Thoughtworks advocates for and advances digital public goods
Today, the Digital Public Goods Alliance welcomes Thoughtworks as a new member. We are particularly excited about this membership both because of Thoughtworks’ leadership in advocating for, and creating, open-source software, but also their commitment to digital public goods. Thoughtworks have established themselves as industry leaders in innovation and digital solutions and we are excited for what our collaboration efforts will accomplish.
Membership to the Digital Public Goods Alliance represents an organisation’s commitment to advancing digital public goods, but also to work collaboratively, transparently monitoring activities, and sharing updates.
“We believe that investing in digital public goods allows us to achieve impact at scale, influence the future and drive equity and inclusion through the use of deep tech. Digital Public Goods, given their relevance in citizen services across multiple geographies, truly reflect Thoughtworks’ commitment to Social Change, globally.”
— Vinod Sankaranarayanan, Business Head for Public Goods, Thoughtworks
Thoughtworks’ efforts in helping to harness the potential of digital technologies are already making a profound impact around the world. Thoughtworks has been working on Bahmni, an open source Hospital Information Management System (HIMS), since 2013. In 2021, their collaboration facilitated Bahmni becoming a digital public good featured on the DPG Registry. Bahmni is active in more than 50 countries, most of which are operating in low resource settings, where Bahmni helps to improve patient care and provide decision makers with data. Bahmni was the first open source HIMS product to obtain India’s National Digital Health Mission certification, a sign of the important value it adds by creating integrated digital health infrastructure. Their partnership with Bahmni is just one example of the transformational potential of Thoughtworks’ membership with the DPGA as they continue to unlock opportunities to increase the breadth and depth of digital public goods.
Another such example is Vakyansh, which aims to take speech recognition models in various languages and make them open source. Thoughtworks has highlighted the potential of using open source technologies like Vakyansh to help bridge the digital divide, in part by helping to bring more and diverse voices into speech recognition tools. They are working with Vakyansh to promote open source Speech to Text in Indic languages to help eliminate language barriers in civic participation. Vakyansh is part of the Sunbird platform, which is also a digital public good on the DPG Registry.
“Thoughtworks’ membership can help open the door to DPGs like Bahmni and more, increasing their discoverability and potential for adoption through the DPG Registry. Thoughtworks also plays a crucial role in stimulating the vendor ecosystem by working to scale up and implement DPGs. We’re thrilled to have them as a member representing an important voice in the open source community.”
— Liv Marte Nordhaug, Co-lead of the Digital Public Goods Alliance
In addition to Bahmni and Vakyansh, Thoughtworks is working with other projects to nominate them to the DPG Registry. Some examples include recent nominations Cloud Carbon Footprint and Epirust. Cloud Carbon Footprint is an open source tool that provides visibility and tooling to measure, monitor and reduce your cloud carbon emissions, and Epirust, a large scale epidemic simulation using the Rust programming language.
To read more about Thoughtworks’ membership and to learn more about the work they’re doing with technologies around the world that are potential game changers in the SDG space, read more here.