Monki Gras 2026 - the most important thing in open source isn't the code

Monki Gras doesn't fit neatly into the usual enterprise technology coverage template. There are no product launches, no analyst briefings, no vendor keynotes about the future of AI. What there is, instead, is something rarer and considerably harder to find on the conference circuit – a room full of people who genuinely care about each other, about their craft, and about what technology is actually for.

Monki Gras is organized by RedMonk analyst James Governor, and this year's theme was prepping craft – being prepared in software and in life. It was a theme that turned out to be more layered than it first appeared. Because Monki Gras isn't really a conference about software, even though software is what most of the attendees build and maintain. It's a conference about the people who build it, the communities that sustain it, and the values that hold both together. Those feel like urgent questions right now.

Prepared for what, exactly

The opening keynote from Laura Tacho set the tone immediately – data versus hype, and the discipline required to tell the difference. Ana Hevesi followed with a frank assessment of what preparing to win in the age of robots actually requires from individuals and organizations. Neither talk reached for easy reassurance. The conference's framing of "prepping" was always going to be more honest than the usual enterprise technology optimism, and it was.

Danilo Campos opened day two with something that landed harder – preparing for genuinely unimaginable change. Not the manageable disruption that transformation keynotes describe, but the kind that breaks your assumptions about where you are and what you can expect. In a room that included immigrants, trans people, and people whose rights are actively under threat in their home countries, the political subtext was not subtle. It was the point.

Liz Fong-Jones's talk – What To Do When Your Passport Is Taken Away – didn't need much elaboration. The title did the work. In 2026, for a significant number of people in that room, that question is not hypothetical.

The human layer is the infrastructure

Holly Cummins and Sanne Grinovero's session on fixing the open source bus number cut to the heart of something the industry prefers not to say out loud: the digital infrastructure that modern enterprise runs on is, in many cases, held together by one person. A single maintainer, probably underfunded, possibly burning out, doing it for love while users file aggressive issue requests demanding free labor faster. The XZ Utils backdoor – where a sophisticated bad actor spent months building trust with an exhausted maintainer before inserting malicious code – was raised not as a cautionary tale about security, but as a cautionary tale about what happens when we treat maintainers as infrastructure rather than people.

The connection to enterprise risk is direct. If your organization's stack depends on open source projects – and it almost certainly does – then the resilience of those projects is a business continuity question, not just a community one. Funding, recognition, and protecting maintainers from hostile interaction aren't acts of charity. They're risk management.

Adrian Cockroft's closing talk on resilience and conscious observability brought this into sharper focus. Observability isn't just a technical property – it's the mechanism by which you know what's actually happening in your systems before it becomes a crisis. The same principle applies to communities. You cannot maintain what you cannot see.

Ashley Rolfmore's talk, Trust Before Truth, approached this from a different angle. Opening with a single number – £400, the maximum weekly Universal Credit payment for a single adult in the UK – Rolfmore made the stakes of software visible in a way that vendor decks rarely do. The systems we build touch real lives, real money, real decisions. Trust in those systems, Rolfmore argued, has to be consensual – it can't be assumed or demanded – and it has to be built through transparency about what a system does and doesn't know. With AI assistance proliferating everything, that principle has never been more important or more frequently ignored.

Daniel Roe's talk on Atproto, federation, kindness and resilience captured the other side of that – the individual joy of building something, the thrill of the first user, and the particular challenge of keeping a community healthy when the volume of interaction scales faster than the humans maintaining it. Decentralized protocols like Atproto and Bluesky are partly a technical answer to platform fragility, but they're also a values statement about who should control the spaces where communities form.

Sue Smith's session — Do Your Fingers Remember How To Code – asked something that resonated visibly with the room: what do we actually lose when we outsource cognitive work, and what does it mean to stay skilled in an age of AI assistance? It's a question without a clean answer, and MonkiGras is exactly the right place to ask it without pretending otherwise.

The open in open source

The moment that stays with me most, though, is Adam Zimman's closing talk on day two ‐ CIS Parent: Transguide. Zimman, a technology leader, spoke about his experience learning to support his non-binary and transgender children, framing the journey through Hollow Knight Silksong – a video game that became common ground between him and his kids when other conversations felt impossible. Three people built that game over seven years, he noted. It brought down Steam's servers on its first day of release. It was a story about craft, and patience, and the unexpected ways connection happens when you stop trying to force it.

It would be easy to ask what a talk about gender identity and parenting has to do with open source resilience. The answer, I think, is everything. MonkiGras has always understood that you cannot build genuinely open communities – communities where everyone can contribute, where trust is real, where maintainers are protected and valued — without doing the harder work of making sure everyone in the room actually feels safe and welcome. The two things aren't separable. The inclusivity is the argument.

The audience and speakers was diverse in a way that enterprise technology events frequently are not, and visibly comfortable with that diversity. Nobody made a big deal of it, which is perhaps the truest sign that it was working.

Why this matters now

I've sat through a lot of keynotes about disruption and transformation and the unprecedented pace of change. Monki Gras is not that. It's smaller, scrappier, and considerably more honest about the gap between what technology promises and what it actually delivers to the people who depend on it.

In a moment when institutional trust is declining, political environments are hostile, and the open source ecosystem is under genuine strain, a conference that centers human connection, psychological safety and community resilience isn't a nice-to-have. It's a model for what the industry needs more of.

That's what the open in open source is supposed to mean.