Today, the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) launched our first community sourcing exercise! 

We’re asking you to participate by reviewing open source projects against the Digital Public Goods Standard with the ultimate goal of determining if a project qualifies as a DPG.*

Why participate? 

Open source represents an unprecedented opportunity to fundamentally alter power balances in international development. But, we can’t harness that power without the cooperation of many – reviewers, maintainers, creators, policy makers, and so many others (that means you!). 

This community sourcing exercise will give you the opportunity to delve into some of the largest up and coming open source projects. You’ll get a chance to understand their licenses and documentation, and how they’re designing for best practices, standards, privacy and more. 

By participating, you’ll get a better understanding of open projects that are making a difference in the world, particularly those that are advancing practical solutions to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). You’ll also join a growing number of innovators working on technology for development (T4D). 

There’s more! We want to show our appreciation for your reviews! We’re working with the UNICEF Office of Innovation’s Blockchain Team to recognize those who contribute with a blockchain-based badge. This badge will be displayed on your Gitcoin profile. As a reviewer, you’ll earn the first Kudos ever issued by the DPGA!

What We Learn When You Participate

The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) strives to embody the principles of openness and transparency in how we operate. We want to engage people who share in our mission of promoting digital public goods for a more equitable world.

The United Nations Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation states, “Currently, access to digital solutions is often limited through copyright regimes and proprietary systems. Most existing digital public goods are not easily accessible because they are often unevenly distributed in terms of the language, content and infrastructure required to access them.”  

To address these issues, we plan to screen and assess digital public goods that have been nominated to our DPG Registry, but are not yet screened against the DPG Standard. We are looking for engagement in this screening process. 

Our aim is to build a process that is reliable, scalable, transparent and open. Ultimately, we want our vetting process to fit with our open values and to leverage the expertise of not only our staff, but also the community to help assess these projects. 

Desired Outcomes 

Our hypothesis is that, by crowdsourcing this screening process, we will arrive at some degree of consensus and therefore be able to move a significant number of projects from “nominated” to “Digital Public Good”. We will be testing this by using confidence ratings in our questions and looking at the overall agreement among reviewers. 

We also want to hear from you – is there interest in participating in an activity like this in the future? Are there better ways to engage you to support an effort like this? We encourage you to leave feedback in the comment boxes throughout the process to help us learn and grow. 

Want to get involved?

Here’s how you can participate:

1. Go to https://validate.digitalpublicgoods.net.
2. Login with your GitHub credentials (or create a profile, if you don’t have one already).
3. Select an open source project that has been nominated as a Digital Public Good.
4. Follow the step-by-step instructions to review the project and decide whether or not you believe it meets the DPG Standard criteria.
5. The validate webapp will open a Pull Request on your behalf.
6. To receive your blockchain-badge, submit your Pull Request (PR) to the Gitcoin Bounty (login with your GitHub credentials).
7. Badges will be allocated on a rolling basis – check back on your Gitcoin profile for your badge!

Ready to try for yourself?

*We define a digital public good as: “open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the SDGs.”

For more information on the Digital Public Goods Alliance or the Digital Public Goods Standard, visit our website. 

For specific inquiries related to licensing, please reach out to: nominations@digitalpublicgoods.net

If you missed it, check out the rest of the series featuring iSPIRT, Norway and Sierra Leone. And, for more on the DPGA follow us on Twitter or sign up for our newsletter.

UNICEF 

UNICEF is a proud co-lead of the UN Secretary General’s The Age of Digital Interdependence recommendations around universal connectivity (1A) and digital public goods (1B).

UNICEF co-founded the Digital Public Goods Alliance as a result of recommendation 1B’s call for a “broad multi-stakeholder alliance, involving the UN, to create a platform for sharing digital public goods”. This work aims to make open source solutions more accessible to governments and to help them scale. UNICEF and other DPGA partners are working directly with national governments, UN agencies, and others who are looking for open source solutions to deploy in their countries. 

UNICEF brings a track record of sourcing, investing in, and supporting open source solutions to the DPGA. They do so through the UNICEF Venture Fund which provides start-ups in developing and emerging markets with equity-free seed funding. They’ve also done cutting edge work that leverages blockchain technology to provide investments in cryptocurrency, creating innovative financing models that incentivise and encourage the creation of open-source digital public goods. Finally, UNICEF has been a leader within the DPGA in identifying and connecting with Pathfinder countries and leveraging their experience incentivizing positive grassroots impacts through digital tokens.

UNICEF is actively working to address underlying barriers that currently limit access to digital public goods. UNICEF’s Giga project, anchored in recommendation 1A, sets the goal of providing connectivity to every school in the world and every young person with information, opportunity and choice – including through increased access to DPGs. According to the ITU, some 3.6 billion people in the world do not have access to the internet. That lack of access means exclusion, fewer resources to learn and to grow, and limited opportunities for the most vulnerable children and youth to fulfill their potential. 

Read more about the work of UNICEF’s Office of Innovation on their website.

Each member of the current Interim Strategy Group (ISG) — consisting of iSPIRT, Norway, Sierra Leone and UNICEF — brings their own areas of expertise and interest to the DPGA which makes it stronger and more diverse in its reach and potential impact. As the DPGA is built out over time, membership will expand and change to include more stakeholders.

Since its launch, the Digital Public Goods Alliance — an initiative co-founded by iSPIRT, Sierra Leone, The Government of Norway and UNICEF — has been working to identify, support and promote digital public goods to implement recommendation 1B from the June 2019 Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation. 

Get Involved

Only by working together can we make this happen. The Digital Public Goods Alliance is, itself an open project, and we seek engagement and support from any governments, businesses, civil society, technology providers, donors, and experts wishing to help us achieve our aim.

Learn more about the Digital Public Goods Alliance on our website.

Stay on top of DPGA news and updates by joining our newsletter.

Nominate digital public goods through this form.