Gabriele Columbro | 01 November 2022
A little over a month ago we announced the launch of Linux Foundation Europe at OSS Summit Europe in Dublin, Ireland, which brought together over 1,500 open source community members, along with 800 online participants tuning in from around the world. I had the honour to be appointed as General Manager of LF Europe, something I am personally and professionally very proud of.
The press announcement was made as part of my keynote (you can play it below) entitled ‘How Can the LF Enable Europe to Collaborate Locally and Innovate Globally?’ where I laid out the vision and the exciting opportunities we believe LF Europe can unlock. You can find detailed slides here, but the tl;dr was this: with the support of the Linux Foundation worldwide federation and our experience bringing together all community constituents, Europe has a major opportunity to create collective value on a technology, policy, and social level by enabling its collaborations to flourish on a global scale.
LF Europe’s mission is to inspire and create this type of open collaboration directly on European soil, with the OpenWallet Foundation being our first project in its formation stage. This mission clearly resonated, as the reaction from the ecosystem has been extremely positive and we even doubled our Members in less than two weeks. Still, we thought it was important to spend our first month learning, validating our hypotheses, and engaging with our contributor and member communities across public and private sectors. Besides the amazing insights from the World of Open Source: 2022 Europe Spotlight report, the input from our inaugural roundtable is heavily influencing how we plan for 2023 and beyond. Case in point, it became clear that investing in public sector-originated projects has to be a top priority, and that is why our first hire will be a Sr. Director of Community Development in Brussels, our LF Europe headquarters.
Next week I’m off to the Linux Foundation Member Summit, where I’ll be keynoting to introduce LF Europe to the global membership on the benefits of LF Europe membership and reasons to host a project in LF Europe. Onsite we’ll also be hosting daily LF Europe office hours (1:00-2:30PM), so if you plan to be there, please don’t hesitate to reach out to info@linuxfoundation.eu to set some time to chat. And, most importantly, yes, I do have swag!
There’s lots more to come this year, between new projects and the formation of our advisory board, so make sure you subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay up to date, consider joining LF Europe if you haven’t done so already and reach out to formation@linuxfoundation.eu if you’d like to propose a new project.