Open Technology Research Symposium 2026 Opens Call for Proposals
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is pleased to support the inaugural Open Technology Research (OTR) Symposium 2026, taking place on 26–27 October 2026 at the historic University of Barcelona.
Organized by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), OpenForum Europe (OFE), Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), and the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund (D//F), the Symposium brings together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, civil society, and industry leaders to help shape the future of open technologies.
The Call for Proposals is now open through 5 July 2026.
About the Symposium
The Open Technology Research (OTR) Symposium builds on the legacy of the OpenForum Academy (OFA) Symposium, led by OpenForum Europe, and marks the launch of a broader collaborative research initiative focused on open technologies and their role in public interest digital infrastructure.
This year’s theme, “Shaping the Open Transition,” focuses on moving from diagnosis to action: identifying what is already working, building evidence-based policy recommendations, and strengthening the institutional foundations needed to sustain open ecosystems at scale.
The event will explore how open source software, open standards, open data, and related open technologies can support resilience, digital sovereignty, scientific collaboration, and democratic governance in an increasingly fragmented geopolitical environment.
Themes
Participants are welcome to submit papers or presentations across seven key themes, which they will then present at the event:
- Theme #1: Economic Value and Impact – As open technology’s strategic importance is increasingly recognised at the highest levels of policy, the research base must go beyond macro-level economic estimates to produce decision-maker-ready evidence that speaks to the questions procurement officers, line ministries, and budget units actually face – not just return on investment and total cost of ownership, but the political, strategic, and resilience value that conventional economic metrics fail to capture.
- Theme #2: Governance – As major open ecosystems increasingly operate under hybrid models combining community, firm, and government oversight, the governance arrangements that determine how open technologies are stewarded, contested, and sometimes captured have outpaced the research base designed to evaluate them.
- Theme #3: Public Procurement Ecosystem – As public procurement emerges as a critical lever for open technology adoption, the research base must address both sides of the equation: the policy and institutional conditions that open doors for open technology, and the supplier capacity, talent pipelines, and upskilling infrastructure needed to walk through them.
- Theme #4: Sustainability and Business Models – Addressing the chronic under-resourcing of open technology ecosystems relative to the value they generate requires both stronger evidence and new institutional mechanisms that make the relationship between value extraction and contribution more legible and accountable, as well as up-to-date models of how value is created and captured in open technology markets and for open technology organisations.
- Theme #5: Behavioural Change/Adoption – The hardest barriers to open technology deployment are organisational and cultural rather than technical, yet the research base remains thinner here than in almost any other area: what works to build internal capacity, overcome institutional resistance, and sustain momentum through leadership transitions, budget cycles, and competing priorities is still more practitioner folklore than evidence.
- Theme #6: Security – As open technologies are deployed across an increasingly diverse range of critical contexts, the research community must continue to substantiate and refine the security case for openness across different technology types, threat models, and governance arrangements for both open source software and hardware.
- Theme #7: Research Infrastructure – As open source tools, open data, and open standards become foundational to how knowledge is produced, shared, and validated, the research base must catch up with both their transformative role in enabling scientific discovery and collaboration, and the governance and funding arrangements needed to sustain the open infrastructure that research increasingly depends on.
Accepted contributions may take the form of:
- Paper Presentation: 20 minutes + 10 mins Q&A (For completed reports and papers; Ideally suited for academic researchers, but also some non-academic researchers/practitioners)
- Presentation of Ongoing Research: 15 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A (For ongoing research and initiatives, presented in a novel or interactive way; Ideally suited for academic and non-academic researchers, but also some practitioners)
- Topical Presentation: 15 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A (For focused presentations on relevant ideas and concepts that are not part of ongoing research efforts; Ideally suited for non-academic researchers or practitioners, but also some academics)
Key Dates
- 18 May 2026: Release of the Call for Proposals
- 5 July 2026: Closing deadline of the Call for Proposals
- Mid- to late-July 2026: Review of proposals by the Programme Committee
- By 24 July 2025: Program finalization and speaker notification
- By the end of July: Program announcement
- 26-27 October 2026: Open Technology Research Symposium
Join the Conversation
The OTR Symposium 2026 aims to bring together 150–200 participants from around the world across academia, government, open source communities, industry, and civil society.
As a partner organisation, OSI is proud to support efforts that strengthen the evidence base, governance models, and collaborative infrastructure needed for open technologies to thrive as a global commons.
We encourage researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working across open source and open technologies to submit proposals and join the conversation in Barcelona this October.
For more information about the Symposium and the Call for Proposals, please visit the OTR Symposium website.