An Invitation to Contribute to Digital Public Goods During Hacktoberfest

Author: Bolaji Ayodeji, DPG Evangelist and Technical Coordinator

It’s October, and something happens in the developer community at this time of the year: Hacktoberfest—a month-long celebration of open source projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors. The Digital Public Goods Alliance seeks to accelerate the attainment of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods (DPGs). These are open source software, open standards, open data, open AI systems, and open content collections that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the United Nations’ SDGs. All DPGs meet specific base requirements, as seen in the nine indicators of the DPG Standard.

Today, digital public goods are addressing critical development needs and urgent global challenges or are being used as important components of several countries’ digital public infrastructure to serve people around the world. You can go to the DPG Registry now and explore all the 170+ DPGs being built around the globe, learn more about them, find their source host, and contribute to sustaining these DPGs and creating a better future for all. Additionally, we have been working with our friends at GitHub on the For Good First Issue platform, which curates digital public goods, civic tech, and social impact projects, providing a way for developers to lend their skills for good. The platform sorts projects based on programming languages and SDGs you are passionate about. Developers, writers, designers, data scientists, and all types of technologists, it’s time to use your skills to make the world a better place.

To get started, all you need to do is head to this page and use the toggle to filter by programming language or SDG goal. Each project is listed with its activity and number of available issues. You can click on each card to preview and click directly on the issues you are interested in or click the project’s name to visit the repository. Once you find a project you are interested in, read their contributing guidelines and get to work! You can rest assured that all DPGs have a community code of conduct that protects contributors during interactions with other users (DPG Standard, indicator 9C).

Don’t worry if you’re not a software engineer; there are many opportunities for contribution, including improving documentation, translating text, designing, and other great ways to participate. If you have never contributed to open source, don’t be shy here; you can read this guide on how to get started!

Thank you in advance for lending your skills to an open source project focused on solving social problems around you. From fighting climate change to solving world hunger, your efforts will contribute to creating a better future for everyone. Together, we can drive positive and lasting contributions to the world, one commit at a time. If you haven’t had the chance to contribute to any projects in recent weeks, we encourage you to start supporting digital public goods today and continue to do so from now on. Thank you, dear hacker!