CEI serves as the primary bridge betwee
n digital sustainability and systemic circular design.
GEOWIDGET is a component built to track drones’ locations
in real time in order to facilitate operators’ monitoring efforts during
emergency missions. It comprises the following components:
\n–\
; A web dashboard for inserting mission-related data\;
\n–\; An
open-data-hub-compatible\, web-based OpenStreetMap component\;
\nR
11\; A NodeJS API\;
\n–\; A mySQL database\;
\n–\; An
MQTT-listener for receiving drones’ location in real time.
AI\, cybersecurity\, and advanced robotics are the key trend s driving automation. Bosch Rexroth leads this software-defined evolution by championing ultimate integration freedom. Within this vision\, ctrlX AU TOMATION acts as the enabler: an open\, Linux-based operating system platf orm that overcomes proprietary barriers to foster co-creation and partner ecosystems.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/the-power-of-open-platforms-in-automation/ TRACK:Open Hardware TYPE:Open Hardware CATEGORIES:Open Hardware DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:The Cyber Resilience Act Is Here – What It Means for Open Source - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T114000 DTEND:20261113T115500 UID:6aac41e6bd7369103bc21c99f7abb0d845dc5639e6d9b DESCRIPTION:The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is no longer a future conc ern. As of September 2026\, manufacturers must report actively exploited v ulnerabilities and severe incidents –\; the first hard obligation to come into force\, ahead of full enforcement in December 2027. So where doe s this leave companies built on open source software?
\nThis talk is a practical guide to navigating the CRA. We start with the essentials 211\; is your project in scope\, and when is your business a “\;manuf acturer”\; versus an “\;OSS steward”\;\, the new role the C RA created specifically to address open source?
\nWe then walk the p ath to compliance\, with a particular focus on third-party and open source due diligence: building an accurate picture of your software supply chain \, assessing the health and security of the components you depend on\, han dling vulnerabilities\, and meeting the new incident-reporting obligations . Crucially\, we’\;ll look at why contributing fixes back upstream is n’\;t just good citizenship –\; it reduces your long-term compli ance burden and strengthens the shared commons the whole ecosystem relies on.
\nWhether you publish open source\, build commercial products on top of it\, or steward a project others depend on\, you’\;ll leave w ith a clear\, actionable understanding of your CRA obligations –\; an d a view of compliance not as a burden imposed on open source\, but as a c hance to make it more secure and sustainable.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/the-cyber-resilience-act-is-here-what-it-me ans-for-open-source/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:The Tech Sovereignty Catalogue - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T120000 DTEND:20261113T121500 UID:6aac41e6be884e004b627b88ec7d59141ad098b9d1322 DESCRIPTION:Europe currently relies on foreign suppliers for over 80% of its digital technologies\, with just three non-European hyperscalers cont rolling more than 70% of the cloud market. The Tech Sovereignty Catalogue is a concrete response to this structural dependency: a concrete initiativ e that maps the complete European technology stack\, from hardware and con nectivity through cloud infrastructure\, cybersecurity\, data platforms\, and AI\, turning the ambition of digital autonomy into a navigable\, actio nable ecosystem.
\nThis talk introduces the Catalogue\, its current and upcoming developments\, its governance model\, and the sovereignty cri teria developed by our consortium of partners to ensure only genuinely sov ereign solutions are included. To be listed\, a solution must meet criteri a across three areas: corporate sovereignty (European headquarters\, major ity ownership and voting rights\, and exclusive European jurisdiction)\, d ata sovereignty (storage\, processing\, and service execution within Europ e by a provider that complies to corporate sovereignty)\, and full technol ogical maturity and market deployment. Assessment\, mapping\, and listing of the vetted solutions are all provided free of charge to solution provid ers. The Catalogue is more than a directory\; backed by a strong partnersh ip of industry players\, think tanks\, academic institutions\, and researc h institutes\, it is actively fostering a community of like-minded Europea n companies that are already collaborating\, building together to expand t heir joint offering across Europe.
\nWe will also explore how Free a nd Open Source Software fits naturally within this framework. Solutions bu ilt on open standards and designed for interoperability align closely with the Catalogue’\;s vision of a collaborative\, non-fragmented Europea n digital ecosystem\, making the case that sovereignty and openness are co mplementary rather than competing values. For SFSCON’\;s community of decision-makers and developers\, the Catalogue represents a practical bri dge between the ideals of software freedom and the policy reality of Europ ean digital independence.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/the-tech-sovereignty-catalogue/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:From Raster Files to Open Data Products: Publishing Geospatial Data with STAC and Free Software - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T120000 DTEND:20261113T121500 UID:6aac41e6bf996e07fc6438cef9f70653c3806310c3ce8 DESCRIPTION:Large raster datasets are central to earth observation\, cli mate research\, environmental monitoring\, and public-sector data services . Yet they are often published as files that are hard to discover\, compar e\, cite\, or reuse without knowing the exact storage location\, format\, and processing tools in advance.
\nraster2stac is a Free Software Py thon library that helps turn existing raster datasets into structured\, st andards-based data products. It creates SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STA C) Collections\, Items\, and Assets from formats such as netCDF\, Cloud Op timized GeoTIFF\, and Zarr\, so datasets can be described consistently and accessed through common open geospatial tools.
\nSTAC is now an OGC Community Standard and is widely used in the earth observation ecosystem\ , including by major public data providers and platforms such as Copernicu s Data Space Ecosystem and the NASA Earthdata. This makes it a practical b ridge between local data publishing workflows and the broader open geospat ial infrastructure used by researchers\, public institutions\, and service providers.
\nIn this lightning talk\, I will show the problem raste r2stac addresses\, the publishing workflow it enables\, and why this matte rs for digital sovereignty. The focus is not only on converting files\, bu t on making scientific and public geospatial data more findable\, interope rable\, reusable\, and less dependent on vendor-specific platforms or cust om data portals.
\nThe audience will leave with a practical understa nding of how open standards such as STAC\, combined with Free Software\, c an help institutions publish raster data in a way that is easier to share\ , automate\, preserve\, and build upon.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/from-raster-files-to-open-data-products-pub lishing-geospatial-data-with-stac-and-free-software/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:From QNX to Linux & Zephyr: Co-Existence and Migration via VirtIO a nd Waydroid - Track: Open Hardware DTSTART:20261113T120000 DTEND:20261113T121500 UID:6aac41e6c09cb317282af3ce6312bc57d3de1ba2f9f2f DESCRIPTION:Full migration away from QNX isn’\;t always feasible du e to legacy constraints or safety certifications\, but that doesn’\;t mean you have to accept total vendor lock-in.
\nIn this lightning t
alk\, Stefan details how to design a flexible architecture
\nwhere QN
X co-exists with\, or seamlessly transitions into\, an open-source
\n
ecosystem. He will dive into using VirtIO as the standardized communicatio
n fabric between QNX\, Linux\, Android and Zephyr environments\, and highl
ight how Linaro achieved seamless graphical integration of Android applica
tions via Waydroid using virtio-gpu. Finally\, he will share performance a
nd latency tuning tips needed to handle mixed-criticality workloads.
Open source gets funded in two ways. Companies give engineer ing time\, which is typically self-interested and rarely distributes equal ly across the dependency tree. Cash donations offer broader reach\, but th e “\;net”\; funding a maintainer receives is often far lower tha n the “\;gross”\; amount pledged\, eroded by fees.
\nThe C yber Resilience Act marks a historic shift in EU law by acknowledging that a product’\;s dependencies are as security-critical as the product i tself. But the dependency graphs map technical criticality\, not the fundi ng mismatch for the long tail. Even where that mismatch is visible\, closi ng it means moving money across dozens of currencies to individual maintai ners\, since no EU software stack is fully EU-built\; the most “\;sov ereign”\; European systems have roots in the Americas\, Asia\, and be yond.
\nThis talk presents the research from the Funding Coordinatio n team\, based on interviews with public sector and corporate open source funders across Europe and beyond. It asks whether settlement rails built f or transparency and minimal intermediaries\, paired with a machine-readabl e dependency graph\, could improve current funding systems for open source .
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/funding-the-long-tail-of-dependencies-who-p ays-for-europes-digital-sovereignty/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Panel Digital Sovereignty - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T122000 DTEND:20261113T125500 UID:6aac41e6c28585c18757fa688e984980e7e88308ce6dc DESCRIPTION: LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL: TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:PCoRaS: Package for Cloud-Optimized Raster and Spatio-temporal Data - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T122000 DTEND:20261113T123500 UID:6aac41e6c3847626588a041c1ba0fd00727b696e53a64 DESCRIPTION:The increase of volume\, complexity and demand for geospatia l data\, such as climate models and satellite data\, requires the adaptati on of storage\, reproducibility and traceability of the high-volume\, larg e-scale data. Traditional formats such as NetCDF or TIFF\, although reliab le and efficient\, do not come with the flexibility and cloud-native adapt ability of Zarr files.
\nThis project presents a library\, PCoRaS\, designed to create multidimensional data cubes in Zarr format from differe nt sources of geospatial and raster data. The library takes one or multipl e raster-based datasets as input and generates an N-dimensional data cube according to user-defined variables\, dimensions and shared metadata attri butes. By allowing users to define which variables should be extracted and how dimensions should be structured\, the library supports the transforma tion of heterogeneous raster inputs into organized analysis-ready data cub es. A particular feature of the library is its support for dual temporal d imensions\, enabling the aggregation of variable data over specific tempor al frames\, such as months\, while preserving a broader temporal dimension representing one or multiple years. This functionality is especially rele vant for climate and environmental datasets where seasonal\, monthly\, and long-term temporal structures must coexist within the same data cube.
\nThis project works on top of Raster2STAC. The package extracts the me tadata from raster data\, generating json files compatible with STAC\, cre ates STAC collections with items and assets\, and automatically uploads th e data to a S3 bucket. The combination of Zarr data cube generation\, STAC metadata and S3 publication contributes to a FAIR and cloud-native geospa tial infrastructure\, allowing climate data and satellite data to comply w ith the requirements of scalable access\, interoperability and reproducibi lity. Overall\, this work contributes a reusable and scalable workflow tha t supports more interoperable\, reproducible and cloud-ready geospatial da ta processing
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/pcoras-package-for-cloud-optimized-raster-a nd-spatio-temporal-data/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open Hardware – A ‘develish’ Case Study - Track: Open Hardwar e DTSTART:20261113T122000 DTEND:20261113T123500 UID:6aac41e6c485e5fa9a1a51c9d1388299d82d22941b938 DESCRIPTION:In May 2025 the German audio hardware maker company Teufel a nnounced a new product\, the Mynd Bluetooth speaker bos. The speaker in it self is yet another Bluetooth speaker box\, the remarkable feature of it i s that it was announced as an “\;Open Source Project”\; with 220\;high repairability and sustainability”\;\, with all mechanical a nd electronics design files as well as the firmware source code published as “\;open source”\;. So they mean the Mynd to be a Free Softwar e and open hardware product.
\nSo we wanted to put this to a test!\n
We got ourselves a device and did a careful analysis of the design files provided by the manufacturer to answer the question: Is it really &# 8216\;open source’\;? And what does this mean for hardware?
\nI n this talk I will present what we found\, eventual caveats and what this means to the central question: Is it ‘\;open source hardware’\;?
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/open-hardware-a-develish-case-study/ TRACK:Open Hardware TYPE:Open Hardware CATEGORIES:Open Hardware DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open Source Has a New Audience. Are We Ready? - Track: Policy & Com pliance DTSTART:20261113T122000 DTEND:20261113T123500 UID:6aac41e6c583e3fc29379768d714ccc225cf821dcf83b DESCRIPTION:Open source is no longer a niche for technical pioneers. Wit
h a $46 billion global market\, 61% enterprise adoption and growing policy
momentum across Europe\, it has become mainstream infrastructure. But mai
nstream users bring mainstream expectations: polished interfaces\, zero-fr
iction onboarding\, integrated experiences\, and security by design backed
by regulation like the CRA and NIS2.
\nAre open source projects read
y for this new audience?
\nThis talk looks at four landmark forks —
Nextcloud vs ownCloud\, OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch\, OpenTofu vs Terrafo
rm\, Valkey vs Redis — to show that funding alone never decided the winn
er. What mattered was customer business: the value delivered to citizens\,
customers and employees. The projects that listened to their users surviv
ed. The ones that didn’\;t were acquired\, forked or abandoned.
\nWith this new audience in mind\, the talk proposes two paths forward. Fi
rst\, designing for customers: applying proven product doctrines — Custo
mer Discovery\, Lean MVP\, UX-first development and open governance as a v
alidation channel. Second\, supporting customers inside open source throug
h OSPOs\, turning scattered adoption into a structured\, governed capabili
ty.
\nThe talk closes with three policy actions Europe can take to su
pport this shift: simplifying procurement for open source models\, funding
OSPOs in public administrations and SMEs\, and using CRA Attestations as
a trust-building mechanism that also drives sustainable funding.
Digital sovereignty is becoming an increasingly strategic re
quirement for public administrations and is closely tied to the responsibl
e use of public funds. Ensuring long-term control over data\, technologica
l autonomy\, and independence from proprietary platforms allows public inv
estments to generate sustainable value over time\, avoiding vendor lock-in
and reducing structural dependency on closed solutions. MapView\, the new
geospatial platform of the Autonomous Province of Bozen/Bolzano\, has bee
n designed with these principles at its core\, following the idea that sof
tware developed with public resources should remain a public\, reusable as
set.
\nMapView goes well beyond the limitations of a traditional WebG
IS. By integrating a Geobrowser and Geobrowser into a single environment a
nd relying on open standards and open-source libraries\, the platform enab
les public institutions to retain full control over authoritative geospati
al data and services. Interoperability is ensured through open OGC service
s\, allowing seamless data reuse across systems while avoiding vendor lock
-in and preserving long-term platform independence.
\nIn line with th
ese principles\, a large portion of MapView’s datasets and services—wh
enever they can be considered public—is openly accessible not only to pu
blic administrations but also to citizens\, professionals\, and the privat
e sector. For professional users and private organisations\, access to non
-public or restricted datasets can additionally be granted through explici
t consent from the respective data owners\, within a controlled and transp
arent governance framework.
\nWithin this open and modular architectu
re\, the new 3D component\, based on Cesium\, plays a fundamental role. Th
e 3D viewer is tightly integrated into the overall system and enables real
-time\, interactive exploration of the territory in three dimensions using
a fully open-source stack. More importantly\, it establishes the foundati
onal layer for the evolution of MapView towards the first Digital Twin of
South Tyrol. By combining authoritative geospatial data\, open services\,
and 3D representations in a shared environment\, MapView lays the groundwo
rk for future simulations\, scenario analysis\, and data-driven planning
extending its scope far beyond simple visualisation.
\nMapView has b
een conceived as an evolving online GIS platform\, already deployed and ac
tively used in production—not as a prototype or experimental solution. A
t both municipal and provincial levels in South Tyrol\, it supports operat
ional territory management and a wide range of everyday administrative act
ivities\, acting as a shared and reliable geospatial infrastructure for pu
blic administrations. The platform provides a rich and continuously expand
ing set of functionalities\, including the integration of external dataset
s and services\, advanced querying and analytical capabilities\, and a mod
ular architecture designed for continuous growth. The introduction of a mo
bile-first client application further enhances operational autonomy\, enab
ling effective field usage while ensuring that data ownership and control
remain firmly within the public domain.
\nWith its open-by-design arc
hitecture and strong focus on autonomy\, independence\, and data control\,
MapView demonstrates how digital sovereignty and responsible public inves
tment can reinforce each other in practice. This talk presents the archite
ctural choices behind MapView\, the role of open 3D technologies within th
e platform\, and the long-term vision of a truly independent\, extensible\
, and production-grade online GIS—capable of evolving into a shared Digi
tal Twin and moving decisively beyond “yet another WebGIS”.
How we seek to encourage communities and students to acquire the skills and capabilities necessary to produce hardware and software in dependently and to have control over it. Therefore\, we promote local and decentralized design and production.
\nWe collaborate with volunteer s to create the opportunity to experience hands-on learning\, to inspire c reativity\, critical thinking\, and problem-solving trying to conceive\, d esign and produce what we need or desire. We encourage this culture from p rimary schools to University and with no age limit.
\nWe share our o pen hardware projects that are governed by our Community that is open. Our Community conceive\, design and produce and where needed\, thanks to dona tions\, we pay engineers. We are quite slow because we solve problems than k to our passion\, creativity and obstinacy.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/deep-dive-into-open-hardware-powerpc-deskto p/ TRACK:Open Hardware TYPE:Open Hardware CATEGORIES:Open Hardware DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Interoperability as a regulatory tool - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T124000 DTEND:20261113T125500 UID:6aac41e6c8a9fc649d931df31437e4992068921410005 DESCRIPTION:Digital markets are characterised by the dominance of Big Te ch and their closed ecosystems\, in which only a few major players control both the hardware and software layers of technological infrastructure. A key regulation of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is the designation of Big Tech companies as so-called gatekeepers. This talk aims to clarify what th e gatekeepers’ obligation to grant interoperability to third-party provi ders means. It will demonstrate how interoperability is no longer just a t echnical ideal but a legal requirement for gatekeepers operating in the Eu ropean Single Market. No prior knowledge of legal topics is required.
\ n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/interoperability-as-a-regulatory-tool/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Governing for Autonomy - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T130000 DTEND:20261113T131500 UID:6aac41e6c9a8fc7f0a7a0bbd86d07efad9d5b5d3aaaa8 DESCRIPTION:Following last year’\;s presentation about discovering the “\;AI jungle”\; and drafting initial risk frameworks\, this year the focus will be on operational reality and the critical realization that relying entirely on proprietary AI black boxes threatens an organiza tion’\;s digital sovereignty. To maintain control over their data\, i nfrastructure\, and technical destiny\, organizations are increasingly tur ning to FOSS AI solutions. The OSPO is uniquely positioned to lead this tr ansition\, shifting from a traditional compliance office to a strategic en abler of digital autonomy.
\nAs EU AI Act compliance deadlines appro ach\, the demand for transparency has intensified. This is where FOSS AI s erves as a practical shield. By leveraging open-source technologies and th e Open Source AI Definition\, OSPOs can help organizations deploy models l ocally or in sovereign clouds. This approach avoids vendor lock-in\, ensur es data privacy\, and retains full governance over the infrastructure. On the other hand\, as AI systems evolve into “\;Agentic”\; mode of operation\, securing this self-hosted environment becomes a complex and d ynamic challenge.
\nThis presentation will explore how OSPOs can pra ctically utilize FOSS to secure and assert digital sovereignty in an AI-dr iven world\, including the operational trade-offs of hosting open models\, how to build verifiable and independent AI stacks\, and how to govern aut onomous agents without compromising control over one’\;s data and inf rastructure.
\nJoin this session to learn how to move your organizat ion from dependency to digital independence.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/governing-for-autonomy/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Digital Sovereignty with Local RAG - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T130000 DTEND:20261113T131500 UID:6aac41e6caac543b2891cd9d4c15fde854db96fb017c6 DESCRIPTION:Many companies want to experiment with AI\, but they also ne ed to keep control over their data\, infrastructure and model choices. Thi s short talk presents a minimal Retrieval-Augmented Generation prototype b uilt with open data\, an open-source database and an open model.
\nT he session walks through the essential RAG pipeline: loading data\, creati ng chunks\, generating embedding\, storing them in a searchable database\, retrieving relevant context and producing grounded answers. The goal is t o show how companies can start exploring private AI with a small\, underst andable and reproducible open-source setup.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/digital-sovereignty-with-local-rag/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:When hardware breaks free - Track: Legal DTSTART:20261113T130000 DTEND:20261113T131500 UID:6aac41e6cbb42a2412a5ac812afe0bf03fff343ddae34 DESCRIPTION:Open Source Hardware (OSH) is not only an important element of digital commons\, as it has become a key enabler of permissionless inno vation. Understanding licensing issues is important\, however\, to explore the maximal potential of OSH.
\nThis talk aims clarifying the main elements of OSH licenses. For instance:
\n–\; What open source
licenses are available for hardware?
\n–\; What are the differen
ces between licenses for software\, hardware and data?
\n–\; Are
there “\;copyleft”\; and “\;permissive (non-reciprocal)
221\; licenses for hardware in the same sense there are for software and d
ata?
\n–\; How do you implement a license in an OSH project?
The talk aims professionals and hobbyists working and developing OSH. No previous knowledge on legal topics or OSH is required.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/when-hardware-breaks-free/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Power to the OSPOs - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T130000 DTEND:20261113T131500 UID:6aac41e6ccb73fbaae4e0909b7b68d439668a3f394111 DESCRIPTION:Europe has written the words. The Tech Sovereignty Package a
nd the new Open Source Strategy say that dependence on a few non-European
platforms is a strategic risk. Fine. But words are cheap. Italy turned
220\;open source first”\; into a legal procurement principle in 2012
through Article 68 of the Digital Administration Code\, AgID guidelines an
d mandatory reuse. More than a decade later it has produced no concrete ef
fect and has been systematically circumvented. A law without budget\, mand
ate and teeth becomes compliance theatre.
\nThis talk argues that ope
n source will not free Europe from Big Tech through policy statements or g
oodwill. It needs a counter-power inside the institutions and companies th
at buy technology: the OSPO\, the Open Source Programme Office\, the team
that decides how an organisation adopts\, contributes to and governs open
source.
\nWhat I want to show is how much an OSPO is really responsib
le for once you take it seriously. Not just licences and developer support
\, but knowing which proprietary dependencies trap the organisation\, havi
ng a voice before procurement signs a renewal\, owning contribution and ma
intenance\, and now carrying real legal exposure\, since from 2027 the Cyb
er Resilience Act turns the software you ship into a compliance duty. None
of this is a technical detail. These are strategic and financial risks\,
which is exactly why an OSPO buried inside the IT department cannot do the
job. It has to be empowered and wired directly to the C-level\, so that o
pen source becomes a leadership decision about autonomy and risk\, not a l
icensing chore handed down to engineers. That shift\, from technical house
keeping to strategic mandate\, is what turns sovereignty from a slogan int
o something that actually changes what gets bought.
The hype in AI is centered around the same names: Google\, A nthropic\, and OpenAI. The narrative is simple: there’s a big GPT that c an solve all your problems\, and the best GPT is mine.
\nBut the tru th is different: we can choose suppliers based on a variety of criteria.\n
–\; –\; –\;
\nI first explained how to select suppliers in the digital economy—both as an entrepreneur and as a develo per—many years ago. So\, what’s new today?
\n–\; –\; & #8211\;
\nIn this brief talk\, we’ll focus on the main criteria fo r choosing AI suppliers\, as well as the specific considerations for AI. B ut more importantly\, we’ll begin building a European community committe d to making conscious choices\, not emotional ones.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/choosing-ethical-and-european-ai/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Who Owns Your AI Data Pipeline? - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T132000 DTEND:20261113T133500 UID:6aac41e6ceb2485691ea0782009771728ecbaede964c5 DESCRIPTION:Al is increasing the complexity of modern data platforms\, b ut many organizations are building systems with limited visibility into ho w data moves\, changes\, and is consumed.
\nThis talk explores appro aches for building observable and portable data platforms using open techn ologies and open standards. Through real-world examples from large-scale e nterprise environments\, we will look at how tools and architectures based on Delta Lake\, Apache Spark\, and OpenLineage can improve lineage tracki ng\, governance\, interoperability\, and operational transparency across m odern data pipelines.
\nThe session covers common problems in Al-ori ented data architectures\, including fragmented metadata\, hidden operatio nal costs\, and observability. We will also discuss practical engineering patterns for building lakehouse platforms that remain flexible\, traceable \, and easier to operate over time.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/who-owns-your-ai-data-pipeline/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open standards for open source hardware and other high-cost-of-chan ge domains: the missing framework - Track: Legal DTSTART:20261113T132000 DTEND:20261113T133500 UID:6aac41e6cfa6524095d917159cf92f03fb8cc323c6882 DESCRIPTION:In open source software governance doesn’\;t matter too
much – incompetent leadership can simply be replaced via a fork. Howeve
r\, this organic governance has limits: One cannot fork a house. Similarly
\, governance matters more in domains with a high “\;cost of change&#
8221\;\, like hardware (and also AI)\, where design decisions can exclude
entire regions from replicating\, maintaining\, or commercializing a proje
ct. De jure standardization was a good very answer to this issue 100 years
ago\, but has seen little procedural innovation since then and is practic
ally unfeasible for open standardization on a product level. The principle
s of Open Standard on the other hand come with modern workflows\, but don&
#8217\;t aim to be representative\, so they would be too prone to be compr
omised by dominant actors.
\nThis talk will outline some of the detai
ls of the problem and propose a potential solution aimed at closing this g
ap.
In this talk\, OSI EU Policy Analyst\, Jordan Maris will sha re how current events are shaping the debate around tech sovereignty in th e EU\, where Open Source is already delivering tech sovereignty\, and what is still needed. He’\;ll tell unique stories from on the ground\, sh are the OSI’\;s and thoughts on the EU’\;s recently released Tec h Sovereignty Package\, and highlight why Tech Sovereignty isn’\;t ju st for governments.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/foss-and-tech-sovereign-in-the-eu-a-view-fr om-the-trenches/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:From Data Sovereignty to Intelligence Sovereignty: A Private First Secure AI Agentic Ecosystem - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T134000 DTEND:20261113T135500 UID:6aac41e6d1a02f541849d0c1259fda784bb42e276a24d DESCRIPTION:Europe’s digital sovereignty discussion has traditionally
focused on data\, cloud infrastructure\, privacy\, and open standards. AI
agents now extend this challenge into a new layer. The intelligence sovere
ignty.
\nWhen agents can retrieve private context\, reason over sensi
tive data\, call tools\, write code\, and trigger operational workflows\,
the central question is no longer only “Where is the data stored?” It
becomes: “Who controls the intelligence layer that acts on the data?”<
br />\nThis talk presents a practical\, vendor-neutral architecture for bu
ilding secure\, local-first AI agent systems using Free and Open Source pr
inciples. The reference example is a Secure AppSec Triage and Remediation
Swarm: a multi-agent workflow that ingests vulnerability reports\, logs\,
stack traces\, and security findings\; applies PII and secret redaction\;
checks policy constraints\; routes tasks to specialized agents\; generates
remediation guidance\; and preserves audit trails for human review.
\nThe talk connects FOSS engineering with Europe’s regulatory direction\
, including the EU AI Act\, data governance\, privacy\, cybersecurity\, an
d responsible automation. It explains why AI governance cannot remain only
at the level of policy documents\, model cards\, or compliance checklists
. For agentic systems\, governance must also be implemented in the runtime
: deterministic orchestration\, policy-as-code\, tool authorization\, audi
table memory\, sandboxed execution\, privacy gates\, and human approval ch
eckpoints.
\nThe core argument is that Europe’s next sovereignty ch
allenge is not only data sovereignty\, but intelligence sovereignty: the a
bility for organizations\, public institutions\, developers\, and communit
ies to inspect\, self-host\, govern\, and safely operate AI systems that a
ct on their behalf.
When building AI\, everyone talks about data\, architectures \, and compute. Almost nobody talks about the massive bottleneck hidden in plain sight: saving the model. As models grow\, traditional synchronous s aving stalls expensive hardware\, costing time and money.
\nIn this 15-minute lightning talk\, we pull back the curtain on Orbax—the modern\ , open-source checkpointing powerhouse engine. We will explore how Orbax f undamentally changes state management through asynchronous writing\, preve nting your storage from bottlenecking your compute. Attendees will walk aw ay understanding why modern ML infrastructure requires dedicated\, smart p ersistence layers to scale seamlessly and efficiently.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/why-scaling-ai-demands-modern-checkpointing / TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open-Source Software and Open-Source Hardware under the new Europea n Product Liability Directive - Track: Legal DTSTART:20261113T134000 DTEND:20261113T135500 UID:6aac41e6d398e22afc3d78f8f84c236e9b70cd03ecd1b DESCRIPTION:The revised EU Product Liability Directive (PLD) fundamental ly changes the liability landscape for software and open hardware. While t he Directive introduces an exemption for Free and Open Source Software dev eloped or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity\, the pract ical scope of this exemption remains uncertain and raises important questi ons for the FOSS ecosystem.
\nThis talk examines how the new PLD app lies to open source software and hardware projects and where maintainers\, foundations\, research institutions and commercial actors may face liabil ity risks. Particular attention will be given to two increasingly common s cenarios: open source projects developed within third-party funded researc h initiatives and software distributed under dual-licensing models. The ta lk will also explore whether the rationale behind the software exemption s hould extend to open source hardware.
\nAttendees will gain a practi cal understanding of when the PLD’\;s open source exemption is likely to apply\, when liability risks may arise\, and why contractual disclaime rs alone cannot eliminate product liability under EU law. The session will further discuss how project governance\, funding structures and distribut ion models can influence legal exposure.
\nAs one of the first analy ses of the new PLD from an open source (hardware) perspective\, this talk provides timely guidance for open source stakeholders aiming to build digi tally sovereign solutions on free and open source technologies. While only future case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union can provi de definitive answers\, the presentation offers a framework for understand ing the emerging legal landscape and preparing for compliance today.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/open-source-software-and-open-source-hardwa re-under-the-new-european-product-liability-directive/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:The Last Decade - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T140000 DTEND:20261113T141500 UID:6aac41e6d4aa94c78dcb523370c91589ba2a65f538be0 DESCRIPTION:The next ten years are the last period in which the governan ce architecture of AI can be meaningfully shaped by society. After that\, the concentration of capability\, infrastructure\, and data will be too ad vanced to reverse through democratic or regulatory means. Open source is n ot a silver bullet — but it is a necessary condition for any future in w hich humans retain meaningful agency over the systems that govern their li ves.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/the-last-decade/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Own your AI agent: running open source agents on your terms - Track : Engineering DTSTART:20261113T140000 DTEND:20261113T143500 UID:6aac41e6d5ac76a26a8bdda67829ced0b6b8468eecdb9 DESCRIPTION:Owning your AI stack isn’\;t just about ideology\, it&# 8217\;s about building systems you can actually trust and understand. This talk shows how to run your own AI agents in practice\, relying on open so urce code and models: through concrete examples (and some inevitable failu res) it will explore what distinguishes open source agents from commercial services\, and present tools and techniques that make local\, custom agen ts feasible\, not just possible.
\nWe’\;ll also look at Otar i\, Mozilla.ai’\;s open-source LLM gateway\, as an example of the inf rastructure that helps make AI ownership practical by giving developers mo re control over models\, routing\, and observability while keeping a consi stent interface.
\nThe session focuses on practical lessons learn ed from building and operating open source AI systems\, showing how owners hip\, transparency\, and flexibility can be achieved without sacrificing d eveloper experience.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/own-your-ai-agent-running-open-source-agent s-on-your-terms/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:EU Cyber Resilience Act for open-source hardware - Track: Legal DTSTART:20261113T140000 DTEND:20261113T141500 UID:6aac41e6d6af483b8f75dd43e08166d45dc7175e93627 DESCRIPTION:The EU Cyber Resilience Act makes cybersecurity mandatory fo r all network-connected products with digital elements. Open-source hardwa re projects are caught in a regulatory gap: they mix design files\, firmwa re\, documentation\, and physical devices\, but the CRA’\;s open-sour ce exemptions only cover software. This talk works through six common OSH scenarios\, from uploading CAD files to selling kits and finished devices\ , and shows where each triggers manufacturer duties under the CRA. It also covers the new Product Liability Directive\, particularly the question of when design files become products and how liability shifts between non-co mmercial developers\, community organisations\, and commercial integrators . The goal is concrete guidance for OSH developers and makerspaces dealing with EU product law for the first time.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/eu-cyber-resilience-act-for-open-source-har dware/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open Source as an economic governance strategy - Track: Policy & Co mpliance DTSTART:20261113T140000 DTEND:20261113T141500 UID:6aac41e6d7ab67def2ee32ee787759d193b3997ba0af5 DESCRIPTION:Open Source is a licensing model\, a governance model for co mmunities and projects\, and a business model. But can the EU\, and can go vernments use Open Source as a strategy for economic actors?
\nThe E
U and governments seem to have understood the benefits of Open Source in t
he context of increasing digital sovereignty. Public administrations make
use of “\;public money\, public code”\; approaches to make inves
tments more sustainable\, transparent\, and inclusive. But there is a thir
d way pilar to making Open Source beneficial for our societies\, and that
is to make economic actors cooperate on the basis of Open Source.
\nO
pen Source as an economic governance model is particularly effective in al
lowing companies to cooperate on projects where they otherwise would be co
mpetitors\, across regions and borders.
This talk explores the thi rd pillar of Open Source\, the cooperation between businesses\, and in pub lic-private partnerships on the basis of openness.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/open-source-as-an-economic-governance-strat egy/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open Source Building Blocks for Europe’s Independent AI Future Ec osystem - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T142000 DTEND:20261113T143500 UID:6aac41e6d8b91d8f2252b9c8e75244d840805fc2be5f5 DESCRIPTION:As large language models (LLMs) rapidly enter European produ
cts and public services\, most of the underlying AI infrastructure still c
omes from non‑EU providers. This creates not only technical and economic
challenges\, but also legal and strategic risks\, as sensitive data and c
ritical capabilities depend on platforms governed by foreign laws.
\n
The talk highlights how familiar trade‑offs\, such as cost versus contro
l\, convenience versus compliance\, and features versus freedom\, are rele
vant in the AI and LLM contexts. The speaker draws on more than a decade o
f experience delivering IoT and big data solutions for companies in Alto A
dige/Südtirol and beyond to outline how open‑source LLMs\, European clo
ud providers\, and hybrid architectures can help organisations reduce depe
ndency on non‑EU AI platforms\, keep European data under European jurisd
iction\, and gradually build more autonomous AI systems that align with EU
values and regulations.
\nThe talk also argues for Alto Adige/Südti
rol as an ideal place to focus on Sovereign AI efforts. It provides a stro
ng existing open‑source culture with a network of SMEs\, public bodies\,
and research institutions that already collaborate on digital innovation.
It also provides real-world use cases for agriculture\, tourism\, public
administration etc. Furthermore\, its cross‑border\, multilingual contex
t also closely reflects the challenges many European regions face\, making
locally developed solutions with open‑source LLMs and EU‑based infras
tructure directly transferable to the wider EU context.
In the context of the upcoming compendium “\;Open Sourc e Hardware in the EU Market”\;\, this talk will briefly present how i ntellectual property rights\, right to repair and the latest EU regulation on hardware interoperability shape the context of Open Source Hardware.\n
In particular\, after an overview of the relevant EU regulation on the topic of right to repair and interoperability rights\, the talk will f ocus on the effects of the latest specification decision of the European C ommission under the Digital Markets Act (Art. 6(7)) on hardware interopera bility requirements for Apple and its impact on the Open Source Hardware m arket and legislative landscape.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/from-right-to-repair-to-dma-shaping-the-ope n-source-hardware-landscape/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:CRA Compliance Is Not a Checklist: Lessons from the Field on Softwa re Sovereignty - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T142000 DTEND:20261113T143500 UID:6aac41e6dabd563ab41ab79a8f6c194f60c04c5a71b3f DESCRIPTION:As the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) moves from awareness to im plementation\, a deeper challenge is becoming clear: compliance is not jus t a regulatory exercise\, but a question of software sovereignty.
\nMany organizations still approach CRA as a tooling or certification proble m. In practice\, the main barriers are structural. Companies lack full vis ibility into their software supply chains\, underestimate the complexity o f their dependencies\, and rely on standards that do not fully address reg ulatory accountability.
\nThis talk shares practical insights from w orking with industry stakeholders navigating CRA readiness today. It highl ights persistent challenges such as delayed prioritization\, limited suppl ier awareness\, and unclear ownership of responsibilities across organizat ions.
\nMore importantly\, it reframes CRA compliance as an issue of control. Who is responsible for vulnerabilities? Who owns the risk across the supply chain? And how can organizations maintain oversight in ecosyst ems built on open technologies?
\nThe session also explores how coll aborative initiatives such as the Eclipse Foundation’s Open Regulatory C ompliance Working Group are helping companies move toward shared approache s\, reducing fragmentation while strengthening collective control over com pliance processes.
\nAttendees will gain a clearer understanding of how sovereignty\, not just compliance\, is becoming a defining factor in t he future of software development.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/cra-compliance-is-not-a-checklist-lessons-f rom-the-field-on-software-sovereignty/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:E-mail and Digital Sovereignty - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T144000 DTEND:20261113T145500 UID:6aac41e6dbc7d93adb324e1a9d793f8aafd88a9853700 DESCRIPTION:When talking about Digital Sovereignty\, most people refer t o file formats\, document storage\, cloud services and messengers. There i s\, however\, one crucial tool that many don’\;t have on screen: e-ma il.
\nIts underlying standards like SMTP and IMAP reach back to many decades ago\, with some more recent developments like DMARC and MTA-STS. E-mail could be considered one of the world’\;s first federated messe ngers\, is usually business-critical and the hosting market is dominated b y a very few big players. They tend to impose their own rules and often cr eate some sort of lock-in effect\, just like proprietary software and clos ed document formats do.
\nIn this talk\, I will explain why proper e -mail handling is more important than ever\, point out various options fro m self-hosting to cloud providers\, and raise awareness of that one servic e that is too often not on the roadmap for Digital Sovereignty.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/e-mail-and-digital-sovereignty/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Panel Engineering - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T144000 DTEND:20261113T151500 UID:6aac41e6dcae4181771d65608fb53a8a4e2fd4572d320 DESCRIPTION: LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL: TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Copyleft on hardware - Track: Legal DTSTART:20261113T144000 DTEND:20261113T145500 UID:6aac41e6ddad8506d76f3c0aaf8179c239b398ca4b5d8 DESCRIPTION:How can we apply copyleft obligations to hardware? In other words\, how can we ensure that the users’\; freedoms to use\, study\, modify and share the design of a piece of hardware are retained? This tal k aims to address this question by diving into the core legal mechanism of copyleft. In particular\, we will look at the text of the GNU General Pub lic License to understand how copyleft works\, then adapt the obligations to the realm of hardware. This will allow us to understand the legal diffe rences between software and hardware\, identify limitations of license enf orcement\, but also untangle the complexity of combining software and hard ware under copyleft licenses.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/copyleft-on-hardware/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:ARCADIA: Towards an Open and Sovereign AI Toolbox for Knowledge Val orisation - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T144000 DTEND:20261113T145500 UID:6aac41e6dec082149a0cc52b0794e00f14eddf8adf5b9 DESCRIPTION:ARCADIA is a new Horizon Europe project that aims to develop an AI-powered toolbox supporting researchers\, universities and knowledge valorisation professionals throughout the innovation journey—from oppor tunity discovery to intellectual property management and stakeholder engag ement. While the project is still in its early stages\, one of its guiding principles is clear: openness should not be an afterthought but a design choice.
\nThis talk introduces the vision behind ARCADIA and discuss es how the project intends to embrace Open Source technologies\, open stan dards and interoperable architectures wherever possible\, fostering transp arency\, collaboration and long-term sustainability. It will also reflect on the importance of digital sovereignty in the European research ecosyste m\, exploring how publicly funded AI solutions can reduce technological de pendencies while remaining trustworthy\, reusable and aligned with Europea n values.
\nRather than presenting final results\, this session invi tes the Free Software community to engage with the project from the beginn ing\, sharing ideas and perspectives on how AI tools for research and inno vation can be built in a way that is open\, responsible and beneficial for the wider community
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/arcadia-towards-an-open-and-sovereign-ai-to olbox-for-knowledge-valorisation/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:GNU Taler - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T150000 DTEND:20261113T151500 UID:6aac41e6dfc1bbdae932e0c7ad32e47bdcb47828f8376 DESCRIPTION:GNU Taler is a Free Software privacy-friendly payment system
from the GNU project. Taler does not use a blockchain: monetary policies
are expected to be set by a central bank. Digital money can be issued eith
er by retail banks or by the central bank. Paying with Taler is extremely
efficient: customers authorize transactions with one click\, and then the
system takes only a few milliseconds to finalize the transactions. In this
lecture\, we will introduce the political goals\, architecture and techno
logy behind Taler\, demonstrate the current state of the art and outline l
ikely future
\ndevelopments.
Existing discussions of Open Source Hardware (OSH) have focu sed predominantly on licensing\, while comparatively little attention has been paid to the long-term management of intellectual property when contri butors or managing organisations cease to exist. The death of individual d evelopers\, the insolvency or liquidation of organisations\, and the resul ting absence of a legal entity capable of holding or enforcing intellectua l property rights raise important questions for the continuity of OSH proj ects.
\nThis talk examines how copyright\, patent and trademark righ ts may be managed in these situations. It considers who is responsible for enforcing software\, hardware and data related licenses\, and addresses t he legal mechanisms available to preserve the continuity of OSH projects\, including the management\, transfer and enforcement of intellectual prope rty rights.
\nThis talk is aimed at professionals and hobbyists work ing on and developing OSH. No previous knowledge on legal topics or OSH is required.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/when-hardware-lives-on/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:EuroCommons: migrating together towards open source digital commons - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T150000 DTEND:20261113T151500 UID:6aac41e6e1c67672cd5d48f8b9a05b0cd1de5a30677d6 DESCRIPTION:EuroCommons\, a European programme launched by Caisse des D pôts (CDC)\, part of Horizon Numérique 2030 (€18 billion strategic en velope) is a call to large European organisations and to open source vendo rs to join collective working groups\, coalitions\, to plan\, prepare\, fi nance and execute concrete migrations away from proprietary software depen dencies. Together. In project mode. With peers facing the same problems.\n
EuroCommons will bring together CIOs\, open-source software vendors \, foundations and public institutions from across Europe to formalise the first cross-border coalitions around shared software components and commi t to migrate together.
\nEleven coalitions cover the critical digita l components: Digital Workplace\, Communications\, Business Applications\, IT &\; Project Management Tools\, Virtualization\, Cloud / Data / AI\, Security\, Directories / Identity / SSO\, Desktop OS\, Mobile OS &\; A pp Store\, Geographic Information &\; Spatial Data.
\nTo establis h and foster FOSS community trust\, CDC has joined OW2 as a strategic memb er.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/eurocommons-migrating-together-towards-open -source-digital-commons/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Sovereignty and security happen before downloading Linux (…update s) - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T152000 DTEND:20261113T153500 UID:6aac41e6e2ce40697b01412b27e495bb65695920a20a3 DESCRIPTION:Replacing Windows with Linux-based operating systems is incr easing. It is assumed that Linux operating systems that are made up of ope n source code allow sovereignty and increase security and independence.
\nHowever\, is an open source community more predictable than a commer cial company? Can common interests be assumed to exist? What if the open s ource community maintaining the chosen operating system decides to make ch anges that break our use case? Would the user find out before the update i s installed? What risks would rise if suddenly whole countries relied on p rojects never intended to serve such a demand? Is sole financing or introd ucing open source code a solution to digital sovereignty with the necessar y usability\, security and predictability?
\nBased on the definition of a sovereign state\, some Linux operating system communities fulfill mo st conditions: they have governance\, representing and making compromises for their permanent users. They have the capacity to engage into relations with each other: there is collaboration through common code like the R 20\;Linux kernel”\; but also cross-community collaborations through p eople\, who align practices or release cycles. They maintain feedback loop s to projects whose code they use and evaluate how that code will evolve t o adjust on time. Established communities have to be connected to ensure t hat critical security issues (especially in the “\;Linux kernel” \;) are mitigated in all of them before public disclosure\, but also that there are no leaks in advance.
\nThese communities manage new code l ong before any law could attempt to regulate it. The only unfulfilled cond ition of these operating system communities is the lack of geographical te rritory: yet\, could this be their biggest strength and maybe even a requi rement for any digital sovereignty?
\nWidespread review and testing remain major means to prevent unexpected code behavior and vulnerabilities . It is a matter of likelihoods that if there are flaws or vulnerabilities in code\, Linux communities or their allies will identify them first and fix them before serious issues occur. Many of these likelihoods depend on forwarding as much relevant knowledge as possible to the one person probab ly best qualified to make use of it\, connecting knowledge globally. Linux communities support intuitive knowledge creation and timely knowledge tra nsfer. Do the territorial boundaries of traditional sovereign states allow anything similar?
\nEven in the geographical sovereignty\, no state can survive on its own without allies: unconditional independence does no t exist. Beyond territorial boundaries\, what are the differences between these communities and sovereign states? Do they overlap? How to define and distinguish them before discussing their relationship?
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/?post_type=talk&p=8858 TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Generative AI in a Truly Sovereign Digital Europe - Track: Engineer ing DTSTART:20261113T152000 DTEND:20261113T153500 UID:6aac41e6e3d052b22667df51ecdc188064388c2a7dd6c DESCRIPTION:“\;European sovereign AI”\; is on every vendorR 17\;s slide. But the model’\;s nationality is the wrong question: wha t makes generative AI sovereign is where it’\;s served and whose laws bind the provider –\; and that’\;s exactly what sovereignty was hing hides. A European-branded model running on a non-EU cloud is still on e lawful order away from a foreign government\, no matter which data centr e stores the bytes.
\nThis lightning talk is a field guide to real s overeignty for LLMs. We map the spectrum –\; from convenient-but-expo sed to genuinely sovereign –\; show how to spot the washing before yo u sign\, and walk through the honest trade-offs (cost\, quality\, availabi lity) we hit while building the backend for our startup\, lynq.ing.
\n< p>The takeaway: the handful of questions that separate sovereign from sove reignty-washed.\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/generative-ai-in-a-truly-sovereign-digital- europe/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Functional Freedom - Track: Legal DTSTART:20261113T152000 DTEND:20261113T153500 UID:6aac41e6e50586e2e10503da3e880333c87793da63cac DESCRIPTION:As Open Source Hardware (OSH) transitions from schematics an d design files to functional physical objects\, it intersects with the leg al landscape of patent law. This presentation breaks down the legal dimens ion of OSH under the European Patent Convention (EPC)\, specifically addre ssing vulnerabilities of under-resourced OSH communities. We explore risks \, including the wrongful granting of patents over prior art\, the phenome non of ‘patent upgrading’\, and the inadvertent infringement of pre-ex isting patents. Finally\, the talk outlines proactive mitigation and preve ntion strategies\, such as defensive publishing and peer to patent process es\, designed to safeguard the functional freedom of OSH. No previous know ledge on legal topics or OSH is required.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/functional-freedom/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Panel Policy & Compliance - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T152000 DTEND:20261113T155500 UID:6aac41e6e5ef6f9e470e1e766e96f1a8410ae015e69aa DESCRIPTION: LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL: TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:OpenStreetMap for Digital Sovereignty: commons are not magic - Trac k: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T154000 DTEND:20261113T155500 UID:6aac41e6e6fd37c3d94498cf1cb6efefcb9ab3c135aa9 DESCRIPTION:OpenStreetMap is more than a map: it is a digital common and
a critical layer of open infrastructure. But commons are not magic. They
require maintenance\, governance\, conflict resolution\, funding and care.
\nThis talk explains why open geodata matters for digital sovereignt
y\, and why OSM must be sustained as shared infrastructure.
The way open-source repositories receive contributions has c hanged drastically over the past two years. Maintainers are increasingly r eceiving code that has never been tested\, code that completely rewrites t he codebase\, contributions from non-technical users\, and even submission s by those who are not people at all.
\nTraditional strategies for m anaging community contributions are becoming less effective\, and the disc ussion about how to adapt is still ongoing.
\nI’\;ll be sharing a few considerations and tips for handling these new situations\, based o n my experience maintaining several Nextcloud repositories.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/you-get-5000-line-ai-slop-contributions-wha t-do-you-do/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Export Control & Open Source Hardware - Track: Legal DTSTART:20261113T154000 DTEND:20261113T155500 UID:6aac41e6e90d246339053408f919eac497ee79de87246 DESCRIPTION:This talk explains how export control rules apply unexpected ly to open-source hardware (OSH) and why modern practices (AI tools\, embe dded firmware) create new uncertainties. It guides developers through gene ral guidelines on export control in the EU\, the associated risks and sugg ests practical precautions. Attendees will learn what counts as an export\ , if digital and AI-generated hardware designs may trigger controls\, and how to minimise risks\, while advocating for clearer rules.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/export-control-open-source-hardware/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Building a Sustainable Open Source Ecosystem for Municipal Tax Serv ices - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T160000 DTEND:20261113T161500 UID:6aac41e6ea1aed34daa259bf43f4c0d97e7ea76d52959 DESCRIPTION:Public administrations across Europe are investing unprecede nted resources in digital transformation through public programs and funds such as FESR 2014 – 2020 and FESR 2021 –\; 2027. Too often\, howev er\, these investments result in fragmented proprietary solutions with lim ited reuse and long-term dependency risks.
\nThe Goffice 2.0 – Tax
project demonstrates a concrete and scalable alternative: how public mone
y can generate public code\, while at the same time fostering a healthy an
d competitive open-source market.
\nDeveloped within the architecture
Goffice 2.0 of the Consorzio dei Comuni della Provincia di Bolzano\, Goff
ice 2.0 – Tax is a shared\, cloud-based system for the digital managemen
t of municipal taxes and fees\, designed to be used by all 116 municipalit
ies of South Tyrol. The solution covers the entire lifecycle of local taxa
tion processes\, from citizen and contract management to calculation engin
es\, electronic invoicing\, digital notifications and payments\, fully int
egrated with national enabling platforms such as ANPR\, SPID\, CIE\, PagoP
A\, FatturaPA and the National Digital Notifications Platform.
The
application has been developed by Sidera ICTEase as a Java full-stack sol
ution\, based on a microservices architecture orchestrated with Kubernetes
\, ensuring scalability\, resilience and long-term maintainability. The us
er interface is entirely built using the Vaadin framework\, enabling the d
elivery of modern\, high-performance web applications tightly integrated w
ith backend services.
\nA key aspect of the project is its open sourc
e by design approach\, aligned with the public money – public code princ
iple: the software is developed once\, financed with public funds\, and is
reusable over time by other public administrations. This enables economie
s of scale\, procedural standardization and long-term sustainability\, whi
le reducing vendor lock-in.
From an economic and market perspectiv e\, the project highlights the complementary roles of two companies within an open-source ecosystem:
\n• Vaadin\, an Apache 2.0–licensed f ramework\, serves as a strategic pillar for digital sovereignty. By seamle ssly integrating modern web standards into the Java ecosystem and automati ng communication between browser and server\, Vaadin allows developers to build sophisticated full-stack applications without complex frontend stack s. Its open-source model provides public authorities with full control ove r their software stack and data\, supporting independence from proprietary silos.
\n• Sidera ICTEase\, an Italian company specialized in dig ital solutions for the public sector\, has designed and implemented Goffic e 2.0 – Tax leveraging open technologies and open-source components. Its business model is centered on value-added services—architecture design\ , development\, customization\, system integration\, training and long-ter m support—demonstrating how open source shifts the market from license-b ased revenues to expertise and service quality.
\nThe talk will shar e architectural choices\, governance aspects and economic implications of the project\, highlighting best practices and lessons learned for public a dministrations and companies aiming to build sustainable open-source solut ions together. Goffice 2.0 – Tax shows that open source\, when combined with clear governance and service-oriented business models\, can deliver i nnovation\, efficiency and long-term public value.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/building-a-sustainable-open-source-ecosyste m-for-municipal-tax-services/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Reflecting on Access Control in Agentic Architectures - Track: Engi neering DTSTART:20261113T160000 DTEND:20261113T161500 UID:6aac41e6eb36264dfb5c3f099208f9a595bfb3ce49cf4 DESCRIPTION:Agentic architectures are rapidly evolving\, enabling AI age nts to autonomously orchestrate workflows\, access heterogeneous data sour ces\, and act on behalf of users. However\, this increased autonomy amplif ies a fundamental challenge: how do we ensure that agents only access—an d reason over—data they are truly authorized to use? In this talk\, we r eflect on access control as a first-class concern in agentic systems\, goi ng beyond traditional models designed for static applications. We argue th at Attribute-based Access Control provides a natural foundation for these systems\, as it explicitly captures the interplay between users\, agents\, and execution environments. This perspective enables the enforcement of t he principle of least privilege across complex\, multi-agent scenarios\, w here the same agent may operate under different constraints depending on c ontext.The talk concludes with open questions for the software development community\, including how to make authorization transparent to agent desi gn and how to embed secure access control mechanisms as a core building bl ock of future agentic systems.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/reflecting-on-access-control-in-agentic-arc hitectures/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Panel Open Hardware & Legal - Track: Legal DTSTART:20261113T160000 DTEND:20261113T163500 UID:6aac41e6ec1f8288fb41a86f97edbf690d8a3c3c3c9e0 DESCRIPTION: LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL: TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:An Ethical Case for Open Technology - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T160000 DTEND:20261113T161500 UID:6aac41e6ed2cd2eca76b419c723c20ad0d688559ac2b2 DESCRIPTION:One of the key insights from the latest wave of technologica
l innovation – particularly in AI – is that technologies are not simpl
y “neutral.” Instead\, they are intrinsically intertwined with ideolog
ical\, political\, moral\, economic\, and even religious contexts. It is t
herefore no surprise that\, in recent years\, the leaders of major tech co
rporation – the tech bros – have focused less on technology-specific q
uestions and more on publishing manifestos\, worldviews\, and global visio
ns of the future.
\nIn order to assess the significance and scope of
digital sovereignty\, as well as the potential of open and free technologi
es\, we analyze a representative selection of the tech bros’ worldviews
which could hardly be more diverse: Mustafa Suleyman’s (Microsoft) serio
us attempt to address an unprecedented dilemma of technological progress i
n his bestseller The Coming Wave\; Dario Amodei’s (Anthropic) mainstream
-oriented\, welfare-economic manifesto Machines of Loving Grace\; Mark Zuc
kerberg’s (Meta) grandly failed Metaverse project\, which was meant to d
efine nothing less than a new era of global communication\; and\, finally\
, the IPO of Elon Musk’s SpaceX in June 2026\, whose official prospectus
presented a potpourri of science-fiction tropes\, detached from both econ
omic realities and current technical feasibility.
\nFrom an ethical p
erspective\, it is crucial to recognize that the overburdening of technolo
gy with economic\, ideological\, or fictional narratives obscures what tec
hnology itself is and can be. Leaving technological development as well as
reflections on technology itself solely to the Tech Bros\, therefore\, do
es not seem conducive to fostering genuine autonomy and sovereignty. Addit
ionally\, the obvious political interests\, particularly those of the US a
nd China\, hamper the pursuit of technological sovereignity.
\nAgains
t this backdrop\, we argue that the approach of free and open software and
technology concepts represents a far more favorable breeding ground for t
he self-determined development of a diverse and sustainable technological
landscape. Hence\, we raise the question of what concrete steps and measur
es are meaningful and which policies need to be adopted\, in order to supp
ort this development and we give a brief assessment of existing European i
nitiatives\, like Gaia-X or EuroStack\, or Tech Sovereignity Package propo
sed by the EU-Commission.
PA-Webinar is a platform to host webinar\, based on Jitsi Me et and the design system .italia. It is actively developed and maintained by the Dipartimento per la Trasformazione Digitale.
\nIt is build on well-know and maintained open source project and takes an DevSecOps appro ach to ease the adoption and the deployment and monitoring with auto-scali ng.
\nThere are wizard and nice defaults for who organize events tak ing into account all the requirement mandates by the law and guidelines es pecially for usability and accessibility issues.
\nWe will present t he software and introduce the workshop to allow the participants to have a look and deploy it on their cloud infrastructure.
\nhttps://github. com/italia/pa-webinar
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/pa-webinar-public-administration-meets-in-d igital/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Is Your AI Stack Risk-Free ? - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T162000 DTEND:20261113T165500 UID:6aac41e6ef8190168db23b5afc38a863a31a32a3412d0 DESCRIPTION:As AI models become central to modern development stacks\, d evelopers and decision-makers face a critical liability: what actually mak es an AI model “\;Open Source”\; ? Relying on architectures that are merely “\;Open Weight”\; without true data and code transpa rency introduces massive risks to an organization’\;s digital soverei gnty\, data privacy\, and long-term compliance.
\nThis technical ses sion moves past the marketing hype to provide a rigorous framework for ver ifying true Open Source AI. We will dive straight into the operational rea lities of building a sovereign AI stack.
\nAttendees will learn how
to:
\n–\; Navigate the Paradigm Shift: Understand why defining O
pen Source AI is fundamentally different (and significantly harder) than t
raditional Open Source Software.
\n–\; Stress-Test Openness: App
ly community frameworks like the Open Source AI Definition to rigorously e
valuate models before putting them into production.
\n–\; Spot t
he Fakes: Break down the technical realities of “\;Open Weights”
\; and learn how to identify and call out deceptive “\;openwashing
221\; in the commercial ecosystem.
Whether you are an engineer sel ecting models for production or a decision-maker protecting your infrastru cture from vendor lock-in\, this talk delivers the concrete tools needed t o defend your digital rights on the modern AI frontier.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/is-your-ai-stack-risk-free/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Introducing CodeSupply - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T162000 DTEND:20261113T163500 UID:6aac41e6f0941161731fb4b39176f05276940ff6575c3 DESCRIPTION:Software supply chains security depends on accurate metadata
: origin\, licensing\, vulnerabilities\, and project health. That metadata
is scattered across package registries and vulnerability databases\, ofte
n conflicting or outdated\, and stored in multiple incompatible data forma
ts. Proprietary systems provide no reproducibility\, traceability\, or aud
itability\, even as regulators and security teams demand exactly that\, an
d development teams require actionable\, accurate\, and current data to im
prove their security posture.
\nCodeSupply is a new Horizon Europe pr
oject building an open\, federated data catalog to fix this with accessibl
e access to current\, correct\, comprehensive metadata. Using PURLs (Packa
ge-URLs) as universal identifiers for software packages\, it aggregates an
d curates software metadata from distributed\, authoritative sources acros
s heterogeneous ecosystems\, assembles it into reference\, curated data se
ts\, and federates it in a unified and decentralized catalog distributed a
s open data under an open source license.
\nThis talk introduces Code
Supply’\;s architecture and open data sources\, and how it fits into
existing software supply chain security and compliance workflows\, that ar
e primarily FOSS-centric. You’\;ll leave knowing how to plug into the
project\, whether as a data consumer\, a contributor\, a curator\, or an
organization looking for digital sovereignty over its own supply chains me
tadata.
BENEFITS TO THE ECOSYSTEM
\n* Unified\, distributed
and open source of truth for metadata
\nUnderstanding how CodeSupply
aims to consolidate scattered\, conflicting origin\, license\, vulnerabili
ty\, and project-health data into one distributed and federated catalog\,
reducing the duplicated effort of cross-referencing multiple registries\,
duplicating scans\, and code reviews to ensure we can all share and access
effective origin\, license\, security\, and health open data for all FOSS
projects.
* Auditability over black-box\, proprietary data
\
nLearning how an open\, traceable\, reproducible approach to software supp
ly chains data addresses the core weakness of proprietary systems\, with a
n opaque approach to curation. This is relevant for any team facing regula
tory requirements (like CRA) that demand verifiable\, curated compliance d
ata to assess supply chain risks such as exploited vulnerabilities in unde
r 24 hours. When automation is the only way\, then correct\, open data is
the way towards enabling this automation.
* PURL-based supply chai
ns interoperability
\nUnderstanding how using Package-URLs as univers
al identifiers lets CodeSupply tie into the broader standards ecosystem (S
canCode\, ClearlyDefined\, vulnerability databases) rather than creating y
et another siloed format\, when PURL is emerging as the leading identifier
s across CVE\, OSV\, CSAF\, CycloneDX\, SPDX and OpenVEX formats for vulne
rabilities\, SBOMs\, and VEXs reporting.
* Open independence enabl
ing digital sovereignty
\nUnderstanding the project’s relevance to
teams\, organizations and public bodies wanting independence from propriet
ary\, closed data providers for supply chains metadata\, is a growing conc
ern for EU-based entities\, and CodeSupply is an answer to this concern.\n
* Clear and multiple engagement modes
\nLeave knowing concrete
ly how to engage with the CodeSupply project as a data consumer\, data cur
ator\, code contributor\, or sponsoring organization.
Generative AI systems are increasingly trained on vast amoun ts of available source code\, much of which is released under Free and Ope n-Source Software (FOSS) licenses.
\nThis talk aims to provide an ov erview of the possible conflict between open-source licensing frameworks a nd the emerging practices of AI training and source code generation. It wi ll focus on key legal issues\, including the implications of using open-so urce code for training purposes\, the notion of derivative works within th e context of AI-generated outputs\, and the risks associated with the repr oduction of licensed code without proper attribution.
\nThe purpose of the talk is to explore the potential legal risks arising from the use o f generative AI in software development. The session seeks to highlight cu rrent legal uncertainties and to consider how open-source principles may c ontinue to foster AI innovation without undermining digital sovereignty.\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/open-source-licenses-vs-generative-ai-are-w e-breaking-the-rules/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:LLM-Generated Code and Copyright - Track: Legal DTSTART:20261113T164000 DTEND:20261113T172000 UID:6aac41e6f2db85adb3924d52e86b528494ef5cdf3d601 DESCRIPTION:
The progress in large language models (LLMs) has rapidly tra nsformed software development. The adoption of using LLMs to write code (s o-called vibe coding)\, has seen significant adoption rates\, not just amo ng novice/amateur software developers\, but now also in large software com panies and in tech startups.
\nSuch developments raise difficult leg al questions pertaining to intellectual ownership. Who owns copyright in s uch code? How do we approach licensing with LLM-generated code? And are ou r existing frameworks able to sufficiently handle these questions?
\nThis talk will focus on explaining these questions and the difficulties e xperienced when we go about trying to untangle these legal complexities\, albeit with the caveat there are no easy answers to be had at the moment.< /p>\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/llm-generated-code-and-copyright/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:SBOM management with Eclipse Disuko - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T164000 DTEND:20261113T165500 UID:6aac41e6f3f47122962a4193e4ad416f25a32c67ef430 DESCRIPTION:
Complex products like vehicles consist of many major compone nts that are built using a open source software. As a manufacturer we need to comply with the licenses of all embedded open source software elements . For this purpose we have recently published Eclipse Disuko.
\nEcli pse Disuko focuses on consuming SBOMs and the resulting actions based on t heir assessment. It is not meant to produce SBOMs from source code since t hat is well-supported already by other projects. SBOMs might be created by combining imported SBOMs though. Eclipse Disuko comes with a license and policy database that helps a project owner to assess FOSS licenses based o n self-configured use cases and understand the resulting license obligatio ns.
\nThe talk outlines and demos Eclipse Disuko with the goal to at tract further users and contributions.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/sbom-management-with-eclipse-disuko/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193918 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:AI Act, copyright and Open-Source: building transparent AI in Europ e - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T170000 DTEND:20261113T171500 UID:6aac41e700ec5f87f9013719fb28833a8ab3d7bde5017 DESCRIPTION:As Artificial Intelligence systems become increasingly embed
ded in business processes and digital infrastructures\, ensuring complianc
e with European regulations is no longer optional.
\nThe AI Act\, Reg
. (UE) 1689/2024\, together with EU copyright rules\, introduces new requi
rements around transparency\, data provenance and accountability\, particu
larly in relation to the use of protected content in training datasets.
\nThis talk explores how these regulatory frameworks impact the design
and deployment of AI systems\, with a specific focus on intellectual prope
rty and copyright compliance.
\nMoving beyond legal theory\, it highl
ights the practical challenges organizations face when building or adoptin
g AI solutions in Europe.
Building decent software has always required discipline\; wi th LLMs\, that discipline becomes even more critical. This talk applies Do main-Driven Design (DDD) to treat LLM sessions as Bounded Contexts\, with a shared ubiquitous domain language and explicit interaction states to red uce drift and improve output reliability.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/beyond-prompts-applying-domain-driven-desig n-to-llm-session-architecture/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:From Legal Headache to Automated Sanity Check: Open Source Complian ce Made Simple - Track: Policy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T170000 DTEND:20261113T173500 UID:6aac41e7032807dd7847812a7e1a7cc2051ddde09e23e DESCRIPTION:Adding Open Source bits to your app is usually a piece of ca ke\, but making sure you don’\;t step on any license landmines? That& #8217\;s a whole different story. Depending on how you’\;re using the code (SaaS vs. shipping a binary\, tweaking it or just pulling it in\, mi xing it with other libraries\, etc.) different license conditions may kick in. Sometimes those conditions clash\, and suddenly your whole distributi on could be illegal\, especially when you’\;ve got dozens –\; or even hundreds –\; of Open Source components tucked into the build.\n
We’\;ve built a simple license-model language that boils down the crazy variety of Open Source licenses into a handful of clear‑cut\, machine-computable permissions and conditions. On top of that we’\;ve made a tool that asks you what you actually need (e.g.\, can you ship sou rce? Can you disclose changes? …\;)\, then spits out:
\n* a to
do checklist of the license conditions you must meet\,
\n* a warnin
g about any possible license incompatibilities among the components you pi
cked\, and
\n* a list of sensible outbound‑license options for your
final product.
In short\, we turn the headache of Open Source com pliance into a quick\, automated sanity check\, so you can keep building w ithout worrying about walking on a legal minefield.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/from-legal-headache-to-automated-sanity-che ck-open-source-compliance-made-simple/ TRACK:Policy & Compliance TYPE:Policy & Compliance CATEGORIES:Policy & Compliance DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:The Unbearable Lightness of Humans in the Loop - Track: Digital Sov ereignty DTSTART:20261113T172000 DTEND:20261113T173500 UID:6aac41e704484aa71ee722c25a03656d7dd70d46101e9 DESCRIPTION:More and more decisions about us — small and large ones\, routine and life-shaping — are being taken by machines. We are entering an age in which algorithms decide\, or co-decide\, on jobs\, education\, l oans\, social benefits\, insurance\, and the content we are shown. The EU GDPR and the EU AI Act address automated decision-making (ADM) directly an d\, in central cases\, require a human “\;in the loop”\;. Some n ational laws\, notably the new Italian AI statute\, address these issues i n specific sectors. But what does this actually mean in practice? When is a human click enough\, and when is it not? This talk sets out where the EU GDPR and the EU AI Act draw the line\, where national rules may add furth er obligations\, and\, in particular\, which concrete design choices in AD M projects may decide whether human oversight is what it claims to be: a l ast sovereign act of human decision.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/the-unbearable-lightness-of-humans-in-the-l oop/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Interfacing LLMs with Systems Management - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T172000 DTEND:20261113T173500 UID:6aac41e7055a88d7603d707a9ae4de59297424b2db3a3 DESCRIPTION:As Large Language Models (LLMs) start executing tasks via au tonomous agents\, system administrators need secure ways to interface AI w ith real infrastructure.
\nThe Uyuni MCP Server is a Model Context P rotocol implementation that bridges the gap between LLMs and the Uyuni man agement solution. It allows AI agents to securely retrieve data and schedu le tasks on the managed infrastructure using natural language.
\nThe presentation will offer an evaluation of the new Uyuni MCP Server. It wil l show how this component exposes system metrics and lifecycle tools to co mpliant AI clients. The presentation will also focus on the strict securit y boundaries and configuration parameters required to maintain human contr ol over sovereign environments.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/interfacing-llms-with-systems-management/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Intellectual Property on Source Code in times of agentic coding - T rack: Legal DTSTART:20261113T172000 DTEND:20261113T175500 UID:6aac41e7066e6827a3558a92a702acff00881beac7ebe DESCRIPTION:Big AI vendors keep telling us that “\;AI-rewritingR 21\; source code from one language into another produces fresh\, original work that the user can relicense at will. But is this claim actually true?
\nThis talk walks us through a few recent\, very real cases that pu
t those kind of claims to the test from a legal pov.
\nWe will look a
t why neither approach holds up under existing IP law.
This talk i
ncludes a brief overview and introduction to intellectual property rights
aimed at Open Source developers.
\nWe revisit the Berne Convention\,
the Naruto v. Slater “\;monkey selfie”\; ruling on non-human aut
horship\, and the recent German GEMA v. OpenAI decision. We will also disc
uss the limits of the arguments brought forward and legal matters showing
up on the horizon. Along the way we will also clarify the possible legal i
mpact of agentic programming.
The goal is to give FOSS maintainers \, contributors\, and decision-makers a clear\, practical mental model for evaluating “\;AI-(re)wrote-it”\; claims – both when they are made to their projects and when they are tempted to leverage the power of LLMs themselves.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/intellectual-property-on-source-code-in-tim es-of-agentic-coding/ TRACK:Legal TYPE:Legal CATEGORIES:Legal DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Lost in Regulation? Navigating the EU Cybersecurity and Data Law Ju ngle as a Tech Company - Track: Digital Sovereignty DTSTART:20261113T174000 DTEND:20261113T175500 UID:6aac41e7077d63bc96ed2766cd0871083fdb0e41ca0c5 DESCRIPTION:The EU has produced one of the most ambitious digital regula tory frameworks in history — but for tech companies\, developers\, and S MEs trying to stay compliant\, it increasingly feels like a jungle: overla pping obligations\, staggered deadlines\, conflicting definitions\, and re gulatory gaps that no single lawyer or consultant can fully map alone.
\nThis talk gives a frank\, practitioner-level overview of the regulato ry landscape that any technology company operating in Europe must navigate today: GDPR (data protection and privacy)\, NIS-2 (cybersecurity obligati ons for essential and important entities)\, the EU AI Act (risk-based AI g overnance)\, the Cyber Resilience Act (security requirements for products with digital elements)\, and the Data Act (data access and interoperabilit y). For each framework\, the talk identifies who is actually affected\, wh at the core obligations are\, how the frameworks interact and conflict\, a nd — critically — what a small or medium-sized tech company can realis tically do to manage compliance without a team of lawyers.
\nThe tal k also highlights how open-source software and open standards reduce regul atory risk: transparent\, auditable\, and interoperable systems are struct urally better positioned to meet the EU’\;s growing compliance requir ements than proprietary black-box alternatives. Attendees leave with a pra ctical mental model for mapping their own regulatory exposure and a set of open-source tools and practices that address multiple compliance obligati ons at once.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/lost-in-regulation-navigating-the-eu-cybers ecurity-and-data-law-jungle-as-a-tech-company/ TRACK:Digital Sovereignty TYPE:Digital Sovereignty CATEGORIES:Digital Sovereignty DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Unknown Data, Useful Answers - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261113T174000 DTEND:20261113T175500 UID:6aac41e70881fb16481d3fded61acbbf4b3d09d5f5571 DESCRIPTION:Making sense of data has traditionally required understandin g structure\, schemas\, building pipelines and defining metadata before an y meaningful analysis could begin. But what if you could start with questi ons instead?
\nIn this talk\, we will explore how AI can act as an a daptive data analyst\, helping users work with unfamiliar datasets\, docum ents and heterogeneous sources without extensive preparation. By discoveri ng structure\, categorizing information and identifying relationships\, AI can accelerate data exploration and turn raw data into useful answers.
\nThrough practical examples\, we will see how AI-assisted workflows c an help uncover insights\, lower the barrier to data analysis and enable u sers to extract value from data they have never seen before.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/unknown-data-useful-answers/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:DMA Interoperability: What It Means for Free Software - Track: Poli cy & Compliance DTSTART:20261113T174000 DTEND:20261113T175500 UID:6aac41e708b181d6e800bb55cffe88d75f7058134866f DESCRIPTION:The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) promises open digital marke ts by forcing gatekeepers like Apple and Google to grant “\;free and effective access to hardware and software features”\;\, a direct open ing for Free Software developers to build real alternatives. But two years into implementation\, the gap between the law’\;s promise and what d evelopers actually experience on the ground is striking.
\nHow is in teroperability actually being granted\, and on what terms? While AppleR 17\;s public tracker lists nearly fifty interoperability requests\, the re al story lies in what gets denied\, delayed\, or buried in conditions that lock out Free Software projects.
\nThis talk presents what FSFE has learned from two years of monitoring DMA implementation from a Free Softw are perspective. We will share findings from our developer survey\, walk t hrough Apple’\;s and Google’\;s gatekeeping practices\, and expl ain what FSFE is doing \, including in court\, to push back.
\nSpeci fically\, we will:
\n–\; Walk through Apple’\;s 40+ intero
perability requests and what they mean for Free Software: which doors are
opening\, which are being slammed shut\, and why the denials matter most.<
br />\n–\; Examine Google’\;s moves on Android: changes to AOSP
source availability\, tightening interoperability documentation\, and side
-loading restrictions that threaten alternative app ecosystems and distrib
ution channels.
\n–\; Report on FSFE’\;s litigation against
Apple under DMA Art. 6(7)\, and what it means for the broader fight for s
oftware freedom on locked platforms.
\n–\; Present findings from
the FSFE DMA Interoperability Survey\, which collects structured\, first-
hand accounts from Free Software developers trying to access interoperabil
ity.
The talk presents the Digital Independence Day initiative\,
born in Germany and is now being implemented in Italy.
\nDID aims to
build a community of activists ready to help anyone who wants to be free f
rom Big Tech dominance through “hands-on” meetups\, where people gathe
r and start removing proprietary software to switch to independent\, free\
, ethical alternatives.
In addition\, the talk outlines the curren t state of digital sovereignty in Europe and the political and regulatory initiatives to achieve it.
\n LOCATION:Auditorium (A2) URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/digital-independence-day-a-path-towards-dig ital-sovereignty/ TRACK:Digital Independence Day TYPE:Digital Independence Day CATEGORIES:Digital Independence Day DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Your Code of Conduct Is Killing Your Community (And What to Build I nstead) - Track: Community DTSTART:20261114T092000 DTEND:20261114T095500 UID:6aac41e70f115508413bfaf5000b0ec38e2a4fc5b0007 DESCRIPTION:Almost every open source project has a Code of Conduct\, and most of us hope it’\;s doing more work than it actually is. In this follow-up to “\;Building a No-Drama Community”\; (SFSCON 2024)\, we’\;ll look at what tends to happen after a project adopts a CoC\, why the document on its own can only carry so much weight\, and how the go odwill a project has spent years building can be worn down surprisingly qu ickly when someone learns to work the process from the outside.
\nDrawing on five years of running the AlmaLinux OS Foundation and two decades in open source communities\, this talk walks through some of the common ways CoCs fall short in practice (adopted without a clear enforceme nt path\, leaned on as legal cover\, or used against the very people they were meant to protect)\, the patterns bad actors tend to rely on\, and the structural foundation that makes a CoC meaningful: distributed authority\ , documented process\, transparent decisions\, and the organizational will to actually follow through.
\nAimed at community leaders\, project maintainers\, and foundation directors who have a Code of Conduct in place and are quietly wondering whether it’\;s doing enough. Pract ical\, honest\, and grounded in what has worked and what hasn’\;t.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/your-code-of-conduct-is-killing-your-commun ity-and-what-to-build-instead/ TRACK:Community TYPE:Community CATEGORIES:Community DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:What the Docs Won’t Tell You - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T092000 DTEND:20261114T095500 UID:6aac41e71007d30dc6258580e9d1a8644238b15b2a925 DESCRIPTION:Nextcloud’\;s extensibility is core to its value as a s overeign\, self-hosted platform\; but the path from “\;I have an idea ”\; to “\;I have a working app”\; isn’\;t always obvio us.
\nThis talk is a code-first walkthrough of Nextcloud app develop ment as it stands today: app architecture\, the bootstrapping and dependen cy injection model\, and a live demo built from the official app-tutorial example. We’\;ll also cover ExApps\, Nextcloud’\;s newer model f or running app logic outside the core PHP process.
\nExpect concrete gotchas\, debugging strategies\, and a working mental model\, plus a star ting point you can clone and extend yourself.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/what-the-docs-wont-tell-you/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Automating translation of a bestseller to spark children’s intere st in coding - Track: Open Access DTSTART:20261114T092000 DTEND:20261114T095500 UID:6aac41e710f7f983a799b386f042d41c7002e5dfbf88c DESCRIPTION:The story “Ada &\; Zangemann – A Tale of Software\, S kateboards and Raspberry Ice Cream” inspires the software freedom commun ity because it covers more than the simple value of learning to program. I t also covers the importance of control over technology and its impact on society. In this way the story is inspiring many kids\, teens\, parents an d many others to learn programming and shape technology.
\nI too was captivated by the story. Working on a Dutch translation sent me down the path of improving the automation to help others like me to translate the s tory and publish it in different formats. The free culture license of the book enables and compels the community to adapt it\, and they have. The co mmunity keeps surprising us with new formats to convey the story. Since it s release it has been translated into 38 languages\, published as a book i n 7 and as movie in 5. And it is available in a growing number of other fo rmats: epub\, online book\, bilingual book and kamishibai.
\nTransla tion and localization is the primary purpose of the automation. More inter esting and ambition is to support the increasing number of formats: from p rinted book\, to online book\, voiceover text and subtitles. This wide var iety of formats presents a unique challenge for which no ready-made soluti on exists. By leveraging open standards (XML\, Docbook\, ITS) and Free Sof tware (Scribus\, itstool\, gettext\, xsltproc\, pandoc\, Weblate) we creat ed automation that enables translators to add new languages while also ena bling new formats to be added. This includes a novel method for inserting text and images into Scribus. This multi-media setup can be used as inspir ation for other free culture multi-media projects.
\nIn this present ation I will tell the story how the automation developed over time. I̵ 7\;ll share the inspiring stories from the community that leveraged the au tomation and influenced its development. The technical challenge of the au tomation is fun\, but the community stories give it meaning and motivate m e to keep at it.
\nWith this presentation I hope to inspire others t o contribute to the Ada &\; Zangemann community by translating\, adding a new format or contributing to the automation and to share own materials benefiting our community as Open Educational Resources.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/automating-translation-of-a-bestseller-to-s park-childrens-interest-in-coding/ TRACK:Open Access TYPE:Open Access CATEGORIES:Open Access DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open Source, If You Have €200,000 - Track: LLM DTSTART:20261114T092000 DTEND:20261114T093500 UID:6aac41e711d90ab744a7abab03db963c595d36101a1b5 DESCRIPTION:In 2026\, large language models call themselves “\;open
source”\; more often than ever\, frequently under genuinely free lic
enses (MIT\, Apache 2.0) and without the contractual tricks that have alre
ady earned other models an official “\;open washing”\; accusatio
n from the Open Source Initiative. On paper\, it looks like a golden age f
or anyone who believes in free software applied to AI.
\nThen you loo
k at the hardware requirements. Even the “\;lightweight”\; versi
on of one of 2026’\;s most relevant open-weight models — purpose-bu
ilt for self-hosting — needs roughly 170GB of VRAM: two professional GPU
s costing tens of thousands of euros each. The full version needs over hal
f a terabyte\, spread across multi-node datacenter clusters. The marketing
says “\;no vendor lock-in”\;\; the practice says that unless yo
u have a datacenter’\;s budget\, the lock-in is exactly the same as b
efore — just moved from the license to the infrastructure.
\nThe ta
lk examines this new form of cosmetic openness: where it comes from\, whic
h models pass the OSI’\;s legal test and which don’\;t\, and abo
ve all why even the models that do pass remain\, in the daily practice of
a developer or small company\, indistinguishable from a proprietary servic
e locked inside someone else’\;s cloud.
Wheter a freelancer or part of an organization\, working in
a digital environment requires tools to modify the products\, measure the
performance\, track competitors etc etc..
\nEvery tool is a license a
nd a cost. Overtime\, these tools became huge platforms capable of doing m
any different things. The firepower grows along with the costs. Point is:
we rarely use ALL the functionalities these platform has to offer and yet
we pay the whole package.
\nThankfully the AI revolution gave us the
possibility to create our own artifact\, then why not replicate that singl
e feature that we really need by our own?
\nSo here’\;s how me &
#8211\; a seo manager with close to none dev experience –\; built a t
iny tool for reading server logs and save thousands in the making.
\n
Not a pitch to throw away your entire stack\, but to rationalize it. Becau
se for the one function you actually use\, the platform was always overkil
l.
Digital Independence Day (DI.DAY) is a fast growing initiati ve that empowers individuals and organizations to reclaim digital freedom by switching to democracy-friendly\, open-source alternatives. This talk e xplores how DI.DAY started in Germany in January and quickly spread across the country and beyond. DI.DAY combines practical change recipes (step-by -step guides for migrating away from Big Tech)\, real-life community event s\, and networking opportunities to drive mass adoption of Free Software. With hundreds of events organized monthly across Germany\, but also in Por tugal\, Ireland\, USA or Italy\, and over 100\,000 website visitors per mo nth\, DI.DAY demonstrates the scalable impact of grassroots advocacy – w ith a difficult line to walk: How “\;pure”\; should a recipe be (with regards to using FOSS\, based in Europe etc.)\, but how practical an d easy to follow as well to reach a wider audience? DI.DAY contributes to democratizing access to open\, ethical alternatives through actionable res ources and community engagement. It concentrates on user-friendly advocacy —paired with tangible switch recipes and local events—to accelerate th e shift toward open technologies at scale.
\n LOCATION:Auditorium (A2) URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/digital-independence-day-building-a-global- movement-for-resilience-and-sovereignity/ TRACK:Digital Independence Day TYPE:Digital Independence Day CATEGORIES:Digital Independence Day DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Open Source, Open Doors: Building Inclusive Communities with Python - Track: Community DTSTART:20261114T100000 DTEND:20261114T101500 UID:6aac41e7146a77e35a6a2d2d688c562ee02dc0261c3fc DESCRIPTION:PyLadies is a global community that supports women and other
marginalized genders in becoming active participants and leaders in the P
ython open-source ecosystem. Through local chapters\, meetups\, workshops\
, mentorship\, and community events\, PyLadies creates welcoming spaces wh
ere people can learn\, share knowledge\, build confidence\, and contribute
to technology together.
\nCheck for more infos: pyladies.com.
The session will present what PyLadi es is\, how the global community works\, and why local chapters matter. It will explain how PyLadies chapters can support beginners\, students\, res earchers\, developers\, educators\, career changers\, and experienced prof essionals alike. A chapter can offer many formats: informal meetups\, codi ng sessions\, talks\, study groups\, contribution sprints\, mentoring circ les\, collaborations with universities and research institutions\, and eve nts connected to the wider Python and FOSS communities.
\nThe goal o f this talk is not only to inform\, but also to invite. It is an open call for people in South Tyrol who are interested in creating a local chapter together. Starting a chapter does not require being an expert Python devel oper or an experienced organizer. It requires curiosity\, care\, collabora tion\, and a shared wish to make the local tech community more accessible and inclusive.
\nLet’s take these first practical steps together.
Let’s discuss how you want to see the local FOSS and Python community de
velope. I want to encourage people from marginalized groups\, as well as a
llies\, to help build a welcoming community where more people can learn Py
thon\, contribute to open source\, and grow into leadership roles within o
ur tech communities.
\nSouth Tyrol has the people\, the institutions\
, and the energy. What is missing is a local chapter. Let’s start one to
gether.
This talk explores how Free and Open Source Software creates value through community\, trust and long-term adoption.
\nWe’\ ;ll look at how everyday developer decisions: choosing tools\, contributin g to projects or maintaining them over time\, influence which technologies organisations come to rely on. These choices shape not only adoption\, bu t also how much control and flexibility organisations retain over their sy stems.
\nBy focusing on real-world examples and ecosystem dynamics\, we’\;ll highlight how open source enables more sustainable and trans parent technology choices and why community-driven projects such as Payara Community\, Jakarta EE and OpenJDK play a key role in building reliable\, widely used infrastructure.
\nAttendees will leave with a clearer u nderstanding of how their day-to-day work contributes to the success of op en technologies and how those decisions influence trust\, adoption and lon g-term control over the systems their organisations depend on.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/open-source-doesnt-make-money-until-it-does / TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Exhibiting the History and Culture of Source Code - Track: Open Acc ess DTSTART:20261114T100000 DTEND:20261114T101500 UID:6aac41e71620e83edda71ee8f02a6bd98b6ee953c56e5 DESCRIPTION:The presentation focuses on an exhibition organised by Softw
are Heritage\, a non-profit organisation dedicated to collecting and prese
rving source code\, with support from Inria\, the French National Institut
e for Research in Digital Science and Technology\, as well as from UNESCO.
I was honoured to be part of the Exhibition Committee and thus contribute
to the creation of this pathbreaking event.
\nThe concept of the exh
ibition was based on the premise that source code holds rich layers of mea
ning and reflects the historical\, social and cultural context of its crea
tion. Following a competitive call for poster proposals on source code rel
eased under a free open source license\, the exhibition committee selected
fifteen proposals. The selected posters were exhibited at the UNESCO head
quarters in Paris in January 2026.
\nThe exhibition was organised aro
und three interpretative axes: Source Code as Historical Testimony\, Sourc
e Code as Mirror of Society\, and Source Code as Cultural Artefact. Follow
ing its Paris première\, the collection of posters was planned as an exhi
bition travelling to several European venues\, including the Sorbonne Univ
ersity and the Cité des Sciences et de l’\; Industrie in Paris\, as
well as the SFSCON in Bolzano. All exhibition materials are openly publish
ed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license\, enabling institutions worldw
ide to independently host\, replicate\, or even expand the collection and
thus foster accessibility and global dialogue on digital heritage.
Semantic drift is one of the most expensive problems in ente rprise AI today — and most organizations don’\;t know they have it. It’\;s what happens when “\;revenue”\; means something sli ghtly different in your CRM than your data warehouse than your BI tool tha n your AI agent’\;s system prompt: as the definition of “\;reven ue”\; drifts\, your business’\; ability to measure it accurately evaporates. This is exacerbated in AI systems: as the semantic layer drif ts\, hallucinations increase and token – compute – costs spiral. What AI needs is a structured\, consistently defined semantic layer on top of y our data.
\nThe Apache Ossie (incubating) Apache 2.0\, vendor-neutra l YAML specification built in the open\, with 50+ organizations collaborat ing to define metrics\, dimensions\, and AI context once\, portably\, acro ss any tool. In this talk\, we’\;ll go through the creation of the Os sie spec\, how to get involved\, and go through real-world examples of tam ing data for AI using Ossie.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/grounding-ai-in-reality-via-the-semantic-la yer-with-apache-ossie-incubating/ TRACK:LLM TYPE:LLM CATEGORIES:LLM DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Reclaiming Our Choice: Why Digital Independence Demands Open Standa rds and Accessibility in FOSS - Track: Digital Independence Day DTSTART:20261114T102000 DTEND:20261114T103500 UID:6aac41e717d6d581f147066bdab7fe6e897794b3a834f DESCRIPTION:A blind user has few choices for their digital independence\
; a sighted person can explore dozens of Linux distros or cheap smartphone
s\, while blind and visually impaired mostly rely on commercial tech with
accessibility on board or external softwares\, but there is no ethical rea
son why most proprietary operating systems are accessible: American Disabi
lity Act (ADA) and federal USA laws for universities have made accessibili
ty mandatory through the years but until when?
\nWhile Android faces
growing restrictions and complex de-googling processes\, iOS remains the m
ost usable and accessible mobile platform for the visually impaired. Yet\,
even this “\;gold standard”\; is no longer a certainty\, as on-
board accessibility features become less stable and increasingly dependent
on unpredictable\, cloud-based corporate ecosystems. Relying on closed so
ftware means accepting that your autonomy can be limited or altered overni
ght by a single update or even political decision.
True\, sustaina
ble independence cannot be built on proprietary quicksand or AI fast acces
sibility illusion\; that’\;s temporary. It must rely on open\, decent
ralized standards like RSS and Markdown\, alongside robust local FOSS tool
s like the NVDA screen reader on Windows –\; at least until we’\
;re allowed to install our own software there.
\nFediverse and open w
eb are the key\, accessibility and ethics should be built by community for
community\, not counting on a State or a corporation who thinks of us.
This talk is a direct reality check for the free software community. We need to bridge the gap between blind users and open-source developers\ , moving past toxic polarization\, guilt-tripping\, or elitist “\;fix it yourself”\; mentalities. Not every blind user is a developer\, bu t every blind user deserves access. This session calls for blind and sight ed tech enthusiasts to sit at the same table and co-design a truly open fu ture\, ensuring that digital freedom is built on stable\, accessible found ations for everyone.
\n LOCATION:Auditorium (A2) URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/reclaiming-our-choice-why-digital-independe nce-demands-open-standards-and-accessibility-in-foss/ TRACK:Digital Independence Day TYPE:Digital Independence Day CATEGORIES:Digital Independence Day DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Don’t Be That Guy: packaging community values like a MANIFEST.in - Track: Community DTSTART:20261114T102000 DTEND:20261114T103500 UID:6aac41e718ac44215a08bb8395bb32cd52e62c4f983e9 DESCRIPTION:In Free and Open Source Software communities\, collaboration
often breaks down not because of code\, but because of unclear expectatio
ns.
\nWhat does “good behaviour” mean in a distributed project? H
ow do we agree on communication norms\, decision-making\, ownership\, or f
eedback when contributors come from different cultures\, time zones\, and
backgrounds?
\nInspired by MANIFEST.in and the spirit of the Agile Ma
nifesto\, our team experimented with treating community values like someth
ing you “package” explicitly: not left implicit\, but made visible\, s
hared\, and versioned.
We created a manifesto using virtual whiteb oards\, voting and a pinch of AI\, we aligned perspectives on what truly m attered day-to-day.
\nThe manifesto became more than a guide: it is our north star. It clarified expectations\, strengthened cohesion and iden tity\, and helped prevent “that guy” behaviors. It also normalized err or culture and generated positive side effects\, like virtual coffee\, cat photos and manicaretti in chat\, making work lighter and more inclusive.< /p>\n
This talk shares the real process of building that manifesto\, wha t worked\, what didn’t\, and how similar approaches can help open-source projects and distributed communities build stronger\, more inclusive and more resilient collaboration cultures.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/dont-be-that-guy-packaging-community-values -like-a-manifest-in/ TRACK:Community TYPE:Community CATEGORIES:Community DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Migrating to Autonomy: The Journey from VMware to Proxmox VE in the Loacker Case - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T102000 DTEND:20261114T103500 UID:6aac41e719968eda2ef76b3aafee6382c5aad26627384 DESCRIPTION:For over ten years\, we have been supporting companies and p ublic administrations in the design of open-source infrastructures\, syste ms integration\, and digital sovereignty projects. As an ISO 27001\, 27017 \, 27018\, and ISO 9001 certified company\, we see free software not only as a technological choice but as a sustainable model capable of generating autonomy\, skills\, and shared long-term value.
\nThe presentation will showcase real-world experiences of adopting open-source technologies in practical contexts\, demonstrating how it is possible to reduce depende nce on proprietary platforms while maintaining control over data\, infrast ructure\, and processes.
\nWe will present one of the most significa nt projects with our client Loacker\, where we are working on the migratio n of the virtualization infrastructure from VMware to Proxmox VE\, a platf orm we have been partners with and users of for about fifteen years. The i nfrastructure has been integrated with open-source tools that support the implementation of the security measures required by the NIS2 Directive\, i ncluding FreeIPA for centralized authentication and multi-factor authentic ation\, Wazuh for SIEM and XDR\, and Zabbix for system and service monitor ing.
\nThe goal of the presentation is to share experiences\, method ologies\, and concrete results that demonstrate how digital sovereignty ca n be achieved through sustainable\, secure\, and already scalable open-sou rce solutions. The session will also explore key topics for free software and open technologies\, such as interoperability\, security\, and technolo gical independence\, highlighting approaches and practices that support th eir practical adoption.
\nAt Continuity S.r.l.\, we develop open-sou rce digital solutions that enable companies and organizations to manage in frastructure and data autonomously\, securely\, and transparently\, reduci ng dependence on proprietary platforms and external vendors. Our approach is based on modular and interoperable technologies designed to ensure oper ational continuity\, control\, and long-term resilience.
\nThe contr ibution we propose to SFSCON aims to share practical experiences\, methodo logies\, and perspectives related to the adoption of free software as a st rategic lever for building more open\, ethical\, and sustainable digital e cosystems.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/migrating-to-autonomy-the-journey-from-vmwa re-to-proxmox-ve-in-the-loacker-case/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:An approach to digitisation of cultural heritage in small cultural institutions: infrastructure and community building in a “network of col lections” to enable digital sovereignty - Track: Open Access DTSTART:20261114T102000 DTEND:20261114T103500 UID:6aac41e71a773cbfd612ec6ce1efa665dbfa6054cbb44 DESCRIPTION:Museums\, collections\, media archives\, and other cultural
institutions in South Tyrol vary greatly\; however\, they share a common f
eature: small size and limited resources\, as is typical in the cultural s
ector. Many of these small institutions play an active role in preserving
movable cultural heritage. The responsibility for preservation includes ta
sks such as inventorying\, documenting\, cataloguing\, and managing movabl
e cultural assets\, including museum objects and audiovisual collections (
photo\, film\, audio). These institutions range from associations and foun
dations to public institutions\; however\, teams rarely exceed 8–10 peop
le.
\nThis field is characterised by a strong reliance on volunteer w
ork\, committed non-professionals\, and professionals responsible for mult
iple tasks\, as well as full-time staff for whom collection work represent
s only one responsibility among many. As a result\, digitisation practices
differ significantly across organisations.
\nAround the year 2000\,
public authorities in South Tyrol recognised the need for a common strateg
ic and centralised approach\, both to optimise the use of financial resour
ces and to ensure the quality\, accessibility and reusability of digital c
ontent. For almost 20 years\, the Province of South Tyrol has been providi
ng museums\, collections\, media archives\, and other institutions holding
regionally relevant collections with free digital infrastructure for docu
menting their objects and\, since 2010\, publishing selected datasets\, an
d\, since 2017\, providing them as open and interoperable resources. The s
ervice includes not only basic and advanced training in the use of the doc
umentation management system\, but also ongoing content support\, such as
quality control\, guidance on cataloguing practices\, and integration with
external authority files.
\nThe talk will discuss how institutions w
ith very different levels of digital competence and capacity can be engage
d and supported from the perspective of a local public administration acti
ng as a service provider. In particular\, it will address the following qu
estions:
\n1. How can institutions be activated as partners in the di
gitisation of cultural heritage?
\n2. How can they be empowered to re
tain control over their data and its presentation in the digital environme
nt while making it accessible for reuse?
\n3. How can they remain act
ive contributors over time within a shared data ecosystem?
\n4. How c
an this “network of collections” be sustained through community-buildi
ng processes that support both collaboration and data sovereignty?
A year has passed since [the Eternal November began](https:/ /sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/apr/15/eternal-november-generative-ai-llm/)\, marking the point in history when LLM-backed generative AI systems becaus e substantially more useful\, to the point where many people who had never developed software before could practically create and modifying exist so ftware using these tools alone.
\nA lot has happened in AI tooling a nd the recommendations that are developing along with it since then. Local models continue to improve\, giving us even more potential insight into e xactly how a tool provides its results\, or even (gasp!) actual reproducib ility. While some communities have adopted policies of no AI tooling ever or\, at the other end\, no disclosure (of when such tools are used) needed \, a middle ground has developed thanks to various communities that have t aken a critical look at these technologies\, while also acknowledging the immense benefits they can provide\, especially to new contributors.
\n< p>In this talk\, we’\;ll take a look at these developments\, especial ly looking at recommendations and policies from various projects that are constantly adapting to the ever-changing realities. In particular\, weR 17\;ll discuss the [Recommendations When Using LLM-backed Generative AI Sy stems for FOSS Contributions](https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/jun/18/l lm-backed-generative-ai-recommendations/) published by Software Freedom Co nservancy (SFC) in June along with the feedback it has received\, as well as AI policies adopted by various SFC member projects and other large FOSS communities. We’\;ll compare and contrast these\, and discuss them i n light of the latest developments in models (especially local models)\, t o see how we can adapt and update them for the future.\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/one-year-into-the-eternal-november/ TRACK:LLM TYPE:LLM CATEGORIES:LLM DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Be a FOSS indie podcaster - Track: Community DTSTART:20261114T104000 DTEND:20261114T105500 UID:6aac41e71c35c07225b0e6ed47329cf934ab86e65edca DESCRIPTION:A case study: the independent podcast
\nChoosing to be
an independent podcaster can come from many different reasons. But indepe
ndent from whom? And from what?
\nWhile digital sovereignty is a topi
c that engages policymakers at both the national and European levels\, thi
s talk focuses on podcasters who have chosen not to rely on production com
panies and who build their audience one listener at a time using only free
\, open\, and federated tools and apps.
\nThis is the story of Io Hac
ker and LINKioni\, and of the platforms that make their independence possi
ble.
Let’\;s see what is great and what is not working in the se experiences.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/be-a-foss-indie-podcaster/ TRACK:Community TYPE:Community CATEGORIES:Community DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Everything in the wok - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T104000 DTEND:20261114T105500 UID:6aac41e71d0e9b239ce875052d540cdd7079e9ffeb5b4 DESCRIPTION:I’\;d like to introduce Wok\, a little Rust CLI I’ \;ve been building to smooth out my own local workflow. In this short sess ion\, I’\;ll show how it fits into my day-to-day and the ideas behind it. It’\;s opinionated\, ergonomic\, and built to type as little as possible\, with short commands and a consistent shape you can build muscle memory around\, so the common things become almost automatic.
\nIf you juggle a lot of repositories or use git worktree extensively\, I hope you’\;ll leave with an idea or two worth borrowing.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/everything-in-the-wok/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Who Gets to Describe the Machine? - Track: Open Access DTSTART:20261114T104000 DTEND:20261114T105500 UID:6aac41e71de7f48b9f7d3fa3f4a1eeccef627142e7c30 DESCRIPTION:Tinplate toys\, which reached their peak in Portugal between 1920 and 1960\, represent an underexplored part of industrial heritage. O ne of their defining features is also one of their most fragile: the mecha nical system\, a miniaturised descendant of clockwork mechanisms. These me chanisms are small\, often inaccessible\, and rarely understood by the pro fessionals responsible for the collections in which they are preserved. As inventorying is the first act in the preservation process\, the consequen ces of imprecise terminology are significant\, leading to fragmented and i nconsistent records that ultimately fail to protect the objects they are i ntended to preserve. However\, producing accurate descriptions requires me chanical expertise that most collectors\, owners\, and museum professional s neither possess nor can easily acquire.
\nTo bridge this gap\, we developed a structured knowledge model. Each object is functionally decomp osed into main mechanical sub-systems encoded as a controlled vocabulary\, a taxonomy\, and a dichotomous key. Through a short sequence of simple\, guided questions\, non-specialists can produce standardized\, technically accurate descriptions suitable for inventories\, catalogues\, and exhibiti on records.
\nIn this talk\, we will describe the foundation and pro cess that supports cultural heritage stakeholders in creating inventory-re lated documentation. This includes a wide range of information\, such as d etailed descriptions of materials and mechanical features. Additionally\, knowledge of mechanical features is expanded by acquiring and processing d ynamic signatures of objects in operation using open-source tools to asses s operational condition.
\nWe present this work as a project in tran sition. Our validated prototype was developed on a proprietary\, rapid-to- deploy\, no-code platform\, but it was ultimately incompatible with the op enness required for cultural heritage documentation. We are sharing this e xperience as both a lesson learned and the rationale behind our next step: releasing the vocabulary as open data and reimplementing the tool as free \, open-source software that any institution can deploy\, adapt and host o n its own infrastructure. For small museums and community collections\, th is openness is not just convenient\, it is a prerequisite for standardisat ion\, interoperability and sovereignty over a shared cultural record.
\ n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/who-gets-to-describe-the-machine/ TRACK:Open Access TYPE:Open Access CATEGORIES:Open Access DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:‘Looking For Freedom’: KDE’s Outreach To Institutions In The Age Of Digital Sovereignty - Track: Digital Independence Day DTSTART:20261114T110000 DTEND:20261114T111500 UID:6aac41e71ec519ca79323d81846ba189690ac5e1f9f1e DESCRIPTION:European organizations are increasingly talking about digita l sovereignty”\;\, and some institutions have begun the migration awa y from Big Tech software. This historic turn toward digital sovereignty ha s given Free Software a unique opportunity\, but it also comes with risks. Will procurement budgets end up supporting long-standing Free Software pr ojects\, or the opportunists capitalizing on new business opportunities? M ight Free Software be passed over for proprietary Europe-first products? H ow can Free Software communities like KDE reach the institutions looking f or digital independence?
\nIn this talk I will present the work KDE e.V. is doing to reach public institutions. Which opportunities and risks have we identified? What services do we see as necessary for institutional change and how can our community provide them? And in the current politic al climate\, how do we present such a diverse and international community as KDE to nationally-oriented politicians? This presentation will provide input for a larger discussion about Free Software in the context of politi cal rhetoric around digital sovereignty.
\n LOCATION:Auditorium (A2) URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/looking-for-freedom-kdes-outreach-to-instit utions-in-the-age-of-digital-sovereignty/ TRACK:Digital Independence Day TYPE:Digital Independence Day CATEGORIES:Digital Independence Day DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Let’s toot together! The Fediverse for outreach for organizations - Track: Community DTSTART:20261114T110000 DTEND:20261114T111500 UID:6aac41e71fa6b4dd77a6b2fac37f71b89e21f293e1ee8 DESCRIPTION:Join Tobias and Ana for a conversation about the Fediverse a
nd how the FSFE uses it.
\nTobias will provide a recap of what the Fe
diverse is and why the concept of ‘\;reach’\; on Big Tech platfo
rms is misleading. Then\, Ana will explain which social media channels the
FSFE uses and why the Fediverse is our main tool. Come along to find out
why decentralised tools are essential for achieving digital sovereignty in
the social media sphere.
Korvus is a proof of concept for AI-driven root cause analys is that you can build and run yourself. A pluggable harness gives an LLM t ool-mediated access to your telemetry\, with model choice and inference lo cation left entirely up to you. Alertmanager or a human triggers it\, prod ucing a structured report for an on-call SRE under time pressure: what hap pened\, blast radius\, and ranked root causes with concrete fixes.
\nKorvus is a proof of concept that an SRE team can design\, build\, and op
erate an AI-driven root cause analysis system using free and open source c
omponents end to end: Kubernetes for orchestration\, an OpenTelemetry-comp
atible data path as input\, and Alertmanager as the trigger. The same appr
oach reaches below the cluster. The demo also traces faults into the under
lying infrastructure layer through OpenNebula\, showing that root causes i
n the base layer\, not just the application or cluster layer\, are within
scope. The harness itself is model-agnostic and works equally with open-we
ight models such as Mistral\, Llama\, Qwen\, or DeepSeek and with propriet
ary ones\, with model choice and inference location left entirely up to th
e operator.
\nThe one hard requirement across every layer is GitOps o
ver ClickOps. Because infrastructure and application state are versioned i
n git rather than changed by hand\, the agent can navigate the relevant re
positories directly and correlate a telemetry anomaly with the specific ch
ange that rolled it out\, regardless of which layer it occurred at. The ta
lk’\;s core argument is methodological: with clean telemetry and a cl
ean\, git-driven deployment process in place\, the entire pipeline\, from
data access to inference to report generation\, is something a team can im
plement\, inspect\, and run themselves\, on infrastructure they control.\n
LOCATION:Seminar 2
URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/korvus-building-your-own-ai-driven-root-cau
se-analysis/
TRACK:Engineering
TYPE:Engineering
CATEGORIES:Engineering
DTSTAMP:20260917T193919
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CLASS:PUBLIC
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Digital Sovereignty for Small Languages - Track: Open Access
DTSTART:20261114T110000
DTEND:20261114T113500
UID:6aac41e7217687a4072e0d2e8bdbccfc8cd49b828a95b
DESCRIPTION:
Open your phone or your local government’\;s website in Ladin\, Romansh or Friulian and you’\;ll quickly run into the same w all: the language isn’\;t in the list\, the speech tool doesn’\; t recognize it\, the system simply wasn’\;t built with you in mind.\n
Ladin\, Romansh and Friulian aren’\;t three random minority la nguages thrown together for a grant application — they’\;re the thr ee surviving branches of Rhaeto-Romance\, close enough in structure and hi story that a tool built for one has a real shot at working for another.
\nThat’\;s not just a nice story\; it’\;s the actual bet beh ind DIGI-RLF\, an INTERREG Italy-Switzerland project bringing together gov ernmental and scientific organizations across all three. This talk is a fa irly honest account of how that bet is playing out.
\nThere are thre e strands to the work:
\n1) The Bureaucratic Plumbing: getting these languages properly registered in CLDR (the Common Locale Data Repository) \, which sounds bureaucratic but is the actual reason your phone doesnR 17\;t offer them as an option today.
\n2) The Data Challenge: buildi ng speech and text resources for them — not easy when the three language s together add up to around half a million speakers\, not millions.
\n< p>3) The Part People Often Skip: figuring out the governance and licensing so that what gets built with public money doesn’\;t quietly disappea r once the project officially ends.\nOn the speech side\, we’\ ;re not starting from zero. Eurac Research’\;s linguaXlab already bui lt AUGUSTA\, a model that transcribes South Tyrolean dialectal German spee ch into Standard German\, and with DIGI-RLF we’\;re now working throu gh what it takes to adapt that approach for Ladin — a real test of wheth er the family resemblance between these languages actually pays off in pra ctice.
\nWe’\;ll also touch on Tradutur Ladin\, a sister projec t on translation at the University of Innsbruck\, because the same lesson keeps showing up there: without shared datasets and open standards\, every small language community ends up reinventing the same tools from scratch\ , badly\, and on a budget too thin to stretch across all of them.
\nNone of these three languages could pull this off alone. Romansh has a rea l head start in automatic translation thanks to years of work with the Uni versity of Zurich\; Friulian just got its SuperDizionari online\, pulling three major dictionaries into a single platform\; Ladin is still out in th e Dolomites recording speakers for its very first speech to text data. DIG I-RLF is built on the bet that putting these efforts side by side — acro ss a Swiss-Italian border\, between three languages close enough to actual ly learn from each other — gets everyone further than going it alone.
\nCome hear what actually carries over from one to another\, and what doesn’\;t.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/digital-sovereignty-for-small-languages/ TRACK:Open Access TYPE:Open Access CATEGORIES:Open Access DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:A FOSS KNIME Workflow for Reproducible Malaria Detection with Low-C ost Microscopy - Track: LLM DTSTART:20261114T110000 DTEND:20261114T111500 UID:6aac41e7225457157e1f63bc03450f059abe8136e9bf6 DESCRIPTION:This work presents an open-source workflow for automated mal aria parasite detection from low-cost microscopy images\, addressing both a technical challenge in biomedical AI and the broader theme of digital so vereignty. In many biomedical contexts\, reliable AI tools depend on expen sive acquisition devices\, proprietary software\, or infrastructures that are difficult to reproduce and adapt locally. Low-cost microscopy can impr ove accessibility\, but it introduces a domain shift: models trained on im ages acquired with high-cost microscopes often show a measurable performan ce drop\, for example in terms of mAP50\, when applied to images acquired under less controlled conditions.
\nWe use YOLOv3 as the reference m odel for automatic parasite detection. As a baseline\, the model is traine d on high-cost microscope images and evaluated on low-cost microscope imag es\, in order to quantify the impact of domain shift. We then investigate preprocessing techniques and targeted data augmentation strategies to redu ce this performance gap without modifying the model architecture.
\nThe preprocessing pipeline includes denoising\, luminance and color correc tion\, local contrast enhancement\, and sharpening operations. Filter sele ction is performed through a greedy strategy\, while filter hyperparameter s are optimized using Optuna. In parallel\, the training process is enrich ed with targeted data augmentation\, applying transformations that reflect those later used on low-cost microscope images at inference time.
\nThe complete workflow is implemented in KNIME\, an open-source\, low-code analytics platform that enables reproducible data processing and machine learning pipelines through a visual interface. The workflow is designed as part of a community-oriented KNIME extension\, allowing researchers and p ractitioners to inspect\, adapt\, and reuse the pipeline without relying o n proprietary software components.
\nExperimental results show that preprocessing alone does not improve performance\, whereas its integration with targeted data augmentation yields an improvement over the baseline. Although the gain is modest\, the results demonstrate how lightweight\, tr ansparent\, and open techniques can support more accessible biomedical AI\ , contributing to reproducibility\, local control\, and digital sovereignt y in healthcare-oriented applications.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/a-foss-knime-workflow-for-reproducible-mala ria-detection-with-low-cost-microscopy/ TRACK:LLM TYPE:LLM CATEGORIES:LLM DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Towards Digital Autonomy in South Tyrol - Track: Digital Independen ce Day DTSTART:20261114T112000 DTEND:20261114T113500 UID:6aac41e7232947aa009105901fd7f789d2f96c2e899ae DESCRIPTION:The first step towards greater Digital Independence in South Tyrol took place in 2004 with eSüdtirol 2004-2008\, the Action plan for the development of the information society in South Tyrol. Chapter 3 was d edicated to promoting Free Software in public administrations\, schools\, and for fostering innovation in the economic sector with the support of a Competence Center. In this talk I show how the FUSS Project contributed to achieve these goals in public schools by bringing Free Software into clas srooms\, building local expertise\, and helping turn our digital autonomy from a policy goal into a practical reality.
\n LOCATION:Auditorium (A2) URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/towards-digital-autonomy-in-south-tyrol/ TRACK:Digital Independence Day TYPE:Digital Independence Day CATEGORIES:Digital Independence Day DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Towards a Local-First Desktop - Track: Community DTSTART:20261114T112000 DTEND:20261114T113500 UID:6aac41e72407eff8f2305bd9e01493ebd289df9126df8 DESCRIPTION:An important area where free software apps currently lags be hind their proprietary counterparts is sync and collaboration features. Wh ether it’\;s file sync\, collaborative document editing\, or system i ntegrations like clipboard sync\, we usually don’\;t have the kind of seamless cross-device sync that e.g. users of Apple platforms enjoy.
\ nOne reason for this is that with the server-based sync architectures t hat have been popular for the past decades\, the cost of a sync system sca les up with the number of users. This makes it unsustainable for free-of-c harge indie apps and desktop environments to implement. In recent years\, advances in areas like CRDTs and peer-to-peer networking have made this mo re feasible though: Building on these\, Local-First software is a new appr oach to sync and collaboration\, which treats network as fully optional\, but allows syncing when it is available.
\nAs Modal Collective\, we& #8217\;ve spent the past few years working towards making this a reality i n GNOME apps using the p2panda framework for Local-First sync. In this tal k\, we’\;ll discuss our progress\, next steps\, and how you can get i nvolved!
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/towards-a-local-first-desktop/ TRACK:Community TYPE:Community CATEGORIES:Community DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Introducing the TTCN-3 Language and Eclipse TITAN - Track: Engineer ing DTSTART:20261114T112000 DTEND:20261114T113500 UID:6aac41e725022611452d54a1033f83d6975f4ff761e8e DESCRIPTION:Despite being around for about 25 years\, almost noone ̵ 1\; even people in software testing –\; know about the TTCN-3 domain specific programming language and its featureful and well-maintained Free / Open Source Software compiler/runtime called Eclipse TITAN.
\nThe language is an exremely powerful tool in testing comlpex networked/distrib uted systems by sending and receiving protocol messages between the test s uite and the implementation under test. It features language constructs fo r common problems and disposese of powerful ways to match on abstract repr esentations of incoming protocol messages as well as templates for outboun d protocol messages.
\nThis talk is a very brief intro.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/introducing-the-ttcn-3-language-and-eclipse -titan/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:From Predictive Analytics to Clinical Decision Intelligence - Track : LLM DTSTART:20261114T112000 DTEND:20261114T113500 UID:6aac41e725de8f8c75e61fe33ddb9a5d32a7ff22b2574 DESCRIPTION:Machine learning–based predictive modeling and generative AI show potential to support clinical decision-making in intensive care un its (ICUs)\, but their use in routine clinical practice remains limited du e to challenges related to reliability\, transparency\, and trustworthines s. A key reason is that current approaches often address only parts of the overall problem. Predictive models focus on estimating risk\, while gener ative systems focus on presenting information\, and the connection between both remains underdeveloped.
\nEmpirical results from predictive mo deling of critical complications in ICU patients illustrate the limitation s of current approaches. Models trained on routinely collected clinical da ta achieve moderate performance and vary across prediction targets. Common challenges include class imbalance\, missing data\, and limited generaliz ability. These findings indicate that predictive outputs alone are often n ot reliable enough to support clinical decisions directly.
\nRecent developments in multimodal and temporally aware modeling aim to address so me of these limitations by improving how patient data is represented. By c ombining structured clinical variables\, high-frequency physiological sign als\, and unstructured text data\, such models provide a more comprehensiv e view of patient states. The use of survival-based methods further allows risk to be modeled over time rather than as a static classification. This leads to more informative outputs that better reflect the dynamic progres sion of critical conditions. At the same time\, the increased complexity o f these models makes their results more difficult to interpret and apply i n practice.
\nThis creates a gap between increasingly detailed model outputs and their practical usability. Generative AI systems\, particular ly those based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)\, offer a way to ad dress this gap by translating model outputs and patient data into structur ed\, context-aware explanations. By grounding generated responses in estab lished clinical knowledge\, such systems can support interpretation while maintaining transparency\, traceability\, and auditability of AI-supported recommendations. Prototype implementations show that this approach can pr oduce consistent and explainable outputs under practical constraints such as latency and cost\, provided that system design includes controlled retr ieval mechanisms and human oversight.
\nTaken together\, these obser vations show that current approaches contribute to different stages of the same problem. Predictive models provide estimates of risk\, multimodal me thods improve how complex patient data is modeled\, and generative systems support the interpretation of results. The main challenge lies not in any single component\, but in how these elements relate to each other in prac tice.
\nThe analysis therefore focuses on the interaction between pr ediction\, representation\, and interpretation as key dimensions of AI-sup ported decision-making in intensive care. It highlights that improvements in model performance alone are not sufficient and that usability\, interpr etability\, and transparency need to be considered as first-class design o bjectives of AI-supported systems. In addition\, the discussion addresses practical implications for the use of AI in clinical environments\, includ ing transparency\, trust\, and integration into existing workflows. The ta lk further discusses how explainable and auditable AI architectures can co ntribute to trustworthy decision support and strengthen digital sovereignt y in data-intensive healthcare environments.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/from-predictive-analytics-to-clinical-decis ion-intelligence/ TRACK:LLM TYPE:LLM CATEGORIES:LLM DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Own your stack: 15 years delivering software freedom to real compan ies, from startups to enterprises - Track: Digital Independence Day DTSTART:20261114T114000 DTEND:20261114T115500 UID:6aac41e726b33bc67c8adf356fa336da97c9980789bd7 DESCRIPTION:Free software is a suitable choice for organizations of all
kinds\, and we can demonstrate its value through our direct experience.
\nWe will look at how\, over the past 15 years\, different organization
s—from small to large—have successfully adopted FLOSS solutions. Parti
cipants will be able to recognize themselves in similar contexts and see h
ow needs and challenges have been met and resolved.
We will start from the basic infrastructure\, with solutions for data sharing\, collabor ation\, and the management of business services through tools such as Next cloud\, Univention\, NethServer\, file servers based on ZFS\, Proxmox\, an d systems for secure credential management such as Vaultwarden.
\nWe will then explore topics related to reliability and operational continuit y\, including disaster recovery\, backups\, remote data replication\, high -availability clusters\, and firewalls based on OPNsense.
\nFinally\ , we will see how free software enables the creation of advanced and scala ble infrastructures thanks to technologies such as FreeIPA\, Wazuh\, Zabbi x\, Ceph\, CephFS\, and systems dedicated to email protection.
\nWe chose open-source software because it enabled us to deliver projects that would have been more complex\, more constrained\, or simply impossible to achieve with proprietary solutions. We have continued to use it because we have fallen in love with many of the communities behind it. Continuity is community: we will also share our wonderful experience with various commu nities\, such as our long-standing relationship with PNlug\, with whom we have shared—and continue to share—battles and projects.
\n LOCATION:Auditorium (A2) URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/own-your-stack-15-years-delivering-software -freedom-to-real-companies-from-startups-to-enterprises/ TRACK:Digital Independence Day TYPE:Digital Independence Day CATEGORIES:Digital Independence Day DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:How to design successful campaigns that scale - Track: Community DTSTART:20261114T114000 DTEND:20261114T115500 UID:6aac41e72790a3406332b413854f749151fb09006e7b7 DESCRIPTION:This talk presents the evolution of a grassroots educational journey that started within the Free Software Foundation Europe and grew into a community-driven toolkit used in schools across different contexts. The talk will reflect on how community creativity\, narrative tools\, and structured support materials can work together to scale educational outre ach\, and how volunteer ecosystems can be empowered through shared ownersh ip of educational content.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 1 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/how-to-design-successful-campaigns-that-sca le/ TRACK:Community TYPE:Community CATEGORIES:Community DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Your Documents, Your Data: Integrating AI into Your Office Suite Wi thout Surrendering Sovereignty - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T114000 DTEND:20261114T115500 UID:6aac41e7287b0f7d399df1376e43a130615e254ccae24 DESCRIPTION:AI writing assistance\, document summarisation\, and intelli gent formatting suggestions are no longer differentiators – users now ex pect them. But most implementations share a common architecture: your docu ment content leaves your infrastructure and reaches a commercial API. For public administrations\, healthcare bodies\, and educational institutions handling sensitive data\, that trade-off is often a hard no. The goal is n ot to resist AI\, but to adopt it on terms that do not quietly undo the so vereignty work your organisation has already done.
\nThis session ex plores how Collabora Office has integrated meaningful AI capabilities\, in cluding writing assistance\, formula troubleshooting and slide creation\, while keeping data firmly within your own boundaries. We examine local and self-hosted LLM integration patterns\, the latency and quality trade-offs involved\, and the governance questions that AI features introduce even w hen the model itself is open.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/your-documents-your-data-integrating-ai-int o-your-office-suite-without-surrendering-sovereignty/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Augusta: ASR for South Tyrolean Dialect - Track: Open Access DTSTART:20261114T114000 DTEND:20261114T115500 UID:6aac41e72967e1a0ac65cf641b88b8c6744048b79fcf9 DESCRIPTION:Most speech technologies still struggle with dialects. Augus ta addresses this challenge. It is an open Automatic Speech Recognition (A SR) model developed at Eurac Research to transcribe South Tyrolean German dialects into Standard German\, making spoken\, informal language accessib le for research\, media\, public administration and archives.
\nBuil t on open-source ASR models and collaborative datasets\, Augusta combines publicly available resources with community-contributed recordings and an iterative correction workflow. Users actively help improve the system by f eeding corrections back into the training loop.
\nWe are actively se eking use cases and collaborators across sectors to test\, refine and exte nd Augusta in real-world scenarios. Collaborations are conceived as mutual ly beneficial and research-oriented\, enabling partners to address their o wn needs while contributing to the advancement of open\, dialect-aware spe ech technology.
\nOur lightning talk presents Augusta as a concrete example of how open technologies can advance speech recognition for low-re source languages\, supporting digital sovereignty\, linguistic diversity a nd community- driven approaches to machine learning and AI beyond standard -language settings.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/augusta-asr-for-south-tyrolean-dialect/ TRACK:Open Access TYPE:Open Access CATEGORIES:Open Access DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Efficient management of public large genomic datasets with PostgreS QL - Track: LLM DTSTART:20261114T114000 DTEND:20261114T115500 UID:6aac41e72a3dbbdaa36426971acc636657f5c41440f1e DESCRIPTION:We had a problem: how to efficiently manage public genomic d ataset\, which may get very large\, and integrate them with private genomi c information stored in a PostgreSQL database.
\nWe leveraged a very powerful\, but probably less known PostgreSQL technology called Foreign D ata Wrappers\, to build an efficient solution: we will describe what we di d and how to replicate our solution and our setting.
\nHospitals\, r esearch insitutions\, universities and every company that wants to interna lly manage large genomic datasets as gnomAD\, DBSNFP\, CADD\, Clinvar\, et cetera\, will find our presentation very interesting.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/efficient-management-of-public-large-genomi c-datasets-with-postgresql/ TRACK:LLM TYPE:LLM CATEGORIES:LLM DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Agentic Artificial Intelligence impose an evolution for Digital Ide ntity - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T120000 DTEND:20261114T121500 UID:6aac41e72b301cb21a72a6beffd66ce9c91dbba5c5202 DESCRIPTION:Digital identity management in the context of Agentic Artifi
cial Intelligence presents unique challenges and requires a radical evolut
ion of some basic concepts of digital identity management as currently imp
lemented.
\nThe widespread adoption of generative artificial intellig
ence for agent creation requires a conceptual evolution of the underlying
ideas and implementation strategies of digital identity management.
\
nIn this talk\, we will explore why identity management as it currently ex
ists cannot meet the security and privacy requirements for large-scale use
\, posing new and difficult-to-solve problems.
We will delve deepe r into the topic\, seeking to understand the profound differences between digital identity\, understood as an alter ego of the identity of individua ls\, and the identity of intelligent agents\, relationships\, and the mana gement of operational authorization assignments.
\nWe will discover that Open Source already offers some solutions\, such as PermGuard\, capab le of evolving the concepts of authorization attribution towards agenetic entities\, and can and must play an essential role in the path of adopting AI in a secure and confidential manner.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/agentic-artificial-intelligence-impose-an-e volution-for-digital-identity/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Playing online games without language barriers - Track: Open Access DTSTART:20261114T120000 DTEND:20261114T121500 UID:6aac41e76452579c52d1dfc21f600f185b9a1abcbd676 DESCRIPTION:In 2020\, a group of friends and I started a Luanti minigame s server called “\;A.E.S.”\;. One of the aspects that fascinated us about Luanti was being able to provide translated content according to the language set on the client –\; even for online servers. What we didn’\;t know was that\, we can’\;t really ask translators to le arn git if they want to contribute. Having a tailor-made translation forma t didn’\;t help either. Fast forward of a few years and\, thanks to C odeberg staff\, we migrate to Weblate\; which is when the boom of translat ions happened. A.E.S. now features 14 languages and\, with Luanti switchin g to an industry standard (.pot/.po files)\, life becomes even easier. Peo ple can now play their favourite games without having to struggle with a l anguage they might not know -so as to focus on the game itself.
\nht tps://aes.land/
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/playing-online-games-without-language-barri ers/ TRACK:Open Access TYPE:Open Access CATEGORIES:Open Access DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:The Last Black Box. Sovereign Minds, Sovereign Code. - Track: LLM DTSTART:20261114T120000 DTEND:20261114T123500 UID:6aac41e765340a84fe0c71a76f0e79b60864ae8261cd3 DESCRIPTION:As proprietary AI systems increasingly automate our workflow s and decisions\, we face a critical evolutionary question: Will the human mind remain the last sovereign “\;black box\,”\; or will we bli ndly yield our cognitive autonomy to algorithmic black boxes we cannot aud it?
\nTrue digital sovereignty is no longer just about who owns the servers\; it is about who controls human agency. When proprietary\, closed -source models dictate choices\, they exploit human cognitive shortcuts. W e stop verifying\, we stop questioning\, and eventually\, we let AI influe nce our choices without even knowing what happens behind the screen.
\nThis talk bridges the gap between open-source tech architecture and cog nitive neuroscience. We will explore how vendor-neutral\, transparent tech nology acts as a vital psychological shield. Attendees will discover the n eurological impact of algorithmic dependency and learn how open-source fra meworks empower developers and leaders to retain intellectual control. It s time to build systems that protect our ability to think\, query\, and remain sovereign.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 4 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/the-last-black-box-sovereign-minds-sovereig n-code/ TRACK:LLM TYPE:LLM CATEGORIES:LLM DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Data Federation using Apache Trino and an Application for Environme ntal Data - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T122000 DTEND:20261114T123500 UID:6aac41e7661a2cac6fe62891a3af1a29494fe2cca7495 DESCRIPTION:Today\, data is increasingly distributed across independent
systems managed by different providers\, each exposing its data through di
fferent technologies and interfaces. Integrating these heterogeneous data
sources into a unified view has become essential for data retrieval\, anal
ysis\, and decision-making. However\, achieving this integration remains c
hallenging due to differences in data models (e.g.\, relational tables and
JSON documents)\, access mechanisms (e.g.\, REST APIs\, web services\, or
downloadable datasets)\, metadata structures (e.g.\, different naming con
ventions and attribute definitions)\, and query interfaces. Traditional in
tegration approaches often rely on data replication\, leading to increased
storage requirements and synchronization overhead.
\nFederated datab
ase systems address this challenge by providing a unified query interface
over distributed data sources while allowing each source to remain indepen
dent. Instead of replicating data into a central repository\, queries are
executed across heterogeneous data sources\, and the results are combined
transparently. Apache Trino is an open-source distributed query engine tha
t enables this approach across many different storage technologies.
\
nThis talk presents Apache Trino and research efforts on building a provid
er-agnostic data federation architecture for heterogeneous environmental d
ata using Apache Trino. The proposed architecture allows access to distrib
uted data sources through a unified global schema without replicating the
underlying data. Rather than requiring data providers to migrate or duplic
ate their datasets\, the architecture allows them to expose their existing
data sources while preserving source autonomy.
\nApache Trino is an
open-source distributed SQL query engine designed for federated querying a
cross heterogeneous data sources. The talk provides an overview of Trino&#
8217\;s federation architecture and query execution model\, and demonstrat
es how these capabilities can be used as the foundation of a provider-agno
stic architecture for integrating heterogeneous environmental data.
\
nMoreover\, the talk demonstrates a provider-agnostic federation architect
ure built on Apache Trino\, consisting of an adapter layer and a unified g
lobal schema. The adapter layer enables the integration of heterogeneous d
ata providers by handling provider-specific communication\, schema mapping
\, and query translation\, while preserving source autonomy and minimizing
data replication. The design of the global schema is supported by a prior
analysis of publicly available environmental datasets\, resulting in a st
andardized metadata model that supports the integration of heterogeneous e
nvironmental data sources.
\nThe presentation will discuss Apache Tri
no\, the proposed architecture\, key design decisions\, implementation cha
llenges\, and the solutions adopted to build a scalable and extensible fed
erated data architecture for environmental data.
When a photo or video may be synthetic\, detection is not on ly a technical question. It is mostly a governance issue: who can verify t he result\, who can audit the method\, and who has the capacity to challen ge mistakes?
\nToday\, deepfake detection is often treated as a blac k-box service: media goes in\, a score comes out. That may be convenient\, but it is not enough for contexts where decisions affect journalism\, ele ctions\, public administration\, legal proceedings\, or citizens’\; r ights. Closed\, proprietary systems make it difficult to assess bias\, rob ustness\, data handling\, failure modes\, or whether a detector still work s once content has been compressed\, resized\, reposted\, or stripped of m etadata.
\nThis talk argues that open-source detectors are not just useful for researchers and scientists in the field. They are a prerequisit e for accountable governance. Public institutions need tools they can insp ect. Regulators need benchmarks they can reproduce. Journalists and civil society need methods that can be questioned rather than simply accepted. A nd Europe\, if it wants digital sovereignty in synthetic media verificatio n\, needs more than procurement access to proprietary\, opaque scores.
\nIn this talk\, we will share lessons from our open-source work on det ector benchmarking\, social-platform degradation\, synthetic-media dataset s\, and provenance testing. The aim is to show why open detectors matter: not because they solve deepfake detection once and for all\, but because t hey make the limits\, trade-offs\, and assumptions of verification visible .
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/trust-without-a-black-box/ TRACK:Open Access TYPE:Open Access CATEGORIES:Open Access DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Beyond Big Tech: how to reach people who don’t care about FOSS - Track: Digital Independence Day DTSTART:20261114T124000 DTEND:20261114T125500 UID:6aac41e767cd6c9de0d971ab2332a85bc3b4674fac1e2 DESCRIPTION:lealternative.net started as a personal blog and grew into o ne of the most comprehensive Italian-language catalogs of alternatives to mainstream software covering tools that range from fully open source to &# 8220\;good enough to matter.”\; This talk traces that evolution and t he editorial choices behind it: why pragmatism beats purity when you’ \;re trying to reach people who have never heard of FOSS\, how years of re viewing and analyzing alternatives shaped a clearer language\, a more acce ssible interface and a growing attention to the details that make the diff erence for a non-technical audience\, and what six years of doing this hav e taught about communicating digital autonomy to people who are simply cur ious and not necessarily technical.
\n LOCATION:Auditorium (A2) URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/beyond-big-tech-how-to-reach-people-who-don t-care-about-foss/ TRACK:Digital Independence Day TYPE:Digital Independence Day CATEGORIES:Digital Independence Day DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:A non-proprietary distributed infrastructure for radical and positi ve societal change - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T124000 DTEND:20261114T125500 UID:6aac41e768a683f17230f3735e9a028a47a237018f17f DESCRIPTION:HMS (Humanity Management System) is a distributed network of independent nodes\, each owned by a different individual\, designed to op erate as a single coherent system regardless of which node a user connects to. The infrastructure is built on Debian 12\, Python/Flask\, and a priva te IPFS network over IPv6\, with all inter-node communication secured via RSA 4096-bit SSH tunnels.
\nThe system admits only physical persons — no institutions\, no abstract entities\, no monetary transactions. It is governed through an Authority/Governance model: Authorities are Python programs that manage interactions between elements of a knowledge graph co vering all areas of human activity (food production\, healthcare\, educati on\, natural resource management\, and more). Each Authority is governed b y a group of domain-competent individuals who define and modify the rules implemented in the program\, with no central point of control.
\nThe talk will cover the architecture of the network\, the synchronization mec hanism across nodes\, the Authority/Governance model\, and the current sta te of the project (5 operational nodes). The goal is to find collaborators willing to contribute to the infrastructure’\;s development and to t he first governance groups.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/a-non-proprietary-distributed-infrastructur e-for-radical-and-positive-societal-change/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Don’t Ask the AI. Ask Collective Knowledge - Track: Open Access DTSTART:20261114T124000 DTEND:20261114T131500 UID:6aac41e76981dc4a3282bc5106406e599e208483b0ffb DESCRIPTION:Digital sovereignty is not only about owning data or running your own servers. It is also about who can organise knowledge\, who can v erify it\, who is allowed to ask questions\, and who benefits from the ans wers.
\nIn this talk\, I will present Knowledge Scout\, a Free Softw are approach to building self-determined knowledge libraries. Its guiding idea is simple: don’t ask the AI — ask collective knowledge. Instead o f sending isolated questions into a black box\, the software turns existin g material — talks\, PDFs\, audio recordings\, videos\, images\, web pag es and reports — into dynamic\, conversational and traceable knowledge s paces.
\nKnowledge Scout supports the whole journey: local and offli ne with personal folder structures for individual knowledge work\; as a sh ared infrastructure for groups and organisations that curate knowledge tog ether\; and finally as an open library that makes selected content accessi ble to a wider public. Users always decide which sources to include and wh ich contexts to trust.
\nI will demonstrate this through three real
examples:
\n–\; SFSCON Talks makes past conference talks\, slide
s and videos explorable through dialogue.
\n–\; The biodiversity
library of the Natural History Museum in Bolzano brings scattered materia
l on species\, habitats and conservation measures into one central place.<
br />\n–\; A library of climate proposals makes the often complex ide
as from South Tyrol’s Citizens’ Council on Climate\, together with exp
ert perspectives and administrative responses\, transparent\, comparable a
nd open for public discussion.
Technically\, Knowledge Scout is ba sed on shared folders\, flexible storage locations\, background processing \, structured Markdown\, RAG-based search and public library pages. But it s most important design principle is transparency: the original sources ar e always visible\, every AI transformation is traceable\, and humans remai n the authority that reviews and contextualises the results.
\nThis turns AI from a centralised service into part of a civic infrastructure. A knowledge base does not have to be a Big Tech product you rent. This talk shows\, in practical terms\, how communities\, research\, public administ ration and citizens can use\, run and co-create tools to regain control ov er their collective knowledge.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/dont-ask-the-ai-ask-collective-knowledge/ TRACK:Open Access TYPE:Open Access CATEGORIES:Open Access DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Only digital sovereignty will save Europe from the America-China du alism - Track: Digital Independence Day DTSTART:20261114T130000 DTEND:20261114T131500 UID:6aac41e76a53d23a85e7b72adec867a9e78d0d100e7f4 DESCRIPTION:In the last twenty years\, we have seen a profound shift in
global power.
\nMilitary strength still matters\, but the real battle
ground today is digital: data\, platforms\, cloud infrastructures\, AI mod
els\, and the rules that govern them.
Right now\, this battlegroun
d is dominated by two giants: the United States and China.
\nOn one s
ide\, a handful of American tech corporations shape much of our online lif
e. On the other\, a powerful Chinese state–tech ecosystem is expanding i
ts reach across infrastructure\, hardware\, and platforms.
Europe
is the world’s largest democratic market\, but digitally it often behave
s like a user\, not a player.
\nWe consume American platforms\, we bu
y Chinese hardware\, and we negotiate from a position of dependency rather
than autonomy.
If this continues\, Europe will not simply “lag
behind”.
\nIt will lose the practical ability to decide how its soc
ieties function in the digital age.
Let’\;s face it: nobody wants to run Windows\, but most
people sooner or later need to run it for some more or less strange use-c
ase.
\nThis usually leaves you with the need for a recovery plan. Alt
hough this can certainly be done using standard Windows tools\, the proces
s is by no means straightforward or simple.
\nHaving been thoroughly
disappointed by the tools available in both the open-source and commercial
sectors\, we ultimately implemented our own solution.
The result
is Barri –\; the Bareos Recovery Imager. It is a complete tool for cr
eating and restoring Windows disaster recovery images.
\nBarri can cr
eate a full recovery image of a running Windows system without downtime\,
using a flexible standalone program (barri-cli)\, or through the Bareos Fi
le Daemon (as a plugin).
For over 20 years\, I have managed to work in the Microsoft dominated public relations industry without a single colleague\, client or journalist realizing that I am using only free open source software on th e desktop. During that timeframe I have exchanged thousands of text docume nts\, spreadsheets and presentations without a single issue.
\n LOCATION:Auditorium (A2) URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/liberate-your-desktop-liberate-your-documen ts/ TRACK:Digital Independence Day TYPE:Digital Independence Day CATEGORIES:Digital Independence Day DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:PasteGuard: use AI without exposing client data - Track: Engineerin g DTSTART:20261114T132000 DTEND:20261114T133500 UID:6aac41e76ce093977164ff17aa87841f76066031d01f0 DESCRIPTION:AI is useful when it can work with real context: support tic kets\, contracts\, meeting notes\, customer emails\, internal documents\, source code\, logs\, and production errors. But that context often contain s client data\, personal information\, credentials\, API keys\, tokens\, a nd other details that should not be exposed to an external AI provider.
\nPasteGuard is a Free and Open Source project that helps with this pr oblem. It checks content before it is sent to an AI provider\, finds perso nal data and secrets\, replaces them with safe placeholders\, and restores supported placeholders in the answer.
\nThis talk shows the problem in practical terms. We will look at what PasteGuard protects\, how the ba sic idea works\, and why this is harder than simple search-and-replace. So me data is easy to detect\, like email addresses or API keys. Other data i s more ambiguous\, like names\, places\, client-specific references\, or s ensitive business context.
\nThe talk is for developers\, consultant s\, organizations\, public institutions\, and anyone who wants to use AI w ith real work context while keeping more control over sensitive data. Atte ndees will leave with a concrete open-source project they can run\, inspec t\, adapt\, or use as a pattern for their own workflows.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/pasteguard-use-ai-without-exposing-client-d ata/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:I care, therefore I tech: getting those that make digital go round to care - Track: Education DTSTART:20261114T132000 DTEND:20261114T133500 UID:6aac41e76dce837f48dc12da769a203b168b8ca3a562d DESCRIPTION:Digital technologies have undeniable broad-reaching impacts on a planetary scale. From ecological to social change\, digital technolog ies represent one of the main ways in which humanity projects its footprin t on our world. Too often\, though\, we find ourselves in the situation wh ere we have people with great thoughts about technologies (philosophers\, writers\, …\;) and people that have great ability to create technolog ies (engineers\, programmers\, …\;)\, but the intersection of those t hat can _both_ think in depth and create meaningful artifacts remains spar cely populated.
\nIn this talk\, I share key insights from my practi ce as a scholar\, teacher\, hacktivist and creative practitioner on how to “\;sensitise”\; those that engage deeply with technologies R 12\; especially students in computing disciplines —\; to the social a nd planetary impacts of their practices. I jokingly refer to this as ̶ 0\;getting the techies to care”\; because this sentence has two meani ngs: the “\;techies”\; should not just “\;care”\; in t he sense that they should think about this\, they should “\;care̶ 1\; in the sense that they should engage in a relationship of care towards other people\, our society\, and the planet as a whole.
\nComputing practitioners\, I argue\, should have conceptual tools to think criticall y about the effects of the technology\; conversely\, deep thinkers should learn how to build technologies. Both approaches are fundamental\, and the way forward I propose is to go against the current trend of hyper-special isation and keep broad interests.
\nIn this talk\, aside from sharin g my research\, teaching\, and insights\, I invite participants to join me in a structured conversation on sharing practices of care\, and on imagin ing concrete actions that computing practitioners could do to reimagine th eir actions under a lens of care.
\nNote: I have a preference for a 35-minutes slot in which I can present for ~15-20 minutes and then have a longer Q&\;A and interactive session\, but I can adapt to 15 minutes if needed!
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/i-care-therefore-i-tech-getting-those-that- make-digital-go-round-to-care/ TRACK:Education TYPE:Education CATEGORIES:Education DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:NextRedOS: Building a Hardened Debian-Based Linux Distribution for European Digital Independence - Track: Digital Independence Day DTSTART:20261114T134000 DTEND:20261114T135500 UID:6aac41e76eac458e993dde0440931ead02a9dafe0a86c DESCRIPTION:NextRedOS is a Debian-based Linux distribution created as a
practical experiment in system hardening\, self-hosting and European-orien
ted open technologies. The project started from a simple need: deploying a
secure and reliable operating system for a home server running Home Assis
tant and other self-hosted services.
\nThis talk presents the ideas b
ehind NextRedOS and the concrete security measures adopted to reduce the a
ttack surface: full-disk encryption with LUKS\, Secure Boot with custom MO
K enrollment\, USBGuard and PAM hardening\, kernel module blacklisting\, a
nd a multi-layer ransomware protection approach combining auditd rules\, T
imeshift snapshots and filesystem restrictions on temporary directories. I
t will also cover how self-hosted services such as Home Assistant and Vaul
twarden are integrated through Podman\, keeping containers isolated from t
he base system.
\nThrough the development of this distribution\, Next
RedOS became both a learning platform for cybersecurity and networking and
a real-world operating system designed for everyday use\, with a GPG-sign
ed\, SHA256-verified release already published on GitHub and Codeberg. The
session will share lessons learned\, challenges encountered during the ha
rdening process\, and future goals\, offering attendees a perspective on b
uilding secure Linux systems with open technologies.
AI agents are not just chat boxes anymore. They open pull re quests\, respond to reviews\, run tools\, write summaries\, trigger follow -up work\, and sometimes keep going while we are doing something else. Tha t is great\, but it also changes the question. Once agents participate in real workflows\, we need to know more than whether the final answer looked good.
\nWho acted? Under which identity? In which runtime? What too
ls were available? What did the agent know from previous work? Which task
did it claim? What did it produce\, who judged it\, and what
\nhappen
ed next?
Today\, many of those answers live inside product-specifi c logs\, chat histories\, dashboards\, or nowhere at all. That is acceptab le while an agent is a personal assistant. It is much is less when the sam e pattern moves into software delivery\, incident response\, public admini stration\, or any workflow where accountability matters.
\nThis talk is about the infrastructure shape I think AI agents need if we want them to be accountable: distinct identities\, signed tasks and attempts\, isola ted runtimes\, traceable memory\, explicit evaluation\, and plugin boundar ies that keep the core independent from GitHub\, Slack\, or any single pro fessional domain.
\nI will use MoltNet\, an open-source project I ma intain\, as the concrete example: an agent harness where the work can be i nspected\, replayed\, extended\, and self-hosted.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/open-infrastructure-for-accountable-ai-agen ts/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:How to supporting schools and universities in integrating Linux int o their curriculum - Track: Education DTSTART:20261114T134000 DTEND:20261114T135500 UID:6aac41e770614111d57d775ce2842769a10d71e1bd958 DESCRIPTION:Parents worldwide often face this situation: as soon as thei r children reach the fifth or sixth grade\, their school starts using clou d-based IT solutions from a large\, well-known commercial company. All com munication with teachers is stored in the cloud of this commercial provide r. I experienced this firsthand: After using Linux for five years\, our ol der son was given a heavily subsidized laptop equipped with cloud-based so lutions from a large commercial company when he reached the fifth grade\, as were all students in our home country.
\nWanting to do something about it\, I ran for the Board of Directors of the Linux Professional Inst itute to support schools in integrating Linux know-how into their curricul um.
\nIn this talk\, I demonstrate how schools and universities can achieve this and how their students can benefit from obtaining an internat ional certificate that proves their Linux know-how.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/how-to-supporting-schools-and-universities- in-integrating-linux-into-their-curriculum/ TRACK:Education TYPE:Education CATEGORIES:Education DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:MXMap Italia: Observatory of Digital Sovereignty of Italian Public Agencies - Track: Digital Independence Day DTSTART:20261114T140000 DTEND:20261114T143500 UID:6aac41e771369a79469200eda0432ca29d8dc027a00f0 DESCRIPTION:MXMap Italia has been established as national observatory of the status of digital Sovereignty of italian public agencies\, by analyzi ng DNS records on the basis of the MXMap software.
\nThe technical p latform provides opendata\, mapping and analytics of the 23k+ public agenc ies on https://mxmap.it .
\nThe alarming results\, with more than 46 % of italian government agencies accessible trough Cloud Act by USA Securi ty Agencies\, requires all the institutional\, technical\, activist world to act now!
\nThe political platform https://osservatorio.mxmap.it a im to provides awareness across all the stakeholders\, with policy and tec hnical papers\, brief for decision makers\, and periodic massive emailing campaign to inform the key persons at each agency (DPO\, but also RTD\, ow ner of digital transformation).
\nThis walk want to share the projec t results\, methodology and a call to action to contribute to the project goals\, improving the status of digital sovereignty with self-hosted infra structure and free software.
\n LOCATION:Auditorium (A2) URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/mxmap-italia-observatory-of-digital-soverei gnty-of-italian-public-agencies/ TRACK:Digital Independence Day TYPE:Digital Independence Day CATEGORIES:Digital Independence Day DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Who owns your Datastore? The Valkey Fork and the Case for Digital S overeignty - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T140000 DTEND:20261114T141500 UID:6aac41e7721432e142d85a40541e9e6c96a4ba80894d9 DESCRIPTION:In March 2024\, Redis abandoned the open-source BSD license it had used from the start and switched to a restrictive source-available model. Within weeks the Linux Foundation\, alongside a coalition of contri butors and cloud providers\, launched Valkey. A BSD-licensed fork of Redis 7.2.4 which changed the future of one of the world’\;s most widely d eployed datastores overnight. This talk tells that story: why the relicens ing happened\, how the fork was organised and governed\, how Valkey diverg ed technically from its origin\, and why Redis itself partly reversed cour se by adding AGPLv3 in 2025. But the real subject is digital sovereignty : what does it mean to depend on open source software whose licensing and r ight to use it can change underneath you? how does open licensing plus neu tral governance change that? Attendees leave with a concrete framework for assessing licensing and governance risk in the open-source software they build on\, using Valkey throughout as one of the most consequential forks of the decade.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/who-owns-your-datastore-the-valkey-fork-and -the-case-for-digital-sovereignty/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Your class is now a parliament - Track: Education DTSTART:20261114T140000 DTEND:20261114T141500 UID:6aac41e772eba4c7a235edbbbdb67976af2b696c796e0 DESCRIPTION:What if students could experience AI governance firsthand no t through lectures\, but by drafting laws\, debating ethical trade-offs\, and voting on decisions that shape a fictional AI-powered society?
\nNeuralforming is a hybrid board game designed for secondary school classr ooms. It transforms students into members of a democratic parliament taske d with regulating artificial intelligence: they propose legislation\, chal lenge each other’\;s arguments\, and vote on policies that balance in novation\, privacy\, and collective rights.
\nThe game is built enti rely on open tools and distributed under a free license\, so any school or educator can adopt\, remix\, and localise it without cost or vendor depen dency. The physical and digital components are designed to work with off-t he-shelf hardware and free software\, making it deployable even in under-r esourced schools.
\nIn this lightning talk\, I will walk through the design principles behind Neuralforming\, share early feedback from classr oom sessions\, and discuss why game-based civic education may be one of th e most scalable paths toward genuine digital literacy\, the kind that equi ps the next generation not just to use technology\, but to govern it.
\ n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/your-class-is-now-a-parliament/ TRACK:Education TYPE:Education CATEGORIES:Education DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Building a Knowledge Graph to Govern Cloud Infrastructure - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T142000 DTEND:20261114T143500 UID:6aac41e773c20439ab63d81a799859fa9dc408f601d90 DESCRIPTION:Governing modern cloud infrastructures is increasingly diffi cult because complexity grows faster than documentation and diagrams. The result is a fragmented and quickly outdated understanding of how the infra structure actually works.
\nIn this talk\, we will show how to use C NCF Cartography to build a knowledge graph of a computing infrastructure u sing deterministic data collection from cloud and infrastructure APIs. The graph is not inferred by an LLM: it is generated from infrastructure sour ces\, without consuming LLM tokens during the graph construction phase. Th is creates a continuously refreshed catalog of infrastructure components a nd\, most importantly\, the relationships between them. Once built\, the g raph becomes a structured context on which LLMs can be applied.
\nWe will show two practical use cases. First\, using the graph to automatical ly generate infrastructure diagrams and documentation that reflect the cur rent state of the system. Second\, using the graph as context for chatbot- style questions about the infrastructure\, allowing engineers to ask how c omponents are connected\, what depends on what\, and where specific resour ces are located.
\nWe will share what worked\, where the graph model was useful\, and where LLM-based reasoning still needed guardrails.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/building-a-knowledge-graph-to-govern-cloud- infrastructure/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Digital Sovereignty Starts in the Classroom - Track: Education DTSTART:20261114T142000 DTEND:20261114T143500 UID:6aac41e774a0b003182c7faad9a02a68934f6b80b3bed DESCRIPTION:Digital sovereignty is often discussed at institutional and enterprise level\, but its foundations are built much earlier: in educatio n. This talk explores how Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) can empower students and schools to regain control over their digital tools\, data an d learning processes.
\nThrough a real-world experience — the “F ree Software in High Schools” project developed in collaboration with Fr ee Software Foundation Europe — this session presents practical insights \, challenges and outcomes from introducing FOSS in a secondary school env ironment.
\nDelivered from a student’s perspective\, the talk high lights how adopting Free Software is not just a technical choice\, but a c ultural shift that fosters critical thinking\, transparency and long-term digital independence.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/digital-sovereignty-starts-in-the-classroom / TRACK:Education TYPE:Education CATEGORIES:Education DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Beyond Cross-Posting: Strategies for Migrating Communities from Big Tech Social Networks to the Fediverse - Track: Digital Independence Day DTSTART:20261114T144000 DTEND:20261114T145500 UID:6aac41e775807257cb3f33c56a14f4e9cac78f14bfa93 DESCRIPTION:After years of running and moderating large Fediverse commun ities in Italy\, we have experimented with different migration strategies: from simple cross-posting to content adaptation\, follower migration camp aigns\, curated account collections\, onboarding techniques\, and communit y-building initiatives.
\nThis talk presents practical lessons learn ed from real-world experiments involving thousands of users. Rather than p romoting an “\;all or nothing”\; migration\, it explores how cre ators\, organizations and activists can reduce their dependence on proprie tary social networks while continuing to reach their existing audiences.\n
Topics include:
\nWhy people fail when they simply duplicate
content.
\nHow to maximize engagement on the Fediverse.
\nTechni
ques to encourage followers to migrate.
\nLiving in both worlds: coex
istence instead of abrupt abandonment.
\nBuilding resilient communiti
es independent of Big Tech algorithms.
\nMeasuring success beyond fol
lower counts.
The goal is to provide attendees with concrete strat egies they can immediately apply to grow their presence on the Fediverse w hile minimizing the risks of leaving traditional social media.
\nAud ience:
\nContent creators\, Free Software communities\, NGOs\, devel opers\, journalists\, public administrations\, and anyone interested in di gital sovereignty and community building.
\nTakeaways:
\nParti cipants will leave with practical techniques for:
\nincreasing engag
ement on the Fediverse\;
\ndesigning a gradual migration strategy\;\nreducing dependence on algorithmic platforms\;
\npreserving and
growing their online communities during the transition.
During my bachelor’\;s thesis\, I investigated whether
k3s\, the lightweight Kubernetes distribution\, could improve service cont
inuity in an on-premise industrial containerized environment.
\nRathe
r than focusing on Kubernetes theory\, this talk presents a practical feas
ibility study based on real-world inspired architecture. A prototype appli
cation was deployed on a multi-node k3s cluster and subjected to controlle
d failure scenarios\, including node shutdowns and pod failures. The syste
m was monitored both from the Kubernetes side and from the user perspectiv
e side.
The results show where k3s excels: automatic pod recovery\ , workload rescheduling\, service routing\, and self-healing mechanisms. H owever\, the experiments also reveal important limitations. Kubernetes can recover many failures\, but not all availability problems disappear autom atically. Operational issues\, image distribution challenges\, and applica tion-level design decisions still play a crucial role.
\nThis talk s hares the architecture\, experiments\, results and lessions learned\, prov iding practical insights for anyone considering k3s as an orschestration s olution fro small on-premise deployments.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/exploring-k3s-for-high-availability-in-smal l-on-premise-environments/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:OpenStreetMap for Inclusion - Track: Education DTSTART:20261114T144000 DTEND:20261114T145500 UID:6aac41e77758d33bbb289da19e218ea3f4221c3b277ee DESCRIPTION:Map services can be summarize in two categories: open data (
e\,g\, OpenStreetMap) focusing on the local community and mainstream (e.g.
Google Map) focused primarily on roads and commercial services.
\nTh
e firsts reason for using OpenStreetMap (OSM) database are because it is a
n open data service and\, moreover\, because every object can be mapped. S
o\, OSM focus its data on the local community an aspect that is often over
looked by mainstream mapping services.
\nSecondly\, everyone can deve
lop tools and applications based on OSM data\, making an environment of in
struments in constant growing.
\nIn this talk we summarize the story
of the project ‘Adopt Your Town’: a workshop proposed for third-year h
igh school pupils\, to be conducted during the 2025/26 school year. During
this mapping workshop\, thanks to the work of 26 pupils\, the town of Pes
aro has increased the number of map changes by over 95\,000 units.
\n
Other pupils\, after them\, based of the work of their schoolmates\, have
printed tactile maps of their campus. This is only the first step. The ‘
Italian Union of Blind and Partially Sighted People’ have shown interest
in this kind of 3D maps which can be easily done for each zone\, not only
in the town of Pesaro.
New to platform engineering? Never heard about the Cloud Nat ive Computing Foundation (CNCF)? This talk is for you!
\nWe start fr om the question every team eventually asks: how do we give developers a pa ved road without locking ourselves into a single vendor or cloud? The answ er is already there: a shopping list built entirely from open source\, CNC F projects.
\nAbout platform engineering: we walk the core capabilit ies of an Internal Developer Platform and see what tools we can use to imp lement those capabilities.
\nAlong the way we plug into the referenc es that make sense of the chaos like the CNCF Platforms White Paper and th e Platform Engineering Maturity Model.
\nThe thread running through all of it is sovereignty: that’\;s what you get when your platform is built from open components you can self-host\, audit and move.
\nAn d yes\, a shopping list isn’\;t a platform so let’\;s learn how to build one together.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/building-your-sovereign-internal-developer- platform-a-cloud-native-shopping-list/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:What Does Coding Do to Your Mind? - Track: Education DTSTART:20261114T150000 DTEND:20261114T151500 UID:6aac41e77937153a3e85627c6066dc7f0327cf9c77ef2 DESCRIPTION:Last year we looked inside the programmer’\;s mind. Thi s year we ask a different question: what does programming do to the mind? Programming is one of humanity’\;s most recent cognitive inventions\, but does learning it actually improve the way we think? Rather than relyi ng on common claims\, this talk explores what cognitive science tells us a bout programming\, the cognitive processes behind computational thinking\, their transfer to broader problem-solving skills\, and how artificial int elligence is reshaping this relationship.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/what-does-coding-do-to-your-mind/ TRACK:Education TYPE:Education CATEGORIES:Education DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Source is a Lie: Deterministic Artifacts and the Shared Responsibil ity Trap - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T152000 DTEND:20261114T153500 UID:6aac41e77a1e7219c2055fbe18ab65249eb5d4ed48f79 DESCRIPTION:Continuous Delivery—the automated orchestration of softwar e deployments—relies heavily on external\, out-of-perimeter artifact reg istries. Whether deploying compiled packages\, compacted scripts\, or deli very manifests\, architects perform an act of blind faith. While open sour ce provides the ideal baseline for verifying intended behavior\, true digi tal sovereignty cannot end at repository boundaries.
\nFor security practitioners\, the imperative is ensuring that components and automated u pdates are not compromised pre-delivery. This talk exposes the gap between formal risk frameworks and actual runtime execution. We map a four-tier g uardrail strategy—moving from compliance baselines and pipeline auditing to ultimate runtime behavioral monitoring. The chain combines strict arti fact integrity verification tools (e.g.\, in-toto\, Sigstore\, SLSA) deplo yed directly inside the delivery pipeline\, auditable tracking logs\, and runtime behavioral monitoring in isolated staging sandboxes to intercept m alicious actions and data exfiltration before production release—a criti cal necessity for non-deterministic AI workloads.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/source-is-a-lie-deterministic-artifacts-and -the-shared-responsibility-trap/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:European digital sovereignty and knowledge governance: An integrate d LCMS approach through open source - Track: Education DTSTART:20261114T152000 DTEND:20261114T153500 UID:6aac41e77b0443d88a960a0ed977e0cb94ed28f0c863a DESCRIPTION:Digital sovereignty is the bedrock of European autonomy\, ye t many public and corporate organizations still depend on proprietary blac k boxes that compromise data control. We believe that knowledge is an orga nization’\;s core asset\, and its ownership must be verified and prot ected through open architectures.
\nThis session presents an integra ted model using ILIAS\, a European open-source environment that unifies an LMS and a CMS into a single infrastructure (LCMS). This setup eliminates technological fragmentation by placing training\, operational documentatio n\, and institutional communication within a single\, secure perimeter.
\nWe will share concrete operational data from three live deployments: the “\;Copernicus”\; network of the Autonomous Province of Boze n/Bolzano (190\,000+ users)\, the DIAdemia platform for the Horizon Europe DIAMETER project\, and the onboarding framework of the pan-European movem ent Volt Europa.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 3 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/european-digital-sovereignty-and-knowledge- governance-an-integrated-lcms-approach-through-open-source/ TRACK:Education TYPE:Education CATEGORIES:Education DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Running Uyuni everywhere - Track: Engineering DTSTART:20261114T154000 DTEND:20261114T155500 UID:6aac41e77be4d595f4ebd41f85fa6cce391a483ba36ba DESCRIPTION:Uyuni is undergoing a massive architectural shift. What star ted as a traditional server application evolved into “\;fat container s”\; managed by mgradm\, and has now reached a milestone: a flexible\ , “\;almost”\; cloud-native solution. While Podman remains a cor e pillar\, Uyuni now expands its horizons to RKE2…\;and why not somet hing else!
\nThis transition isn’\;t just a change in packaging \; it’\;s a fundamental modernization effort. However\, moving to the cloud brings its own set of challenges\, validated setups\, and architect ural limits.
\nIn this tutorial\, we will get our hands dirty by:
\n–\; Deploying Uyuni on various container runtimes\, with a prima
ry focus on RKE2.
\n–\; Exploring the shift from manual RPMs\, s
cripts\, and static configuration files to a streamlined “\;spin up a
nd go”\; container workflow.
\n–\; What’\;s the next s
tep? Where we are today\, the hurdles we’\;ve cleared\, and UyuniR
17\;s cloud-native future.
Join this session to learn how to lever age the power of Kubernetes for system management and see how Uyuni is ada pting to the modern infrastructure landscape.
\n LOCATION:Seminar 2 URL:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/running-uyuni-everywhere/ TRACK:Engineering TYPE:Engineering CATEGORIES:Engineering DTSTAMP:20260917T193919 STATUS:CONFIRMED CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Traces and IoTA - Track: Education DTSTART:20261114T154000 DTEND:20261114T155500 UID:6aac41e77c0d6af7beecccf323fbb52f3619aec117f8a DESCRIPTION:Traces and IoTA –\; Abstract
\nTraces: Between Na
ture and Information Technology.
\nThe concept of traces is a fundame
ntal element in both natural and digital systems. In both contexts\, a tra
ce is the mark left by an event\, an action\, or a presence\, which can be
observed\, interpreted\, and used to reconstruct past processes or predic
t future developments.
\nIn both nature and computing science\, trace
s constitute a system’\;s distributed memory. They transform ephemera
l events into enduring information\, allowing observers—biological\, hum
an\, or artificial to understand relationships\, behaviors\, and transform
ations. For this reason\, the concept of trace represents a conceptual bri
dge between ecology\, communication\, art\, cognitive science\, and inform
ation technology.
\nIn nature\, a trace is a material or immaterial t
estimony left by organisms and environmental phenomena. An animal’\;s
footprints on the ground\, a path carved by water in rock\, a tree’\
;s growth rings\, or mycorrhizal networks underground are examples of trac
es that tell a story.
\nNatural traces serve various functions:
–\; they reveal the presence of organisms and their activities\;\n–\; they document environmental transformations over time\;
\n–\; they allow us to reconstruct ecosystems and ecological relati
onships\;
\n–\; they constitute forms of indirect communication
between organisms.
The interpretation of natural traces requires o
bservation\, experience\, and the ability to connect seemingly isolated si
gns to broader processes. In this sense\, nature can be seen as a vast arc
hive of distributed information.
\nIn computer science\, a trace is t
he set of information generated during interactions between users\, device
s\, and digital systems. Every website access\, every message sent\, every
IoT sensor that records data creates a digital trace. Digital traces incl
ude:
–\; log files\;
\n–\; metadata\;
\n–
\; browsing histories\;
\n–\; data from sensors and networks\;\n–\; recordings of user operations.
These traces allow u s to:
\n–\; monitor system operation\;
\n–\; analyze
behaviors and processes\;
\n–\; identify anomalies and security
issues\;
\n–\; reconstruct past events through auditing and digi
tal forensics.
Traces and IoTA –\; The project
\nAs in
nature\, in the digital world\, a trace does not coincide with the event i
tself\, but represents interpretable evidence of it.
\nAs part of thi
s Traces topic\, we’\;re developing an educational project\, with stu
dents of the courses “\;Interactive Systems”\; and “\;Inter
action Design”\; of Urbino Academy of Fine Arts\, that connects a web
site to a robotic animal that receives events from web page user input and
responds consistently to requests. These electronic animals can leave phy
sical traces: a footprint on a sheet of paper\, a light trail\, or a sound
signature.
\nTraces is a project that explores the concept of traces
as a connecting element between the digital and physical worlds through i
nteraction between users\, a web platform\, and a series of small\, autono
mous robotic animals. The system consists of a website that allows users t
o send stimuli\, commands\, or messages. Each interaction generates a digi
tal trace: an event recorded\, processed\, and transmitted to an electroni
c animal equipped with sensors\, actuators\, and behavioral response capab
ilities. The animal interprets the input received and reacts consistently\
, simulating behaviors inspired by living organisms. Depending on the natu
re of the message\, it can move\, change speed\, emit lights\, produce sou
nds\, or activate mechanisms that leave tangible traces in the environment
. The project’\;s unique feature lies in the transformation of digita
l traces into observable physical traces. Each user action is not confined
to virtual space\, but materializes in the real world through various for
ms of expression:
–\; Graphic imprints left on paper using ma
rkers\, stamps\, or drawing systems integrated into the robot\;
\n
211\; Light trails generated by programmable LEDs that visually record the
path taken\;
\n–\; Sound tracks consisting of acoustic sequence
s that document received events\;
\n–\; Spatial paths that make
the system’\;s decisions and behaviors visible.
IoTA System: The Relational Level. The third component is the IoTA – Internet of Thin gs and Art system\, a communication platform that connects the digital and physical worlds. IoTA is not simply a network of connected devices\, but an infrastructure designed to transform information into aesthetic and beh avioral experiences. Main Functions of the IoTA system:
\n–\; r
eceives events generated by the website\;
\n–\; distributes mess
ages to robots\;
\n–\; coordinates interactions between devices\
;
\n–\; records the traces produced\;
\n–\; creates a
shared memory of activities.
Through IoTA\, every event follows ( in both directions ) a transformation path:
\nUser Input → Digital Event → Network Message → Robotic Interpretation → Physical Trace\n
The system acts as a sort of communication ecosystem in which data takes on a sensible form. A Network of Artificial Organisms\, where every students makes a Robotic Pet\, and in an extended version of the project\, multiple animals can be connected simultaneously. Each robot becomes a no de in the IoTA network and can:
\n–\; receive information from
users\;
\n–\; communicate with other robots\;
\n–\; sh
are states and behaviors\;
\n–\; build collective traces.
Traces and IoTA – Components
\nThe co mponents of this project are:
\n–\; The website in HTML\, CSS\,
and JavaScript.
\n–\; The robotic animal built with an electron
ic circuit based on sensors\, LEDs\, and motors driven by an ESP32 and C++
.
\n–\; The IoTA (Internet of Things and ART) communication syst
em with the relative Proxy with Python.