Johan Linåker

Johan Linåker is a Senior Researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Lund University, working at the intersection of empirical software engineering, open technologies, and digital sovereignty. His work focuses on how public and private sector organizations can use, develop, and govern open source software, open and shared data, and open standards to strengthen interoperability, reduce lock-in, and enable sustainable digital transformation.

He currently leads and supports European and national initiatives on open source adoption in the public sector, including coordination of the EU-funded OSAwards.eu project and facilitation of networks around open technologies in Swedish industry and government, including NOSAD and the Swedish OSPO network. He regularly conducts reports and studies commissioned by various entities, including the European Commission, the Danish Agency for Digital Government, and the Eclipse Foundation, and collaborates across projects with several large international industry and government organizations on urgent matters related to open technologies. He also advises on governance models, procurement, and cybersecurity for public digital infrastructure and open technologies across different levels of government, with open strategic autonomy and governments’ capacity to shape their own digital future as a unifying theme.

Previously, he has worked as an action researcher at the Swedish Public Employment Service, served as Open Source Strategist at Axis Communications, and founded OpenHack – Coding for Humanity, a social initiative promoting open source solutions for the UN Sustainable Development Goals, now part of Engineers Without Borders Sweden. He enjoys collaborating with policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to turn research insights into practical strategies, guidelines, and communities around open and sustainable digital ecosystems.

Johan's research commonly touches on the human and social aspects of software engineering, as the development of open technologies by design is a collaborative and social effort. This implies several challenges from a socio-technical perspective, often requiring a qualitative or mixed-method approach to investigate. His goal, however, goes beyond problem understanding, and is focused on developing knowledge and designing artifacts that can help to address the problem at hand in a real-world context. An iterative process he prefer to do in collaboration with the actors present in the problem context.

For full bio, see: http://linaker.se