California Department of Technology Open Source Summit 2026

Attended by Natalia Luzuriaga, Open Source Software Engineer @ CMS.gov

Agenda

12 – 12:30pm: Lunch and check-in [missed]
12:30 – 1:30pm: Opening remarks [missed] and Lightning talk
1:30 – 1:45pm: Break
1:45 – 4pm: Panel and facilitated working session

Overview

This event is a joint effort by California Department of Technology and Nava’s Open Source Program Office / Nava Labs. Attendees included open source practitioners from academia (UC OSPOs), foundations (Python Software Foundation, Linux Foundation), and government (CMS, NASA).

About California and the state’s Open Source Posture

The California state government is composed of 150+ departments and agencies working together to deliver services to over 40 million Californians. Chris Given, CIO of California, recognizes the various benefits of open source from enabling code reuse to creating public spaces for collaboration and trust. SAM 4984 is California’s Open Source and Code Reuse Policy where it states open source solutions as the first option to reuse existing code before building or buying new, and to make code developed by the State of California broadly available for reuse. The legislation calls for the state to “create and maintain an enterprise code inventory that includes all new State of California custom-developed code and related information and make this information available to all other Agencies/state entities on an ongoing basis”, leading to the creation of code.ca.gov, California’s Open Source portal.

California’s technology leadership seeks to prioritize boosting their open source posture. Currently, the open source portal exists but is outdated and not completely managed. They seek to restart this effort and reach out to more agencies to add to their inventory but challenges in education, awareness, and culture are barriers to adoption. Through the Open Source portal, they hope to enable more opportunities of code reuse.

Brainstorming Session

Feedback on California Open Source Portal

CMS OSPO Recommendations:
- Use a maturity model framework to identify where projects are in their open source journey, considering project needs and purpose.
- Standardize repository documentation via repository templates
- Outbound review checklists should be self-serve to reduce adoption barriers
- Consider archiving repositories that are no longer active. Use archival-identifier and repo-sunsetter to do this work
How can we build and grow the coalition of people involved in open source within California state agencies?

CMS OSPO Recommendations:
- Create an open source strategy based on California’s OSS policy
- Identify the champions in your organization
- Spread education and awareness via partnerships and trainings
- Innersource: OSS tools that one agency uses to comply with state legislation can be used by the other 149+ state agencies
How can we grow the California open source contributor pool?

CMS OSPO Recommendations:
- Identify “first good issues” on active projects in Open Source portal
- Build and invest in an early career talent pipeline: internships, hackathons, events
- UC Community is a great start