Open Source at UN Science Summit

Martin Häuer, Team Leader of Team C1 “Sustainability-Standardization” is confirmed as speaker at the United Nations Science Summit 2026. In the session “Open infrastructures for global health, education and open science“, he will talk about the importance of open source hardware for science and healthcare infrastructure. The session will take place online and a free registration is possible via this link: Register

Martin Häuer was accepted with two session contributions:

Open Source Imaging

Many public services, including healthcare, significantly depend on proprietary products and infrastructure. This tends to inflate the service costs enormously – to a simply unaffordable degree, especially in the global South. The Open Source Imaging Initiative (OSI²) has developed an MRI scanner – which allows everyone to use, study, share, and improve it – thereby counteracting the MRI oligopoly and opening up processes for clinical certification. OSI² aims to provide open-source reference technology that can 1) serve as a product standard, 2) diversify supply chains (and eliminating vendor lock-ins) and 3) aid research e.g. via data comparability on fully characterized systems.
This talk will give an overview of the initiative and outline the concept of democratic, sovereign technology for critical infrastructure.

OSH Standardization

As open source allows anyone to use, study, modify, and redistribute material, there is hardly any need to reinvent the wheel anymore. In software, a global community is organically shaping standard solutions for even highly complex issues, free for anyone to use, adopt, or commercialize. This is primarily enabled by open source licenses; the governance of individual projects almost becomes irrelevant, as ineffective leadership can simply be replaced through a fork.
However, this model has its limitations. Such as one cannot simply fork a house, some technologies come with a very high “cost of change”, making it difficult for downstream users to replace them with variants that better represent their needs. This is the case for many open source hardware projects, where design decisions can exclude entire regions from replicating, maintaining, or commercializing a product. Consequently, more representative methods of decision-making are needed.
De jure standardization, despite claiming to be representative, has seen little procedural innovation over the past 100 years and is often unfeasible for open source hardware. At the same time, open standards processes in software generally do not claim to be representative and may prove equally unfeasible in the long run, as decision-making can become dominated by individual actors.
This talk will briefly outline the problem and propose a potential solution aimed at closing this gap.