Funding the Commons: Metadata Formats as a Public-Sector Lever (froscon2026)

There is a massive potential for public procurement to play a key role in open-source funding. Governments want software that is secure, maintainable, and backed by visible ecosystems as they look for digital sovereignty. But the reality is that proprietary procurement remains the safe play for procurement offices. This session shows how interoperable metadata formats could turn procurement requirements into a funding lever by making adoption, security posture, and contribution capacity legible across catalogs and jurisdictions. Public procurement is one of the largest financial levers in the software ecosystem. When procurement criteria favor open, sustainable, and secure solutions, funding follows. But many open source projects are excluded before evaluation because key evidence is fragmented across repositories, documents, and informal signals. This talk focuses on a practical solution: interoperable metadata formats that let projects publish procurement-relevant evidence once and reuse it everywhere. The session connects maintainer workflows to real funding outcomes by showing how better metadata improves discoverability, comparability, and trust for public buyers, grant programs, and ecosystem funders. What attendees will learn: * Which metadata signals matter most for procurement and investment decisions (security, adoption, contributor and vendor ecosystem, support capacity) * How we can use EU laws and policies specifically to build momentum for these metadata signals. * How standardized metadata helps public institutions buy responsibly while channeling resources to sustainable upstream projects. What we will discuss: * How to implement these formats incrementally to keep overhead manageable for maintainers and what signals we need from policymakers and procurement offices to go further. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://programm.froscon.org/2026/events/3485.html