Open Labs

Open Labs is an Albanian based non-governmental, non-profit organization with the mission to empower Free Libre Open Source Software, Online Privacy, Open Data and Open Culture communities. It has been active since 2012 and members from the hackerspace have organized over 300 events since then. We strive to function in a decentralized and non-hierarchical way. 



We are often told that our community has a great gender diversity, something which creates a healthy working environment with minimal intervention of a Code of Conduct in practice. See for yourself in the group photos of the many events we organize.

Projects & Events

We are made of and host various communities and projects who work together in symbiosis in our hackerspace. Some of the most active projects Open Labs empowers are Mozilla, LibreOffice, Wikimedia, OpenStreetMap, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Nextcloud. 


(LibOCon 2018, Organized in Tirana, Albania)

Since 2014 we organize Open Source Conference Albania aka OSCAL, the first annual conference in Albania organized to promote software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge. We have hosted six successful editions of OSCAL, where representatives and contributors of the major open source projects we promote, joined us in Tirana for a weekend fully dedicated to free software.  


(Group photo from OSCAL'18 )

Policy-making

We have managed to collaborate with various other organizations and institutions to forward our goals as stated in our manifesto. We recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Municipality of Tirana to publish their data in the open by migrating them to the appropriate platforms like OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikicommons. Our latest achievement was the successful migration of the Tirana City cloud services to Nextcloud, a free and open source solution for cloud storage and services.



With the General Elections on 25th June 2017, we have reached out to the various political parties asking them about their stance on Free and Open Source Software, Open Data, Net Neutrality, Online Privacy and the Public Domain. Results are published on our Wiki.

Why support us?

Open Labs is partly sustained by donations but we still rely on sponsors. We would like that people like you contribute to the sustainabilty of our hackerspace, instead of shareholders, which is why your continuous support on Patreon is so important to us.


(Part of Open Labs crew and friends @OSCAL'19)
Your financial contribution will help us pay various costs which are part of running a hackerspace, including but not limited to:

• Rent
• Utilities
• Internet
• Accountant
• Legal Fees
• Office Supplies
• Hardware
• Furniture
• Space Maintenance

We are strong believers that a common space which empowers people from all parts of society should have no required participation or membership fees, hence we rely on optional membership fees, donations and well, you, Patrons.

Interested in learning more? Mingle with us on our Discourse Forum and get involved (no matter where you are based).