We're happy to welcome Emma Ghariani to We Make Commons, part of the team running the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at DINUM, France's interministerial digital directorate.
Making open source usable inside government
OSPOs exist to solve a very specific, very unglamorous problem: helping large organizations actually use, contribute to, and govern open source software responsibly — tracking license compliance, supporting internal teams who want to publish code, and making the case internally for reusing existing commons instead of reinventing them. Inside DINUM, that means Emma's work touches everything from helping ministries release their code as open source to helping them responsibly consume the open source they already depend on.
The unglamorous work that makes commons durable
Digital commons rarely fail because nobody wants to use open source — they fail on the boring details: unclear licensing, no contribution pathway, no one accountable for security patches. OSPO work is the institutional plumbing that keeps those details from sinking good intentions.
Why this matters for We Make Commons
Emma represents exactly the kind of behind-the-scenes enabling work that lets public open source projects graduate from one-off experiments to sustained, well-governed commons.
Welcome to We Make Commons, Emma. Glad to have you.