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Dear Readers,
SOOCon26 is “on the road” and on its way to our first stop…Edinburgh, on 5 June. We will be delighting our Scottish open tech community (and many from further afield) with the delights of AI, working our way through sovereignty and up the AI Stack from compute through models and agentic to orchestration, protocols and standards, all the way to user experience and ROI.
Speakers and agenda will be announced on 7 May, but if you want to bag a Bank Holiday bargain, you can save £50, with a £99 ticket, available now until midnight UK on 6 May.
SOOCon26 On The Road Edinburgh, 5 June
Bringing the UK’s open technology conference to a city near you. Now in its 4th year, SOOCon26 is going to travel across the UK after 3 brilliant years in London, and our first stop is Edinburgh on 5 June. We are delighted to be guests of Natwest, who have kindly sponsored us with their Goagerburn venue.
The day will focus on the AI stack, working up from Compute through Models and Agents to user experiences and ROI. You can guarantee that there will be a fair level of debate around sovereignty in the AI Stack as we look at open source software, data, hardware, standards and AI.
Early bird tickets from 30 April to 6 May at £99
Standard tickets from 7 May £149
Free tickets for community, students and those between jobs available on application – contact mailto:admin@openuk.uk
Tickets include catering and the conference party on 4 June. Speaker reveal on 7 May, so please stay tuned.
Dates for our future on the road days in Cambridge, Bristol and Belfast will be shared.
7th Annual Awards in 2026
The OpenUK Awards are now in their 7th year, and the Awards Ceremony will take place on 5 November in the House of Commons, sponsored by Dame Chi Onwurah, MP. We have a few categories available to sponsor, and if you are interested in being a sponsor, then please contact us at mailto:admin@openuk.uk.
We look forward to receiving your nominations in June and to announcing a shortlist in early September. All shortlisted nominees are invited to the event as our guests, and there is no cost to nominate.
We are excited to bring you the Oscars of Open Source for a 7th year and grateful to our Judges, Laura Czsjkowski, Kunal Kushwaha and May Cheung for their work.
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Ambassadors Cohort 2026
Our purpose is UK leadership and global collaboration in open technology, and in line with that, we are delighted to recognise the contributions and leadership of our community of contributors in our new cohort of OpenUK Ambassadors. They represent the gambit of open source, from software to standards, AI to data, and hardware and are a huge pool of talent.
We will be announcing our junior ambassador (Apprentice Ambassador) and International Chapters in May.
Skills Report
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OpenUK’s legal and policy work convenes our community to discuss the grand challenges of open tech and to share research on this. We produce regular reporting, and our most recent report focuses on skills, with the most recent data demonstrating 5.5 million GitHub Accounts in the UK for the first time, being 7.9% of the UK population per capita. As well as a deep analysis of the data, the report focuses on unpaid work and maintainers and how skills can be evolved – even in the age of AI – through contribution to open source projects. |
Our reporting will continue with a Cyber Security report in May and over the summer we will share our annual “State of Open” UK update. This will include an economic analysis of the economics of open source and value generated.
For the first time we will be delving into AI as well as software and we will be opening the survey up to an international audience.
The economic analysis OpenUK undertakes with our team of economists is world-leading and the only attempt to assess the value of open source in a replicable way using publicly sourced non-commercial data. That is key as it enables us to cut the date for different geographies etc. We will as always make the questions used in that survey available for re-use on a CC Attribution licence.
The content for the report beyond the survey is already taking shape but if you would like to make us aware of any projects or people you think we should speak to in the UK, pleased do.
There is, as always, a lot going on and a lot more to come, but we hope you will be able to join us across the UK at State of Open Con on the Road, will nominate in our awards as nominations open and also take part in and share our survey, which is scheduled to be released on 12 May.
As we approach the May Day Bank holiday weekend here in the UK, we wish you a sunny and relaxed long weekend, and don’t forget to bag an early bird ticket for SOOCon26 in Edinburgh!
Best wishes,
Amanda
Professor Amanda Brock,
CEO OpenUK and OpenHQ
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