04/06/2026
🗣️ KEYNOTE #3 🗣️
“Imagine Europe's policy process had a CONTRBUTING.md. How would you get a pull request merged, and what would count as a useful commit?”
This is a question our 3rd keynote speaker, Stefanie Lumnitz (FOSS4G Made in Europe Co-Chair), will be asking the audience. Her talk comes at a timely moment when the European Union has just released its Open Source strategy.
For decades, the FOSS4G community has built and maintained the geospatial digital commons Europe depends on. Today, this work is increasingly recognized and open-source is moving into policy agendas, funding programmes, and institutional strategies, including Europe's emerging tech sovereignty agenda.
This creates an opportunity for FOSS4G: not only to be recognised, but to shape the conditions under which open geospatial tools are funded, procured, trusted, adopted, and maintained. It is one way to secure the long-term relevance, sustainability, and impact of the digital commons we build and maintain. But are we ready to engage?
This keynote invites the FOSS4G community to treat governance with the same rigour as code. We will look at how European decision-making works in practice, and why your next most valuable contributor might be a policy specialist or business developer. It will offer concrete recommendations for making better policy 'commits', while opening a discussion on how we maintain the tools, values and conditions that allow open geospatial commons to thrive as part of Europe's digital infrastructure.
Stefanie Lumnitz works at the intersection of environmental data, artificial intelligence, and European policy. She is an Environmental Observations Policy Officer at the European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, currently seconded from the European Space Agency. Her work focuses on strengthening Europe’s Earth intelligence ecosystem by connecting environmental observations, modelling, AI, and open geospatial technologies. Through initiatives such as the EC–ESA Earth System Science Initiative, she brings together scientific communities across Europe to close key knowledge gaps in the Earth system while fostering open, collaborative infrastructures for environmental data and analytics. She is particularly interested in how open geospatial ecosystems can strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty, support sustainable digital infrastructures, and stimulate a stronger innovation and start-up culture around environmental data and open-source technologies.
👉 Learn more about our keynote speakers here: https://2026.europe.foss4g.org/speaker/
👉 Check the EU Open Source Strategy here: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-tech-sovereignty
