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November 19, 2024

Software Heritage 2025 Symposium and Summit

The annual Software Heritage Summit and Symposium, set to take place on January 29, 2025, at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, provides a unique platform for academia, industry, and policymakers to discuss critical issues at the intersection of software, artificial intelligence, and society.

This year’s Symposium will focus on four key themes:

  •  Cybersecurity and regulation
    In the era of heightened regulation, including the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), ensuring a robust and open infrastructure for software preservation and traceability is vital. Stricter global cybersecurity and compliance requirements pose challenges to the software ecosystem but also open pathways for innovation. Software Heritage, in partnership with UNESCO, provides the transparency, reliability, and long-term accessibility required to navigate these regulatory landscapes. This track will explore the intersection of policy, regulation, and technology, highlighting how open infrastructures safeguard public and private digital ecosystems.

  • Open and transparent AI
    AI’s transformative potential must be harnessed responsibly to serve the entire global community, particularly regions in the Global South. Transparency in AI development and deployment is crucial for building trust, ensuring ethical practices, and reducing inequality. Software Heritage, through its preservation of source code and partnership with initiatives like StarCoder2, provides a foundational infrastructure for creating and sharing open AI models. These efforts enable equitable access to AI technologies, supporting innovation in underserved regions and fostering inclusive global progress. Discussions in this track will explore strategies to ensure that transparent, open, and efficient AI models are accessible to everyone, regardless of geographic location or economic status.

  • Open Science
    The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science underscores the importance of non-commercial digital infrastructures for preserving and disseminating scientific knowledge. Software Heritage embodies this vision by ensuring community-driven, long-term stewardship of software source code as first class research outputs. This session will delve into how Open Science practices, supported by Software Heritage, foster collaboration, accelerate discovery, and promote scientific endeavors globally.

  • Cultural preservation and education
    Software source code is a unique form of cultural and documentary heritage, with immense educational value. Recognizing software creators, including contributions from women and minorities, is critical to capturing the full narrative of digital innovation. Building on the 2019 Paris Call and UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme, this track emphasizes the importance of software preservation for empowering citizens and cultivating digital literacy, ensuring inclusive participation in today’s digital society.

Preliminary schedule for the 2025 Symposium & Summit

9:00 – 12:30  Software Heritage Summit (members – invite only.)

14:30 – 19:00 Software Heritage Symposium

14:30 Welcome address and opening remarks

15:00 Panel on cyber security and regulations

15:40 Tech talk(s)

16:00 Panel on AI transparency and regulation

16:40 Coffee break

17:10 Open science panel

17:50 Tech talk(s)

18:10 Panel: Memory of the world

18:50 Conclusion

The Software Heritage Symposium 2025 provides a unique platform to address the critical challenges and opportunities at the nexus of software, AI, and societal progress. Through dialogue and collaboration, the event aims to reinforce the role of open-source infrastructure in fostering a secure, transparent, and equitable digital future.