OpenUK October Newsletter 2

OpenUK NewsletterOct 28, 2026

Dear John,

I recently spent some time at GOSIM AI Vision Forum in Zhuhai, China, along with our Chair Rebecca Rumbul and Chris Simmonds. It was a fascinating trip, seeing the Chinese ecosystem running whole tracks on agentic topics that we might simply cover in one talk. The AI openness ecosystem is thriving and enthusiastic there, which has inspired our current work on AI openness, with a China report for you to look forward to in early December. We welcome Eva Tseng to the policy team to work on this.

We will also be hosting an AI Policy Day at FieldFisher on 2 December, asking 5 key questions:How do we trust AI?; Who gets to build our AI?; Who owns our infrastructure?; Who is liable for AI? And of course, Who gets to Govern AI? This will be a fantastic discussion and the big reveal of our panel speakers will be in our next newsletter in two weeks time.

Back to this week and our Space Advisory Board are launching their Space Tech Radar on 29 October, with an event including keynotes by Anil Madhavapeddy and Simon Wardley.

One of my favourite activities each year is our annual OpenUK Awards, now in their 7th year. I am looking forward to seeing our shortlisted nominees, sponsors and volunteers at the gala dinner and award ceremony at the House of Commons on 5 November.

And our Rising Ambassadors meet again on 24 November with Matt Barker, co-founder of Jetstack talking about how to build a sales pipeline from the ground up.

Launch of the Space Tech Radar, 29 October

Join us on Thursday 29 October, 13:00-17:00, at Fieldfisher, Riverbank House, 2 Swan Lane, London, for the launch of the OpenUK Space Tech Radar, in association with Thoughtworks. Registration and coffee will be open at 12:00. The afternoon will include a keynote from Simon Wardley. Thank you to Fieldfisher, our venue sponsor, for hosting us. You'll need photo ID to enter the building.

Awards 2026

The 7th OpenUK Awards take place at the House of Commons on 5th November. It will be a cracking night, and we take this opportunity to wish all the shortlisted nominees [list them with companies if appropriate] the best of luck.

The Awards are free to enter and free to attend each year, and this is made possible by a lot of hard work from the team at OpenUK and the generosity of our sponsors. We are grateful to them for their support.

And of course, the awards wouldn’t be possible without our judges, and we are, as always, grateful to them.

Blog “The PHP Panic Exposes Open Source’s Cash Problem”

OpenUK Rising Ambassadors Meetup, 21 October 2026, Red Badger, London

Mathew Lodge, OpenUK Board Director writes about last week’s "The PHP Panic Exposes Open Source’s Cash Problem” shifting understanding to this being purely an AI Challenge and explaining why this is about open source funding and resources.

Read blogpost

“Agentic AI in Financial Services”: OpenUK London Meet-up

You can watch the broad and deep conversation that took place at our OpenUK Agentic AI in Financial Services meet-up last week sponsored by Infosys. If you missed the sold out meet-up or want to listen again you can watch the recording on YouTube.

Watch now

November Meet-up: Founder-Led Sales: starting from Customer Zero

Our Rising Ambassadors cohort of future leaders are under 30 or have less than 10 years in open source, and will meet again on Tuesday 24 November, 18:00 - 20:30 in London, sponsored by RedBadger.

This time Matt Barker, CEO and Founder of BoltMCP, and OpenUK’s Entrepreneur in Residence, will explain “Founder-led sales: starting from customer zero”, with lessons in how to sell a product before you’ve got it all figured out.

Although these events are focused on skills for our Rising Ambassadors, anyone can join.

Other OpenUK Upcoming Events

OpenUK Awards 2026, House of Commons, London, 5 November, by invitation
AI Policy Day, Fieldfisher, Swan Lane, London, 2 December, 10:00 - 16:00, invite only, email [email protected] to apply

All events require advance registration

Events OpenUK will be at

Amanda Brock is being interviewed on the Detective podcast: AI Agents: What the Builders are Learning, by Dtechtive
28th Oct || Online

Amanda Brock will speak on the Sovereignty panel at FTT Fintech Festival 2026
9-10th Nov || In-person || London

Amanda Brock will be part of a panel on the Consequences of Scaling Agentic AI at the Singapore FinTech Festival 2026
18th Nov || In-person || Singapore

Events of Interest

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA9-12th Nov, Salt Lake City, USA
Agentics Day: MCP + Agents North America 9th Nov, Salt Lake City, USA
4th World Congress on Recycling & Waste Management 2026 23-24 Nov, Paris, France
Open Source Summit Japan 2026 7-9th Dec, Tokyo, Japan

OpenUK in the news

US bans federal agencies from buying DeepSeek AI products, quoted Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK
Trump's AI agreement is strong on self-regulation, weak on enforcement, article by Computing, quoted Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK
No silver bullet for AI contracts - what buyers need to do instead, article by diginomica, quoted Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK
Computer Weekly announces the Most Influential Women in UK Tech 2026,
mentioned Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK as 14th most influential
US bans federal agencies from buying DeepSeek AI products, article by Computing, quoted Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK
How to manage and maintain open source models and contributions in the AI age, article by diginomica, quoted Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK

We have a lot going on as we see open weights and models, and agentic technology continue to dominate the conversations, even where the challenges are for open source projects. There will be more to come in our upcoming reports, events and blogposts on these.

Best wishes

Amanda

Professor Amanda Brock,

CEO, OpenUK and OpenHQ

For information on anything in this newsletter or to get involved, email us.

Join our Meet-up Group, #Community on Slack, GitHub, and view Event Gallery.

Would you like to add an event? Fill out the Event Form.