A Roadmap for NYC to Follow

On November 2, 2025, Barcelona became the first city in the world to formally endorse the UN Open Source Principles — a decision sparked by attending UN Open Source Week in New York, the event this campaign is built around. It paired the signature with three commitments still being built out: an Open Source Programme Office, a citizen agreement on digital rights, and a municipal open source fund. The signature itself was immediate — exactly the low-cost, high-signal move this campaign asks of New York.

The proof of concept was already running. Decidim, Barcelona’s open source participation platform, has operated since 2016; one participatory budgeting cycle allocated €30 million and drew 64,571 participants. In 2023 it was recognized as a Digital Public Good.

New York is already inside this story: the city’s own Civic Engagement Commission runs its participatory budgeting on Decidim today. NYC didn’t have to build that tool — Barcelona built it and gave it away, as it did for Helsinki, Mexico City, France’s National Assembly, and the European Commission.

Munich proved open source works at city scale early: starting in 2003, the city moved roughly 15,000 desktops to Linux and LibreOffice, the largest public-sector Linux deployment in Europe at the time. A change in political leadership shifted the city back toward Windows in 2017, but the commitment to open source kept going in a more durable form: in 2024, Munich's Open Source Program Office opened under an explicit "public money, public code" mandate, an institution built to outlast any single administration.

That commitment shows up in daily use today, not just policy. Munich runs Zammad, an open source helpdesk platform, and lists its work on openCode.de, Germany’s national exchange for public-sector open source software.

For New York, the takeaway is that open source at city-government scale is proven. The durable form it takes is an institution with a policy mandate behind it, paired with everyday adoption — exactly what this campaign asks New York to build.

Paris has run an open source policy since 2002, centered on Lutèce — a platform that now powers more than 300 city services, from permits to the participatory budget. In 2022 it stood up Europe’s first city-level Open Source Programme Office, an office with real reach: a Baltimore neighborhood nonprofit piloted Lutèce with support from Paris’s own IT staff — one city’s software crossing an ocean because it was built to be reusable.

Then the model scaled. In May 2025, France became the first national government to endorse the UN Open Source Principles; its national catalog now lists 494 approved free software products used across 183 public bodies. One city’s OSPO became, within three years, whole-of-government infrastructure.

For New York, the parallel is direct: being first isn’t a press moment, it’s a starting point other institutions build on.