Organisations and groups

The peak body for open source communities in Australasia. It supports conferences, events and community projects, holding funds and providing organisational backing for volunteer-run activities. It also runs an annual grants program for open source, open data, open hardware and open culture work.

Founded in 1997, Linux Australia is a non-profit organisation run by volunteers and governed by a council elected by members each year. Membership is free. See more on the Wikipedia page.

The regional chapter of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, covering Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. OSGeo Oceania is a volunteer organisation devoted to growing and enabling the OpenStreetMap and Open Source Geospatial communities in Oceania.

Australian mappers coordinate through the Australian Mapping Community pages on the OSM wiki.

The Spatial Information Council (formerly the Australia and New Zealand Land Information Council). It is an intergovernmental organisation that sets the shared rules that let government spatial data be found, trusted and reused across state, territory and national borders. It maintains the metadata standards that describe what a dataset is and where it came from so anyone publishing spatial data can check their records against the standard.

ANZLIC also sponsors the Foundation Spatial Data Framework, which defines the core data themes, like addresses, elevation and land cover, that everything else is built on. The technical delivery is done by agencies, mostly Geoscience Australia.

A group of Commonwealth government staff and researchers, established in 2012, working on linked data, a set of open web standards for publishing data so that every term in it points to a published definition. The group writes guidance for agencies on using those standards, and publishes the resulting vocabularies and definitions under an open licence, so anyone can reuse them.

A national research data infrastructure facility that supports the management, preservation, and sharing of research data across Australian universities and research institutions.

The Australian Government’s geoscience agency is the national custodian of Australia’s geographic and geological data. It releases its material under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, is the largest contributor to data.gov.au and publishes its own holdings through the Geoscience Australia Portal. It builds what ANZLIC sets the standards for, including the Digital Atlas of Australia. Its Digital Earth Australia platform, which lets you browse satellite imagery, runs on open source software, Open Data Cube. See more on the Wikipedia page.

A national research infrastructure facility that has been operating a wide range of observing equipment throughout Australia’s coastal and open oceans since 2006. IMOS makes all of its data openly and freely accessible through the Australian Ocean Data Network portal.

Computerbank is a Melbourne not for profit organisation that has been refurbishing donated computers since 1998. Skilled volunteers install Linux and useful software, and the machines go to concession card holders, community groups and not-for-profits at low cost.

A volunteer-run non-profit organisation building local web hosting across the Merri-bek area in Melbourne’s north, as an affordable alternative to commercial cloud services. The longer aim is a local network that keeps working during power outages and other disruptions.

An Australian charity that builds and runs civic tech projects using public government data.

OpenSI is a non-profit open-source institute established through collaboration between the University of Canberra and industry partners. It supports the research, development, education and implementation of open-source technologies, with a strong emphasis on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum technologies.

OpenSI connects research, education and industry through multidisciplinary open-source projects that give students and researchers opportunities to work on real-world technologies and contribute to production-ready, publicly accessible outcomes. Engagement includes higher degree research, Capstone and sponsored projects, industry-embedded internships and other research-led pathways. Current initiatives include CoSMIC, an open-source AI orchestration platform; SmartGate; and OzLLM, an initiative exploring an open Australian language model.

OpenSI’s approach is grounded in open collaboration, with research outputs and software developed to contribute back to open-source communities wherever appropriate. Its public code and projects are available through TheOpenSI on GitHub.

A Melbourne non-profit that builds free, open-source platforms making Australia’s climate and energy data usable, including Open Electricity and Open Methane.

A research group at UNSW Sydney that builds software with mathematical proofs of its security, safety and reliability. Best known for seL4, the first operating system kernel proven correct from high-level security properties down to the compiled binary. The group started at NICTA, moved into CSIRO’s Data61, and returned to UNSW in 2021. Most of its software is released open source at github.com/au-ts, and projects move to the seL4 Foundation’s repositories once the foundation adopts them.

The Australian chapter of the international Wikimedia Foundation, and an independent charitable organisation. It supports people and organisations to contribute to Wikipedia, Wikidata and other Wikimedia platforms through events, training and partnerships.

A peer network connecting community groups, non-profits, and individuals working in the open source and innovation commons space. They run a recurring program of gatherings in Melbourne and online, spanning software freedom, open source, privacy, right to repair, cooperatives and internet governance. Formats include un-forum sessions, chainferences (satellite gatherings held in conjunction with a main conference) and fortnightly sprints.

Flounder (FLOSS Down Under) is an online meeting group for free software users across Australia and New Zealand. Meetings run as open discussions covering whatever members are working on, and the group has also held hack days. Because it is online only, it suits people outside the capital cities where most user groups meet.

Summaries of past meetings are published on the site, and the group uses Matrix rooms for community discussion and cooperative coding.

A Perth meetup group for people working with open geospatial software and data. Topics include QGIS, PostGIS, OpenStreetMap and geospatial Python. Events are open to anyone and include guest speakers, mapathons and technical workshops.

A Brisbane group for tech enthusiasts who explore the latest trends in technology using their own hardware, in their own time. They meet online every month and in person once a month at a library meeting room, moving the venue around the city. The group runs its own Jitsi server for the online meetings and its own Discourse forum for discussion between them.

Home Unix Machine Brisbane User Group (HUMBUG), is a Brisbane computer club for people interested in Unix and Unix-like operating systems and open source software. This group has actively been running since 1995.

The Australian user group for Joomla, an open source content management system. It runs a regular community meetup online, and the JoomlaDay Australia event. Members also use a Discord server for day-to-day help and discussion. It is a subcommittee of Linux Australia.

A Perth meetup group for developers using Laravel, an open source web application framework written in PHP. Meetups cover tools and techniques in Laravel development, and the group is aimed at connecting PHP developers in Western Australia.

Linux user groups, or LUGs, are local groups for people interested in Linux and open source software. They hold meetings, provide education and community support, and sometimes run events like installfests. Most are free or very cheap to attend and welcome people with no experience.

Linux Australia maintains a current list of Australian LUGs, organised by state, with contact details for each.

Melbourne Tech Guilds is a maker community that started in December 2025. It meets on the first Sunday of the month and splits into five interest groups: robotics, mechanics, IoT, coding and deep dive. Projects run on open hardware and open tooling, mostly Arduino, ESP32 and Raspberry Pi, with Home Assistant and MQTT on the IoT side. Mentoring is free and the group is non-commercial.

A Sydney meetup for people working with Rust, an open source systems programming language. Meetups run as a series of short talks and cover everything from embedded work and compilers to games and audio. Meetup dates are announced on GitHub, on Meetup and in the RustAU Discord.

Sessions are streamed and recorded, and slides are published in the group’s GitHub repository.

The national hub for Australia’s WordPress community. It lists local meetup groups and WordCamps happening around the country, and it hosts the Slack workspace that ties those groups together.

A forum where Australia’s major research bodies exchange information on open science, advocate for it, and coordinate the country’s response to international initiatives like the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation. It is co-convened by CAUL, Open Access Australasia and the ARDC.

A membership body for university libraries across Australia and New Zealand, and a registered charity. CAUL leads initiatives to increase open access to research outputs through content procurement, policy development and advocacy, and runs the CAUL Consortium, which negotiates read-and-publish agreements with publishers on behalf of member institutions. It also runs the Open Educational Resources Collective, a catalogue of free peer-reviewed open textbooks. CAUL co-convenes the Australian Open Science Network.

A membership organisation advocating for open scholarship across Australia and New Zealand, formerly the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group. Its scope covers the whole research and education landscape, including open access publishing, open data, open educational resources and other open practices. OAA makes submissions to government consultations, sometimes jointly with CAUL, and co-convenes the Australian Open Science Network.

A network based at Griffith University that brings together universities, not-for-profits, industry associations, consumer groups and repairers to promote the right to repair in Australia. It engages with government and industry on the legislative and policy changes responding to the international right to repair movement, and runs forums and the Australian Repair Summit.