Open Source Society Malta

TECHXPO 2025
2025-11-20 08:30 - 2025-11-22 18:30 (Europe/Malta) | MFCC, Ta Qali, The National Stadium, Ta' Qali, ATD 4000, Malta
TECHXPO Malta is a national technology expo organised by the Ministry for Economy, Enterprise and Strategic Projects. The expo was established in 2023 and serves as a platform to showcase Malta’s cutting-edge innovations in emerging technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence, digital transformation, and local tech solutions.

The event brings together industry leaders, government entities, and technology professionals to explore the future of tech in Malta and beyond.

The theme for this year is Connecting Innovation. Shaping Tomorrow.

Opening Hours

Thursday 20th November8:30am – 2:00pmFriday 21st November8:30am – 2:00pmSaturday 22nd November10:00am – 6:30pm

Floor Plan at MFCC

#Floor plan of Tech expo at Ta’ Qali

Participating Entities

GDG Malta’s DevLab 2026
2026-01-10 10:00 - 17:00 | DiHub, Zone 3, DiHubMT, Central Business District, Twenty20 Business Centre, Triq L-Intornjatur, Birkirkara, CBD 3050, Malta
This event is all set to spark your creativity and elevate your skills. ✨
Dive into the world of web technologies with enlightening talks on Angular 🌍, where our expert speakers will share insights and cutting-edge techniques.
Get hands-on in our Battlesnake workshop designed to empower you to deploy, manage, and scale containerised applications seamlessly. ☸️

Finally, put your skills to the test in our thrilling hackathon capture the flag event 🏴‍, where teamwork and innovation come to the forefront with exciting challenges. Connect, learn, and thrive with fellow developers in Malta. RSVP now and be part of this phenomenal journey! 🧑‍💻

Please don’t forget to get your excitement, and your laptop for a day of DevLab!

UNESCO - Software Heritage 2026 Symposium and Summit
2026-01-28 00:00 - 23:59 | UNESCO HQ, 7 Pl. de Fontenoy-Unesco, 75007 Paris, France, 7 Pl. de Fontenoy-Unesco, Paris, 75007, France
Software Heritage for Humanity

Preserving and leveraging source code as a Digital Public Good for a sustainable future

To mark the 10th anniversary of Software Heritage, UNESCO and Software Heritage will co-host the 2026 Symposium on January 28, 2026. This event will recognize software source code as a universal component of the knowledge commons and organize collective action for its long-term preservation and inclusive reuse.

Software Heritage has built a neutral, heritage-grade archive of global source code and advanced persistent, verifiable identifiers that anchor provenance, integrity, and citation. UNESCO complements this with a mandate to articulate shared principles, mobilize partnerships and build capacities for openness, connecting the Open Solutions portfolio with the UNESCO 2021 Recommendation on Open Science, 2019 Recommendation on Open Educational Resources, and the 2015 Recommendation concerning the Preservation of, and Access Documentary Heritage including in Digital Form as well as the UNESCO ROAM-X indicators that operationalize rights, openness, accessibility and multistakeholder participation.

The 2026 edition will serve as a moment to take stock of progress achieved over the past decade and to translate the lessons learned into an agenda for 2026–2030. It will bring together partners from across research, education, culture, the private sector, and public administration to consolidate a shared vision in which software preservation, citation, and reuse are integral to knowledge creation and dissemination. By fostering equitable participation, promoting multilingual access, and strengthening capacities, the Symposium will advance public access to information in line with SDG 16.10 and contribute to the implementation of the Global Digital Compact through more inclusive, open, and interoperable digital ecosystems

Through a joint effort pairing technical excellence with policy leadership, UNESCO and Software Heritage will sustain a code commons for key global needs, including reproducible science, lifelong learning, documentary heritage access, and trustworthy, transparent artificial intelligence.

This half-day event will:

Mark the renewal and expansion of the UNESCO–Inria partnership on Software Heritage, reaffirming a shared commitment to preserve software source code as part of the world’s digital heritage, in line with the UNESCO 2015 Recommendation concerning the Preservation of, and Access to, Documentary Heritage, including in Digital Form and to advance its role in knowledge creation, education, and innovation.

Position software as a Digital Public Good and an essential component of the global knowledge commons, promoting policies and practices that strengthen openness, interoperability, and long-term access across research, education, culture, public administration, and industry.

Take stock of a decade of progress and launch the 2026–2030 joint agenda, connecting technical achievements—such as the Software Heritage archive, verifiable identifiers (ISO 18670), and heritage-grade preservation standards—with UNESCO’s Open Solutions frameworks to support equitable, multilingual, and sustainable digital ecosystems. (The term Open Solutions refers to UNESCO’s integrated policy and programme framework encompassing Open Access, Open Data, Open Educational Resources (OER), and Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS). It promotes openness as a foundation for inclusive knowledge societies, supporting transparency, collaboration and equitable access to information, in line with the UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science (2021) and on Open Educational Resources (2019).

Strengthen the link between software preservation and open development by foregrounding Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) as a foundation for sustainable innovation, transparency, and reuse. This includes promoting community-driven maintenance, open licensing, and procurement practices that enable public institutions and researchers to build on preserved code in the public interest.

Examine how transparent and responsible uses of artificial intelligence, grounded in open and verifiable code archives, can advance digital inclusion, empower local innovation, and sustain cultural and linguistic diversity—thereby contributing to the implementation of the UNESCO 2021 Recommendations on Open Science, as well as SDG 16.10 on public access to information.

Key themes

Open infrastructures for software as a Digital Public Good (DPG)

Software underpins education, research, culture, public services, and industry. Treating it as a DPG requires open, non-commercial infrastructures that guarantee long-term access, provenance, and equity. This panel examines how to map and monitor the commons (catalogs, registries, observatories), how to make infrastructures interoperable (open APIs, shared schemas, content-addressable storage), and how to increase resilience through geodiverse mirrors and identifier standards such as ISO/IEC 18670 for verifiable citation and provenance. It will also explore compliance-enabling practices (licensing clarity, software bill of material (SBO) readiness) and public-private cooperation models that keep stewardship in the public interest while leveraging industry expertise and scale. Global code archives and mirror networks are referenced as neutral enablers that sit behind the scenes to serve science and society.

Supporting the digital commons and a resilience infrastructure

Sustaining the software commons requires predictable funding, independent governance, and clear division of roles across states, funders, research, industry, and international organizations. Building on the Open Science recommendation and evolving policy frameworks (e.g., AI Act, CRA, NIS2), this panel looks at governance models that secure the public-interest mission while enabling contribution at scale; multi-source funding mixes (baseline public support, philanthropy, in-kind, procurement); and resilience plans that guarantee continuity of access to software dependencies and research artifacts during outages or shocks, aligning with the objective of scientific reproducibility.

Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) ecosystems form a cornerstone of this resilience, ensuring that preserved code remains usable, auditable, and adaptable through open collaboration. They demonstrate how community-led development and shared maintenance can complement institutional stewardship, strengthen trust, and sustain the commons as living public infrastructure.

Practical alignment with provenance/software bill of materials (SBOM) attestations and verifiable identifiers supports compliance and lowers systemic risk. Neutral global archives and mirror networks again serve as quiet plumbing for continuity and auditability.

Transparent AI for digital inclusion

AI can narrow the digital divide—if it’s built on traceable, well-licensed, and representative training resources. A Code Commons approach assembles high-quality, provenance-rich corpora that support transparent and efficient AI while honoring creators’ rights and enabling auditing and reproducibility. This panel centers on inclusion: enabling local language models, culturally relevant applications, and pathways for researchers and small and mid-sized businesses from the global south to participate. It links open code collections with education and capacity-building. It also highlights how neutral archives, identifier standards, and open tooling quietly make responsible AI possible without dominating the stage.

Code on show: A special exhibit

As part of the conference, an exhibit will place the spotlight on the untold stories embedded within source code, moving past its purely functional role. The exhibit will showcase code as a historical testimony, whether monumental, like the Apollo-11 lunar landing equations, or grassroots creations capturing the DIY spirit of early computing. Crucially, the focus extends to code as a mirror of society, revealing the biases, politics, and values of its time, rather than existing in a vacuum. Finally, the exhibit will invite appreciation of source code as a cultural artifact, exploring its expressive power, aesthetics, rhythms, and the unique artistic voice of its author, positioning it alongside traditional forms of human expression.The project is organized by Mathilde Fichen (CNAM/Software Heritage), Titaÿna Kauffmann (University of Luxembourg), and Camille Picard (Inria). Furthermore, a distinguished Exhibition Committee—featuring experts from the Computer History Museum, Codexpo.org, Deutsches Museum, and other global institutions—was responsible for the essential tasks of reviewing proposals and curating the final display.

Program

The Symposium will take place as a hybrid public event at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, following the Software Heritage Summit in the morning for contributors and partners.The conference program is subject to change; speakers will be announced soon.Registration details for this hybrid event will be announced shortly.

14:00–14:30 Opening ceremony — Renewal of Inria–Software Heritage Agreement and UNESCO partnership14:30–15:30 Panel: Open infrastructures for software as a DPG15:30–16:15 Coffee break16:15–17:15 Panel: Supporting the digital commons and a resilience infrastructure17:15–18:15 Panel: Transparent AI for inclusion18:15–18:35 What’s next & closing remarks18:35–19:15 Exhibition visit19:15–22:00 Reception

Foundry for Builders: MCP, Knowledge & Workflow Orchestration
2026-01-29 19:00 - 22:00
🛠️ Production Is Not Analytics: Understanding Microsoft Fabric’s Role
⚙️ Modern production systems are built to process transactions, enforce business rules, and scale reliably.
📊 Analytics systems are built to explore data, aggregate it, and turn it into insight.

Microsoft Fabric exists to cover this second space — with a unified, end-to-end technology stack.

🔧 In this session, we’ll focus on Microsoft Fabric as a platform, with a concise overview of:

🗄️ How Fabric stores and organizes data beyond application databases
🔄 How ingestion, transformation, and orchestration are handled
📈 How analytics, reporting, and exploration are built on top of the same foundation
🧩 How Fabric’s workloads are designed to work together as a single system

🧠 Conceptual context will be kept to the minimum necessary to understand why these components exist, with the emphasis placed on what they do and how they are used in practice.

🎯 This session is aimed at developers who want a clear, technology-oriented understanding of Microsoft Fabric and its role next to production applications — without turning into a data platform deep dive.
🛠️ Foundry for Builders: MCP, Knowledge & Workflow Orchestration
Microsoft Foundry introduces a new agent-first way of building AI applications — combining reasoning, knowledge, tools, and workflows into a single, composable platform.

🚀 In this session, we explore Foundry from a builder’s perspective, focusing on how things actually fit together after the Ignite announcements — using the new Foundry UI and APIs.
🔹 What you’ll see

🧠 Knowledge-based Agent (RAG)
Build an agent backed by Foundry Knowledge to answer domain questions using retrieval-augmented generation.
🔌 MCP-powered Agent
Use a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to securely access an Azure SQL Database — without embedding schemas or credentials in prompts.
🔀 Intent-based Workflow Orchestration
Implement a workflow that detects user intent and routes each request to the correct agent, showing how workflows act as the control plane for multi-agent systems.

🎯 Why this matters

Clear separation between knowledge, actions, and reasoning
Practical patterns for multi-agent architectures
Designed for scalable, governed, production-ready AI solutions

By the end of the session, you’ll understand how to structure agents, MCP tools, and workflows in Microsoft Foundry — and how to apply these patterns to real-world builder scenarios.

Agentic Software Development Webinar
2026-04-17 15:00 - 16:30
AI is accelerating coding, but its also quietly changing how risk enters production.

This session explores Vibe Code Drift: the slow, normal-looking failure mode where AI-generated code is shipped because it looks plausible, not because it has been verified.

If your teams are using AI coding assistants (and they are), this webinar will help you ship fast without shipping blind.

SQL Server 2025 News: AI Integration and More
2026-05-07 19:00 - 21:30 | Microsoft Malta, Skyparks, Skyparks, Luqa, Malta
Join us at the Microsoft Malta office for another evening of technical
learning and networking around the Microsoft Data Platform.
Two sessions. One foundational. One deep.
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🧠 Session 1 — From ML to AI Agents: The Journey That Changed Everything
◆ The Data Introduction Session
Before we talk about SQL Server 2025, we need to speak the same language.
This session tells the story of AI from the beginning:
→ From ML and its narrow, task-specific roots
→ To large language models and the generative AI explosion that followed
→ To the agent landscape everyone is navigating but few have clearly mapped
Models, agents, assistants, copilots, skills, tools — and the very different
types of agents hiding behind the same word.
You will leave with a mental model that makes every AI conversation,
and every vendor pitch, easier to evaluate.
◆ No prior AI experience required.
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🗄️ Session 2 — SQL Server 2025 News: AI Integration and More
◆ The Main Session
SQL Server 2025 marks a turning point for Microsoft’s flagship database engine.
This is the honest version of the story.
→ The vector journey from Azure SQL to what SQL Server 2025 delivers in RTM
→ What is GA, what is still in preview, and what that means for production
→ DiskANN vector indexes, AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS, AI_GENERATE_CHUNKS
→ CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL — calling LLMs without leaving SQL Server
→ Fuzzy string functions: EDIT_DISTANCE, Jaro, and when NOT to use vectors
Build semantic search and RAG pipelines inside the database.
No separate vector store required.
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🤝 Networking
The evening includes time to connect before and after the sessions.
Whether you are deep in the Microsoft Data Platform or just getting started,
this is your space to ask questions and exchange ideas with the community.
