Digital Commons and Digital Public Goods – Finding Common Ground for Policymakers
Authors:
Liv Marte Nordhaug – Digital Public Goods Alliance Secretariat CEO & NGI Commons DCTF Member, Nicholas Gates – Open Forum Europe, NGI Commons
This article is co-written by the Digital Public Goods Alliance and NGI Commons. You can find another version of this article on the NGI Commons website.
Digital Commons can be a fuzzy term to some, but it has a long history and legacy. The same history has also shaped the concept of digital public goods (DPGs).
Over the last five years, there has been growing international recognition of both these terms as essential to a more equitable digital cooperation model that operates in service of the public interest. The DPG concept is prominently referenced in the Global Digital Compact that UN Member States adopted in September 2024, and state recognition of Digital Commons has increased, most notably in Europe, with the policy push from France’s 2022 EU Presidency.
In this article, we describe the commonalities of these terms and their role as policy tools to channel support and investment, while also unpacking the unique identifying features of each concept. We also make the case that having more technologies that are both DPGs and Digital Commons will help advance the landscape of shared public interest technologies.
Unpacking the Concepts: Digital Commons and Digital Public Goods
To begin unpacking these concepts and their relationship to one another, let’s first look at Digital Commons.
Digital Commons
The history of Digital Commons traces back to cooperativism and collaboration of the early Internet and shares history with the open source software movement, beginning in the 1980s. It began with early collaborative platforms like Usenet and open projects like the GNU Project (announced in 1983) and the development of the Linux kernel (initially released in 1991). These ‘free’ projects fostered a culture of shared governance and co-creation. It expanded as more knowledge was released freely under open licenses, becoming regarded as open knowledge, initially under the movement that “Information wants to be free”.
Towards the end of the 1990s, the emerging open knowledge and by then well-defined open source movements began to align more with the commons movements (as defined by Ostrom and Hess). This led to the concept of open knowledge and open source tools being not just regarded as ‘free’ or ‘open source’ but as Digital Commons. The emphasis on Digital as Commons expanded with the rise of Creative Commons, enabling standardised licenses for freely sharing intellectual property. Digital Commons evolved further with the advent of platforms like Wikipedia (launched in 2001) and other open data initiatives, creating spaces where resources are collectively owned, maintained, and shared online.
In its current conception, Digital Commons refers to specific digital resources, as well as the communities and modes of governance that support them. In this view, the Digital Commons are specific technologies defined by communal production, ownership, and governance – placing more emphasis on individual products, infrastructure, standards, bits of code, etc – as well as the communities and governance of those digital resources. This understanding has been particularly championed by France’s 2022 EU Presidency.
Resources developed as Digital Commons go beyond ‘building in the open’ and more towards ‘building together in the open’. In practice, this means explicitly sharing decision power with all contributors and maximising reusability, paving the way to delivering the sort of services that only digital platforms usually enable, without the power concentration of Big Tech companies or dependency on systems integrators.
It also means, as NGI Commons contributor Jan Krewer highlighted in his recent paper for NGI Commons and Open Future, that Digital Commons are ideal providers for all types of ‘public’ digital infrastructures (PDI), or digital infrastructure which is ‘designed to maximise public value by combining public attributes through unrestricted access with public functions and public ownership’.
Digital Public Goods (DPGs)
Putting aside ‘digital’, the notion of ‘public goods’ itself is derived from the economic distinction between goods in regards to rivalry and exclusivity. This distinction has been used to argue for their public or private management. Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons shows the limits of this economic view of goods; namely, to show that it is institutions that make goods either public or private. And most importantly that, alongside public or private management, there are many ways for people to self-organize and collectively manage goods.
It was in some sense inevitable that the notion of public goods would be applied to the digital realm. Recognizing this, in 2018-2019 the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation placed the topic firmly on the international digital cooperation agenda with its report recommending the creation of an alliance and platform for digital public goods. Building on this momentum, the UN Secretary General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation which was published in 2020, stated that digital public goods 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 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”. The DPG Standard, which operationalizes this definition, is stewarded by the multi-stakeholder Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA). Although the DPGA definition adds a normative dimension with do no harm by design and the SDGs, it is still based on the original economic understanding of public goods advanced by Ostrom and others, with non-excludability and non-rivalry as core tenets.
The DPG Standard is a set of nine indicators that are used to determine whether or not open-source solutions can also be considered digital public goods. The indicators relate to three main aspects of a technology solution; 1) openness, which is represented by both licensing, documentation, as well as independence from proprietary platforms, 2) do no harm by design, including how the technology has been designed to meet international standards and protect privacy and user security, and 3) relevance to one or more of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
All DPGs that have been verified to meet the DPG Standard are listed on the DPG Registry, making them open and available to the public, so they can be easily discovered by potential adopters – including governments, private sector, academia, and civil society organisations.
So, what’s the difference?
In brief, the modern understanding of Digital Commons emphasizes the need for digital resources to not just be built in the open, but to be governed, maintained, and collaborated on in the open. However, as of 2024, the concept is not operationalized through a clear standard, leaving it vulnerable to concept drift and inconsistent use, despite the efforts of the NGI Commons initiative, Digital Commons EDIC, and others – all of which seek to build more understanding and policy coherence related to Digital Commons.
By comparison, the DPG concept is operationalized through a standard that was developed through a collaborative, community-based process. As a result, it is possible to verify whether a given digital solution is a DPG or not. However, beyond assessing ownership and ensuring active maintenance through annual reviews, the DPG Standard does not consider the governance of a given solution.
While many DPGs have some form of community governance, being a DPG does not necessarily mean that it is governed by or for the community. The assessment of the public interest side of DPGs is limited to the three aspects mentioned earlier; openness, do-no-harm-by-design, and SDG-relevance. This is where thinking of digital resources as commons becomes important.
The central idea of Digital Commons places significant importance on being self-governed ‘for the public’ and ‘by the public’ through public attributes and public functions.That said, there isn’t a specific standard (like there is for verifying what is or is not a DPG) to verify degrees of governance or openness for Digital Commons. Moreover, the aspirations of Digital Commons towards ‘publicness’ are higher than for DPGs overall, as the ideal Digital Commons model is one of public ownership ‘of and by the public’ through public control, public funding, and public production. While most DPG product owners see significant value in community and governance, a DPG can indeed be funded and/or governed by a single-entity as long as ownership is documented.
One example of this is open standards. Open standards, in all definitions, are not only based on open access to the standard but on the participatory process to define the standard. While some definitions accept licensing and fees, all definitions seem to agree that the true value of standards lie in the collective decision-making process. For more on this process, check out this policy brief from the Internet Society.
There is a logic behind why. Many proponents of open technologies, such as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) advocates, who argue that the benefit of open source lies in its adherence to the four freedoms outlined in Richard Stallman’s Free Software Definition, e.g. that ‘the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software’. In other words, prescribing how that community ought to be run would negate the intrinsic value of being able to do whatever you wish to with it . The concept of DPGs indeed emerged to maximize the opportunity for reuse and significant adaptation to meet contextual needs, partly as a response to the tremendous duplication of efforts and resources seen in international development funded technology initiatives. Hence, the FOSS definition has significantly shaped the DPG Standard, albeit with the added layer of do no harm by design and relevance to the SDGs.
Bringing the two together
We see significant value in highlighting more clearly the strong alignment between Digital Commons and DPGs not only in policy discussions, but also by showing examples of technologies that meet both definitions. By showing these examples, we believe we can provide important insights for policy development and resource allocation.
There are some challenges in doing this, though.
Defining clearly what ‘good enough’ public funding and governance looks like for Digital Commons is complex, as it is highly context dependent. It is also resource intensive to establish and maintain such a review process in an adequately neutral and independent organization. Therefore, no standard or review-body exists for Digital Commons, at least not yet. (That said, the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium, or EDIC, for Digital Commons is an announced collaboration which seeks to do something like this.) But, there is one for DPGs. This creates significant space for the two to reinforce one another, if there is a strong policy backing for doing so.
Encouraging more Digital Commons projects to nominate their technologies to be verified as DPGs could therefore be a useful step forward, as it ensures that certain minimum requirements are consistently met, and makes this information available in a transparent manner. It also increases the discoverability of Digital Commons technologies to different types of stakeholders relevant for adopting and contributing back to the solutions.
Despite the lack of a clear standard for assessing technologies as Digital Commons, it ought to be true that while a DPG should be free for all to use and modify, it should also have access to diverse forms of support and resources needed to become sustainable for the long-term. More thought can be given to this in the medium-term. One starting point could be to identify DPGs which are already functioning as Digital Commons as well as DPGs that could benefit from broader and more collaborative governance and support structures.
One interesting case is where multiple countries are implementing the same DPG to build out their foundational digital public infrastructure (DPI) components, such as digital identity systems or secure data exchanges. How can we encourage more innovation sharing that also benefits the core DPG? What governance structures can be collaborative and allow diverse inputs, while ensuring that countries feel they have sufficient autonomy in how these systems are built and implemented? Another highly relevant domain relates to the technologies that are critical to enabling public discourse, where there is a clear case for social media and communication platforms that are both DPGs and Digital Commons.
These are just some of the opportunities we see where there is high value in having more technologies aspire to be both DPGs and Digital Commons given the high alignment and complementary unique strengths of these two concepts.
Join us to learn more
Both the NGI Commons Consortium and the Digital Public Goods Alliance will be on the ground at OpenForum Europe’s (OFE) upcoming EU Open Source Policy Summit 2025 on 31 January, as well as the broader EU Open Source Week. During the Policy Summit, the CEO of the DPGA Secretariat, Liv Marte Nordhaug (co-author of this article), will be sharing her thoughts on the importance of both DPGs and Digital Commons in a discussion centred on “Open Source and Global Digital Cooperation: Positioning Europe as a Leader”. That discussion will be moderated by OpenForum Europe Policy Advisor Nicholas Gates (also a co-author of this article).
Both organisations – OFE and the DPGA – will be on the ground during the entire FOSDEM weekend as well. OFE, on behalf of NGI Commons, is contributing to the devroom on Open Source in the European Legislative Landscape, as is the DPGA, who will be joining OFE in a fishbowl discussion at the end of the Public Sector part of the devroom. The DPGA will be giving a keynote talk on Scaling Open-Source Solutions to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals: A Global Call to Action, hosting a stand which people can visit to learn more about DPGs, ,and organizing a side-event for product owners of DPGs and Digital Commons.
Make sure you join NGI Commons’ Digital Commons Community Platform (DCCP) to have these types of discussions. And if you want to get involved in this work, come find us while we are in Brussels.