NIPA Commences Training of Open Source AI and SW Experts

[Financial News] The National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) announced on the 14th that it held the '2025 Open Source Contribution Academy Participatory Launch Ceremony' at the International Conference Hall of the Seoul Science and Technology Center on the 12th.
This launch ceremony was a meaningful event where a total of over 320 mentors and mentees for 15 mentoring projects attended to share mutual exchanges and program directions ahead of the official start of the project.
The '2025 Open Source Contribution Academy Participatory Program' is an education and practice-oriented mentoring program that supports mentors and mentees to form teams to learn open source technology and culture, participate in actual projects, and gain contribution experience.
This participatory program will operate the mentoring process for 315 final selected participants out of 983 applicants received from May 27 to June 22 until October 31, and will conclude the approximately 13-week journey with a performance sharing meeting on November 1.
At the November performance sharing meeting, seven teams with outstanding achievements among the participating teams will be selected and awarded the Minister of Science and ICT Award, the President of NIPA Award, etc. In particular, this year, excellent mentors who successfully led the projects will be selected to recognize and encourage mentoring achievements, induce re-participation, share cases, and seek overall improvement in mentoring quality.
At the launch ceremony, Kendall Nelson, a senior communication manager and core developer at the world-renowned open source foundation 'OpenInfra Foundation', was invited as a guest speaker to provide a special lecture and mentoring program to enhance participants' open source project contribution capabilities.
Also, Bang Jin-ho, a developer from Kakao Enterprise who received the '2018 Public Software (SW) Industry Development Merit Award', was invited as a special lecturer to vividly share his contribution academy participation experience, actual project contribution cases, and the process of growing as a developer, encouraging the future and growth of prospective contributors.
Lee Kyung-rok, head of the SW Future Headquarters at NIPA, said, "As advanced technologies such as AI have become key elements that determine the competitiveness of the entire industry, understanding and utilizing open source contributions in the AI field is no longer an option but a necessity for developers," and "I hope that participants will grow into talents with technical expertise in the AI and SW field open source ecosystem and world-class collaboration capabilities through this program."

yjjoe@fnnews.com Yoonju Cho Reporter