About OpenHeidelberg
An open initiative building and running its own digital tools — for everyone who wants to use, learn, and shape them.
The short answer
OpenHeidelberg is a non-profit initiative in Heidelberg that builds and runs its own open, self-hosted digital tools — and opens them to anyone who wants to use them, learn them, and help shape what they become.
- We are independent. Our services run on our own servers at a German hosting provider, on free and open-source software, under European law. No advertising, no behavioural profiling, no panic migration because someone halfway around the world rewrote a contract.
- We are open. Members, clubs, initiatives and organisations work side by side in one shared digital space. Concrete cooperation is negotiated individually and built on mutual, reciprocal benefit.
- We are useful. Everything here — from a searchable archive of city-council papers to a photo library, a project board or an AI assistant — exists so that real people can do real things with it, and so that anyone who asks how does this actually work? gets an honest answer.
If you remember only one thing from this page: technology you understand is technology you can control. That belief is the whole initiative in a nutshell.
A workshop, not a product
Most digital services are designed to be consumed. You sign up, you accept the terms, you upload your photos, your notes, your contacts, your life — and at some point you notice that all of it now lives inside a system you cannot see, cannot influence, and cannot take with you.
OpenHeidelberg is deliberately the other kind of place. It is a workshop: somewhere you walk into, look over the tools, ask what they do, plug something in, and leave a little more capable than you arrived.
- We are technically curious people — long-time IT professionals, developers, designers, planners, and neighbours who simply refused to accept that "the cloud" means "somebody else's computer".
- We are civic-minded. Our projects are about how this city and region make decisions, include people, and stay resilient.
- We are not a startup, not a club for programmers, not an anti-technology protest, and not a place where you need a title or a degree to be taken seriously.
Our mission
Our founding documents put it like this:
The initiative promotes the societal discourse on the use of information technologies, in particular artificial intelligence, and supports self-determined participation in these technologies.
Unpacked, that mission has four verbs:
- Understand — we take the mystery out of artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure, so that the conversation about them includes everybody, not only the people who sell them.
- Do — we run concrete projects using AI technologies, and every member can join one.
- Share — we give our members the resources to collaborate, organise and build.
- Stay free — we prefer free and open-source software, because software whose source is open can be inspected, repaired, taught and inherited.
Why we exist
Everyday digital life has quietly become rented life. Four things convinced us that this deserves a local, volunteer answer.
- The door does not lock behind you — until it does. Subscription platforms are friendly right up until the price doubles, a feature disappears, an account gets suspended, or a service shuts down in your country.
- Lock-in is expensive. Closed formats and proprietary suites make switching feel impossible. In 2025, Germany's federal government paid a record €481.1 million in Microsoft licensing fees — and that figure excludes municipalities, and the Google, Amazon and Oracle contracts on top. That money buys dependence, not capability.
- Democracy needs an explanation layer. A city council produces mountains of agendas, motions and minutes. Citizens who cannot read them cannot discuss them. Software that makes those documents searchable and understandable is not a gadget; it is infrastructure for participation.
- Small organisations are priced out of competence. A company has an IT department. A music initiative, a church group, a learners' collective, a neighbourhood association usually does not — and yet they carry the most social work in this city.
What we actually do
We run our own digital workbench
One login opens a complete, professional set of tools that we install, secure, back up and maintain ourselves. File sharing and document collaboration, a shared wiki, a project board, encrypted messaging and video calls, an AI assistant on our own model, a photo library. When you control the plumbing, you can decide what happens to your life.
We work on real projects with real partners
Our flagship project — Council Insights — collects city-council documents from the open interfaces of Heidelberg and Karlsruhe county and uses language technology to search, summarise, categorise and visualise them. We also maintain a reference RAG pipeline (General RAG), build learning materials, and explore what a shared digital home for volunteer work and local culture could look like — together with partners from the cultural scene.
We meet, argue, and learn together
Friendly conversation, presentations, and an exchange on whatever the latest technology actually is. Honest discussion about the social consequences of what we build. Introductions to the projects that are running right now — and an open door to join any of them. Dates are announced via our Matrix channel. No fixed location yet — we deliberately publish dates rather than promises.
We need active participants
Three small first steps: subscribe to our mailing list to hear about the next meetup, join our Matrix channel to say hello, or browse the member pages to see who we are.