Last Updated on 15. June 2026
Two days in Berlin, over 2,000 decision-makers from government, politics, and business, and one theme that ran through nearly every discussion: Those who do not control their own digital infrastructure lose their ability to act. The Future Congress on government & administration 2026 demonstrated that digital sovereignty has long been a pressing issue of the present. mgm was represented this year with two program contributions and actively shaped the debate.
Less fragmented, more integrated: the Deutschland-Stack under the microscope
Roland Kreutzer kicked things off on June 9 in the Best Practice Dialogue “The End of Fragmented Specialized Process Logic? What the Deutschland-Stack Already Means for States and Municipalities” Together with Miriam Seyffarth (OSB Alliance), Saskia Lorasch-Weber (Dataport), Matthi Bolte-Richter (ITV.SH), and Florian Ebel (Berlin Senate Chancellery), he openly discussed the current state of administrative digitization in states and municipalities.
The picture was clear: municipalities lack funding and planning certainty, trust in higher-level structures has been eroded, and many administrations are not resilient enough. Anyone who wants to change this cannot avoid standardization and consolidation. The Deutschland-Stack is not merely a technical solution, but a commitment to the region and to digital independence.
Schleswig-Holstein provided the strongest argument for this path during the discussion. Nine years of consistent work, a painful but manageable transition to open-source solutions, and today blueprints that other regions use directly as templates. The state saves 15 million euros in licensing costs alone through the switch.
But it also became clear: open source does not mean free. The solutions must be operated, maintained, and further developed. The advantage lies elsewhere: open code is transparent, adaptable, and strengthens precisely the resilience that public administrations need today. Open interfaces foster competition and investment security. And the demand side is already shifting: those who invest in the Germany Stack now position themselves as reliable partners to public administration.
Thinking about IT, business, and organization together: that is our approach at mgm. And it is exactly what this transformation process needs.
The Courage to Pursue Sovereignty: Hamarz Mehmanesh at the Future Forum
On the second day of the congress, our Managing Director Hamarz Mehmanesh participated in the Future Forum “Implementing Digital Sovereignty” and discussed with representatives from Cloudogu, STACKIT, the Federal Foreign Office, ZenDiS, and IBM what is specifically needed for Germany and Europe to become more technologically independent.
Hamarz Mehmanesh took a clear stance: Germany can achieve this. The engineers are here; the know-how is available. What is missing is the courage to act decisively.
mgm has taken this step. With the open-source release of the A12 AI Low Code platform, the source code of our platform—which has been used for years in demanding administrative projects—is now freely available on GitHub and openCode. A12 is used in ELSTER, among other systems, and has already proven itself in practice. The open-source release is a concrete contribution to the technological independence of the public sector: greater transparency regarding the technology used, no vendor lock-in, and full control over one’s own software infrastructure.
What remains
The Future Congress 2026 has once again demonstrated: Digital sovereignty means that the state retains control over its digital infrastructure, remains independent of individual providers, and makes transparent decisions regarding how data, processes, and software are designed. The path to achieving this requires political will, clarity in implementation, and the conviction that digitalization must be anchored in every government department.
mgm supports this process with consulting that integrates IT, business, and organization and with a platform that is now open to the entire community.
