Beyond Open Source: HCF at the Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs Workshop

On 16 September 2026, the Human Colossus Foundation took part in a consultation workshop at the Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs (Ministerstwo Cyfryzacji) in Warsaw, at the invitation of Katarzyna Antoniak, Director of the Minister's Office. The topic was open source in local government. Our message was that the real goal is digital sovereignty, and open source is one essential element of it, not the whole.

A competition for open source in local government

The workshop was the second stage of consultations which HCF responded to, on a planned competition for pilot deployments of open source software in Polish local government units (jednostki samorządu terytorialnego, JST). Funded under Action 2.4 of the European Funds for Digital Development programme (FERC), it will let municipalities and regions test which open source solutions are worth adopting, and how. The Ministry aims for interoperable solutions tailored to local needs, as an alternative or complement to proprietary software.

It is the first initiative of its kind from the polish central administration, and the Ministry put its working documents in front of practitioners before fixing the rules. Its underlying ambition is sovereignty: public institutions that decide for themselves how their digital infrastructure works. That is exactly where we wanted to widen the frame.

Open source is the first step, not the last

An open source licence gives an administration permission: the right to read, audit, fork and leave. No other software arrangement offers stronger exit rights, which is why open source belongs at the heart of any sovereignty strategy. But permission alone does not make an administration sovereign. Drawing on the Dynamic Data Economy, the framework HCF has developed since 2020, we pointed to three further elements.

Open protocols. Interoperability lives in shared protocols, not in individual applications. When identity, data semantics and verification sit in open protocols, applications can be replaced without losing the data or the relationships behind them. This is what lets a pilots achieve interoperability between municipality knowing that there could be many different implementation of same tools.

Funded maintenance. A licence hands over rights, but nobody owes a duty of care when something breaks. That accountability comes only from paying someone to maintain each critical component, and procurement should buy it explicitly.

Competence. The right to fork is worthless if nobody inside the administration can evaluate, run or fix the code. Sovereignty needs in-house capacity in critical core components like security, protocols, identity and data.

Dual use: where the elements meet

These elements stop being abstract in a requirement raised at the workshop by representatives of local government offices themselves: dual use. We fully support it, because one set of communication protocols and applications serving several roles, instead of a separate system for each, greatly simplifies the work of small offices.

The scale makes this matter. As of 1 January 2026, Poland has 2,809 JST: 16 voivodeships, 314 counties and 2,479 municipalities. Of those municipalities, 302 are urban (including 66 cities with county rights), 724 urban-rural and 1,453 rural.

The requirement has two dimensions.

Inside and outside the administration. The protocols the administration uses for internal communication should also let citizens communicate with the public sector and with private companies. One shared infrastructure for identity, verification and data exchange replaces a patchwork of disconnected systems.

Normal operation and crisis mode. The same protocols and applications should keep working when things go wrong. In a crisis, the administration must be able to operate offline, still reach every part of the system, communicate with citizens, and verify them, for example when distributing resources. A crisis is the worst moment to switch to a system nobody has used before.

No licence can deliver either property. They depend on open protocols designed for them from the start, on components someone is paid to keep working, and on offices able to run them. Dual use is digital sovereignty made practical.

Looking ahead

We hope the competition rewards more than the choice of an OSI-approved licence. Pilots should also be judged on open, interoperable protocols, a credible plan for funded maintenance, and the competence they build inside local administrations. With the Cyber Resilience Act and the revised Product Liability Directive approaching, these questions will soon be unavoidable anyway.

We develop these arguments further in our forthcoming paper, Digital Sovereignty Without Recourse. We thank the Ministry of Digital Affairs for the invitation and look forward to following the competition as it takes shape.