openDesk at FOSDEM 2025: Digital sovereignty through collaboration
At Europe's largest open source conference, ZenDiS presented its openDesk solution and discussed cross-government collaboration and digital sovereignty with European partners.
ZenDiSUse case: MPK relies on openDesk for secure collaboration
With its target of 160,000 licences across Germany’s public administration by the end of 2025, openDesk is proving its strength not only in major institutions such as the Robert Koch Institute, but also in smaller, strategically important settings.
The starting point was the Conference of Minister Presidents (MPK), which laid the foundations for openDesk’s practical success back in October 2024 in Leipzig. That initial successful deployment became the basis for the ongoing cooperation now being continued at the current conference in Rhineland-Palatinate.
From 23–25 October 2024, openDesk had its first real-world use case: just one week after its official launch, the system went live at the German Conference of Minister Presidents in Leipzig. The organising team from Saxony had contacted the openDesk project well in advance.
What they needed: a secure and autonomous system for interaction, documenting resolutions, and exchanging and collaboratively editing files among the 16 federal states before, during, and after the conference.
The opportunity: from the outset, openDesk proved that its interoperability works in practice. As an open-source solution, it integrated smoothly with the range of IT systems used by the federal states. It also had to satisfy strict security requirements, since data protection concepts differ within Germany’s federal structure.
The outcome: a clear success. The minister presidents, the heads of the state chancelleries, and their respective offices were all set up on openDesk within a short timeframe. Digital committee work was carried out without issue. openDesk thus passed its first test in a small but strategically important circle. The system performed reliably in daily use and satisfied all security tests behind the scenes.
Adfinis hosted openDesk for the Conference of Minister Presidents on C5-certified infrastructure from IONOS, meeting the standards of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). The cooperation between ZenDiS, Adfinis, IONOS and the participating public bodies ran smoothly — a successful partnership between SMEs and government in the interest of digital sovereignty.
Building on this success, ZenDiS and the MPK continue to rely on openDesk. The committee work of the current conference, chaired by Rhineland-Palatinate, is again being conducted on an openDesk environment, this time around in cooperation with B1 Systems and hosted by STACKIT.
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