Och AI the noo: What to expect from State of Open Con, Edinburgh
Mercifully staged on British shores, the State of Open Con, Edinburgh, is held this week on Friday 5th June, so what can we expect?
Speakers will cover security, investment in infrastructure and the future for Scotland.
The event will include speakers from the Scottish Government, the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) and Natwest, as well as technology experts from Meta, NScale and Mozilla.
Held by OpenUK, the non-profit organisation convening the UK’s open technology sector, the conference will bring together some of the leading figures in software, open source and AI for debates and discussions around building secure and ethical AI through openness.
Themes at the event will include the future of digital and AI infrastructure in the UK, as well as security of agentic AI and the effect of Mythos, and sovereignty in the digital and AI stack.
The role of AI in open source
Some of Scotland’s leading technologists from industry, business and the public sector will join together to discuss the challenges in AI and the role of open source.
These leaders demonstrate the talent whose development Scotland has supported and who have gone on to global leadership roles in the open source software, infrastructure and AI. Scottish speakers and those based in Scotland on the event panels will include:
“With so much investment in AI taking place and Scotland’s talent, AI offers a fiscal opportunity. Open source AI allows access to innovation and builds jobs around this. The people speaking at this event are part of an international technology community transcending borders. They will be amongst those delivering the security, sovereignty and infrastructure that will be necessary for us all,” explained Amanda Brock, CEO at OpenUK.
Speakers also include:
Adrian Mouat, developer relations at Chainguard is (an expert on IT security and open source) who will provide insights to developers around how to keep applications secure. Professor Adrian Jackson, director of research at EPCC, the UK’s first National Supercomputing Centre in Edinburgh; Mike McQuaid, chief technology and product officer at Administrate, who runs one of the world’s most used open source software projects used across millions of software deployments. Plus, Tom Wilkinson, chief data officer at The Scottish Government, leads the nation’s technology and data strategies, improving use of data and AI to inform policy, strategy, and operational decisions.
The event will be hosted at The Royal Bank of Scotland Gogarburn Conference Centre, 175 Glasgow Rd, Edinburgh on the 5th of June 2026, starting at 9:30am.
Tickets are £149, with complimentary passes available for community members and those that are between employment positions.
