This session approaches open source as a socio-technical-ecological system, where sustainable digital infrastructure means addressing exploitative practices at every level. An open-source project can only be considered healthy when the people who maintain it are supported rather than exhausted, and when its design choices reduce extraction and waste instead of accelerating them. Robust and transparent infrastructures emerge when ecological limits and human well-being are treated as interconnected conditions for technology that lasts. Public investment is decisive. The Sovereign Tech Agency is a public-sector initiative that strategically funds foundational open-source digital infrastructures globally. This talk will introduce the Agency, outline the projects we invest in, and show how strengthening these core infrastructures contributes to sustainability.
Open source software is often described as the invisible backbone of our digital society. However, this shared digital infrastructure is chronically underfunded and rarely maintained with long-term sustainability in mind. Sustainability in digital infrastructure includes hardware and energy efficiency and greener computing, but it also includes the individual maintainers and communities that maintain code; its ecological and socio-technical dimensions are inseparable. In open source software, the raw material is most often the humans behind the code. Exploitation, whether of people or natural resources, lies at the heart of unsustainable practices.
The way we care for maintainers, the choices we make in public investment, and the durability of our codebases directly shape how much energy is consumed, how long hardware remains usable, and how knowledge circulates in society. Collaboration around shared components prevents unnecessary duplication. It is like building one strong bridge together instead of several fragile ones in parallel. Yet keeping these bridges standing requires more than technical fixes; it requires equitable working conditions and recognition for the people who maintain them. Sustainable infrastructures emerge when the social and ecological are treated as one intertwined system of human labor and material resources.
The Sovereign Tech Fund, managed by the Sovereign Tech Agency, is a public‑sector investment initiative launched in October 2022. Financed by the German government, the Sovereign Tech Fund uses public procurement to strategically fund foundational open‑source digital infrastructure globally. Our investments focus in the core infrastructure that many other projects build upon.
This includes support to Fortran, a long standing programming language at the core of climate modeling and high performance computing, which directly enables scientific communities to produce tools essential for understanding environmental changes. It also includes investment on Python Packages Index, which is in the core of many projects listed in Open Sustainable Technology. Fortran and Python’s continued reliability shows how maintaining existing open infrastructures allows scientific communities to build climate models without constantly reinventing the technical base. This is how software sustainability translates into ecological impact: less obsolescence, longer hardware lifecycles, and stable tools for urgent environmental research. Our role is to sustain these base layers through direct investments and programs such as the Sovereign Tech Agency’s Resilience and Fellowship, which strengthen digital infrastructure by reducing vulnerabilities and supporting individual contributors, recognizing that sustained human effort is as vital as technical reliability.
Public investment is decisive. For too long, the invisible labour of open source maintainers and critical infrastructure was rarely recognised or remunerated. The European debate on digital sovereignty reflects this concern: sovereignty is not about absolute control, but about the capacity of communities, institutions, and states to act with agency in the digital sphere. Sustainable digitalization, digital sovereignty, and digital competence are interdependent. This means recognizing maintenance of critical open source software projects as a public service: investing in maintainers and building competence for self-determined use is essential to making digital infrastructures both democratic and sustainable.
This session approaches open source as a socio-technical-ecological system, where sustainable digital infrastructure means addressing exploitative practices at every level. An open-source project can only be considered healthy when the people who maintain it are supported rather than exhausted, and when its design choices reduce extraction and waste instead of accelerating them. Robust and transparent infrastructures emerge when ecological limits and human well-being are treated as interconnected conditions for technology that lasts. Building on this perspective, this talk will introduce the Sovereign Tech Agency, outline the projects we invest in, and show how strengthening these core infrastructure contributes to sustainability, both in terms of ecological impact and in sustaining the people and communities behind the code.