A delegation of experts for UN Open Source Week

Open digital infrastructure emerges from a global open source ecosystem, and sustaining this ecosystem is essential to safeguarding digital sovereignty, innovation, and economic resilience. Yet the people who do this crucial work face significant structural challenges—from funding gaps to security vulnerabilities to succession planning—that threaten the stability of the systems our societies depend upon.

These systemic issues are fundamentally a global problem requiring concerted and coordinated action. The shared and decentralized nature of this infrastructure is precisely why we've come to New York City, to the United Nations—because the world and its societies need to come together to keep our digital foundations stable and secure.

For United Nations Open Source Week, the Sovereign Tech Agency is joined by a delegation of seasoned experts who work on critical open source projects. Their presence and contributions ground the theoretical deliberations on open source policy in a more complex reality. Every day, these practitioners do the work that keeps the systems we all rely on stable, secure, and accessible.

We've selected experienced individuals who reflect the breadth of the Sovereign Tech Agency’s investments in critical infrastructure and the open source ecosystem. Each brings complementary expertise, from security and scientific research to community building and sustainable project governance. Through in-depth discussions, knowledge sharing sessions, and collaborative development of best practices, they’re not only contributing to the maintain-a-thon agenda, they’ll also be supporting the teams hosted by the UN for the hackathon.

Here are the expert maintainers participating as part of the Sovereign Tech Agency's delegation:

Tania Allard is the CEO of Impact at Quansight, a Public Benefit Corporation dedicated to sustaining open-source projects and communities through maintenance, community stewardship, collaborations, and partnerships with other community stakeholders and organisations. She has participated in open source for over 15 years as a community organiser, contributor, maintainer, mentor, and strategic leader. Tania is passionate about driving initiatives to make open-source more accessible, secure, equitable, and inclusive.

Thilo is an FFmpeg developer and maintainer, as well as an open source freelancer. He is most experienced in the FFmpeg realm for lossless audio coding, video decoding, video filtering, EXIF metadata, OSX/iOS-based input devices and video filtering using system APIs, DASH and HLS based adaptive streaming, and WebP animation/video.

He is a former research assistant at the Communication Systems Group, Technische Universität Berlin working on 3D reconstruction, view synthesis, and computer vision in general. Thilo has been FFmpeg's administrator in the Google Summer of Code program since 2018 and has mentored projects in the GSoC program.

With over thirty years of software and systems experience, Mike is a seasoned professional who has accumulated extensive knowledge and expertise in the field. He has actively engaged with the Python community, contributing to open source projects and sharing his insights. His leadership roles at companies like Datadog, Warby Parker, and others have enabled him to mentor and guide others in the tech industry. Recognized as an AWS Container Hero and an avid open source maintainer, Mike's dedication to learning and problem-solving reflects his holistic approach to technology.

Sarah is based in Dresden, Germany. Originally trained in operating systems development, when she discovered the OpenStreetMap project, she switched focus to geospatial software with a special interest in search. She is currently maintainer for Nominatim, Photon, osm2pgsql and pyosmium but she has contributed to many other projects of the core OpenStreetMap software as well.

Matthias Klumpp is a PhD candidate in Neurosciences at the University of Heidelberg, with a strong foundation in molecular biosciences and a longstanding commitment to open-source software development. He has contributed extensively to the Linux desktop ecosystem. He is the current maintainer of Freedesktop.org, a platform dedicated to facilitating collaboration on specifications that make the modern Linux desktop work. He also maintains projects like AppStream and PackageKit, which underpin modern Linux software management. As developer for both the GNOME and KDE communities and Debian developer, Matthias bridges the worlds of science and open-source technology. His neuroscientific research work has been published in Nature Communications and Science.

Seth Larson is the Security Developer-in-Residence at the Python Software Foundation. Seth works to improve the security posture of the CPython language runtime, Python packaging tools, and the broader Python package ecosystem interactions with vulnerability infrastructure, security standards, and public policy. Seth maintains multiple open source Python projects focusing on web and security such as urllib3, requests, and truststore.

Tim Lehnen leads the engineering team supporting the Drupal community, maintaining critical services that Drupal relies on, and providing technical solutions to support Drupal Association programs. He joined Drupal in 2006 and joined the Drupal Association in 2014. With expertise in measuring open-source contributions, he's a frequent speaker on tech podcasts. Tim is passionate about the Drupal Association's role as an open-source nonprofit, upholding values of empathy, pragmatism, and openness. As he puts it, "the Drupal Association engineering team builds the tools that empower the community to build Drupal".

Minh has participated in the OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia projects for over 20 years as a contributor and community organizer. As a mobile developer by trade but a geography and language nerd at heart, Minh is particularly interested in free content and open data projects that lie at the intersection of technology and the humanities, as well as the open source software ecosystems that build upon them. Currently, he serves as Core Software Development Facilitator for the OpenStreetMap Foundation, as well as in several volunteer roles.

Adrian is a long-time contributor to FOSS, primarily focused on the development of libre operating systems for the mass market. To that end, Adrian works on GNOME OS: the GNOME project's experimental OS that explores ways to make Linux more user friendly, robust, and secure. Adrian was also involved in GNOME's Sovereign Tech Fund project, initially as a contractor and later on as an administrator. Adrian also has experience working in accessibility, specifically with Braille displays. He's most active in the GNOME and systemd communities, and during the day he works at Red Hat.

Leah Wasser is the founder and Executive Director of pyOpenSci, where she has built an inclusive open source community dedicated to improving the quality, usability, and sustainability of scientific Python software. Her work bridges open source, open science, and open education, with a deep commitment to equity, accessibility, and empowering the next generation of contributors with skills that support reproducibility, transparency, and collaboration in science.

With a PhD in ecology and over 20 years of experience in data-intensive science, Leah has built nationally recognized programs, including the NEON Data Skills initiative at the National Ecological Observatory Network and Earth Data Analytics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She also created earthdatascience.org, an open education platform that has served millions of learners.

William Woodruff is an Engineering Director at Trail of Bits, a NYC-based cybersecurity consultancy. He currently splits his time between open source engineering (primarily supply chain and cryptographic engineering) and running the Ecosystem Security group, which is responsible for contributing security and usability improvements to a wide range of open source tools and services (PyPI, Homebrew, pip-audit, Sigstore, LLVM, PyCA Cryptography, etc.). Outside of work, William is a member of the Homebrew project and is a contributor to a wide variety of open source projects.

Qianqian (Q) Ye is a Chinese artist, creative technologist, and educator based in Los Angeles. Trained as an architect, she creates digital, physical, and social spaces that explore the relationships between technology and systems of power. Her recent collaborative project, The Future of Memory, received the Mozilla Creative Media Award. At the Processing Foundation, Qianqian serves as the Lead of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, reaching over 5 million users. She teaches creative coding as an Adjunct Associate Professor at USC Media Arts + Practice and 3D Arts at Parsons School of Design. Most recently, she was a NYU ITP/IMA Project Fellow and a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab.