Reflecting on a Year of Community and Open Source
We’re looking back on a successful and exciting year! From local events in Berlin to a (nearly) 24-hour global broadcast, 2025 was all about bringing communities together.
This year, we continued to grow our own projects, Berlin Buzzwords and FOSS Backstage, with record numbers of submissions to the Calls for Papers of both of them. The amazing keynotes by Jutta Horstmann and Aline Blankertz set the tone for productive and fun conferences. Following last year’s success, we also held the second edition of our FOSS Backstage Design, bringing together the Open Source design & UX community to explore what’s needed for successful UX in Open Source.
Our long-standing partnerships remained the cornerstone of our work. We were honoured to co-organise Haystack Europe for the sixth time alongside OpenSource Connections, to support the Univention Summit for the fifth consecutive year, and to be part of the incredible team at re:publica for the 12th time running.
Beyond our regular schedule, we ventured into new territory in the public sector by launching the „Netzwerkfrühstück Open Source in der Verwaltung“. After a successful first instalment at FOSS Backstage together with NEGZ, we went for a second edition at SmartCountry Convention, in partnership with CityLab Berlin.
One of the most ambitious projects this year was co-organising the InnerSource Summit, a (nearly) 24-hour global event that literally went around the world, to bring together the InnerSource communities in Yokohama, Berlin, New York and around the world.
To top it all off, we were delighted to work with the Sovereign Tech Agency to co-organise their Sovereign Tech Fellowship event earlier this month in Berlin to recap and evaluate the pilot year of the programme.
cc-by-sa 4.0 Jan Michalko/InnerSourceCommons
cc-by-sa 4.0 Jan Michalko/InnerSourceCommons
cc-by-sa 4.0 Jan Michalko/SovereignTechAgency
cc-by-sa 4.0 Jan Michalko/SovereignTechAgency
Special thanks go to John Woodell, René Kriegler, Isabel Drost-Fromm, Russ Rutledge, Olive Cannon, Guilherme Dellagustin, Basanta Thapa, Nadine Riede, Greta Bidassi, Alice Horstmann, Phil Extra-Sachse, Powen Shiah, Mareike Bader, Jan Michalko and of course Andreas Gebhard. We also want to thank our fantastic partners, Kulturbrauerei, bUm, and TUECHTIG, as well as pretix, pretalx, WECAP, X10 Event IT and Covalent.
We’re already looking forward to an even more exciting 2026 with all of you!