The right to look isn't the same as the ability to judge

03 Jul, 2026

Notes from UN Open Source Week 2026

Open source stands on open source. Every AI system at the UN last week was built on libraries, frameworks, and tooling that someone gave away. And the same technology is quietly eroding the thing it's built on. That contradiction was the reason I framed my panel the way I did, and it turned out to be the reason for most of my week.

I was in four rooms across the week: judging the hackathon, moderating a panel on AI's impact on open source, and chairing the community-led UNxSDG track. Different rooms, same question kept surfacing, and it wasn't the one everyone came to answer.

The week was full of people declaring open source the answer. And they were inspiring about it. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Morocco's Head of Government for Digital Transition, called open source "the instrument of sovereignty." Tanzania's Angellah Kairuki spoke about changing from a passive consumer of technology to an active participant. The Next Einstein motif kept resurfacing: talent exists everywhere, infrastructure and access don't, and open source is the equaliser. Alberto Gago, Spain's AI regulator, put the stakes plainly: decisions affecting all of society are being handed to a handful of private actors answerable to no electorate, and transparency in that architecture isn't just unguaranteed, it's structurally impossible.

Those are the right instincts. But sitting at the judging table and the moderator's chair for a week, my job was to keep asking the quieter follow-up: the answer to what, exactly?

Because openness is the precondition, not the delivery. A nation that adopts open weights it can't evaluate hasn't gained sovereignty. It's swapped one dependency for a subtler one. My fellow panelist Frederik Blachetta, a government-tech CTO, said the thing I keep repeating: open source gives you the right to look; evaluation gives you the ability to judge. A model that scores well on global benchmarks can fail completely in a specific administrative language or jurisdiction. Access to the weights tells you nothing about that. You still have to build the capacity to judge, and almost nobody has it.

I saw the small version of this at the hackathon. Teams built open, agentic, genuinely live tools on the UN's emerging Data Commons, and the strongest ones made a real dataset legible to someone who has to act on it. The weaker ones confused an interface for a decision-support system. Open, dynamic, demo-ready, and still not load-bearing. The gap between something that looks complete and something that is turned out to be the whole week in miniature.

And I saw the large version when we ran project spotlights in the UN Open Source Community of Practice. We deliberately paired Primero, UNICEF's child protection case management platform running across dozens of countries, with eTIR, UNECE's customs transit exchange underpinning cross-border trade. Nothing in common as domains. Everything in common as examples: open source that is real, maintained, and load-bearing, built by actual communities over years. That's the bar. Most of what's arriving now, AI-assisted and technically polished enough to clear seed stage, isn't there yet, and there's no clear way to fund the institutional weight that gets it there.

Which is the part that stays with me, from the best moment on my panel. Taylor Downs of OpenFN pointed out that software has always been cheaper than trustworthy, publicly accountable institutions. As the cost of producing software falls toward zero, the cost of the trust layer, the maintenance, the reliability, the accountability, only rises. AI is making the first part nearly free and the second part more important than ever.

So here's what I took away, and it's less quotable than "open source is the instrument of sovereignty," but truer:

Openness buys you the right to look. That's it. That's what it buys. Everything hard starts after that. The evaluation, the maintenance, the provenance, the institutions that make a system trustworthy enough to run a country's child protection service or its customs on. Open source is the precondition for all of it and the guarantee of none of it.

The ministers are right that open source is how you avoid becoming a permanent technology colony. But you don't get sovereignty by adopting open weights. You get it by building the capacity to judge them. That capacity is the work. It was the work before AI, and AI has only raised the price.