Aiding the discovery and development of digital public goods is at the core of everything we do. Which is why we are excited to announce that this week we launched a beta version of DPG Resources, a collection of resources that will support projects on their journey to becoming a digital public good. This is a beta version of the project, so we are actively seeking additional resources to include. If you are aware of any additional resources, please share them via this form. 

In order to become a digital public good, a project must meet the DPG Standard. The DPG Standard is a set of 9 indicators that were developed by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) to operationalise the definition of digital public goods set by the UN Secretary-General in the 2020 Roadmap for Digital Cooperation. Indicators range from open source licensing to relevance to the Sustainable Development Goals. You can read more about the creation of the DPG Standard here. 

DPG Resources aims to become a curated collection of publicly available tools that can help projects meet and surpass the minimum standard. Meeting this minimum standard will increase the discoverability of a project and consequently its ability to make sustainable impact through reuse and adaptation. Going beyond the minimum standard enables projects to embrace the full potential of open source. For this reason, the DPG Resources collection includes resources to help projects go even deeper on areas such as documentation, community development, and child online protection. 

DPG Resources draws on efforts by other prominent open-source stakeholders including GitHub, Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative (OSI), and many more. By bringing together resources from across the open source community, we seek to highlight the important work that has already been documented, and to provide relevant resources that can help a project maximise their impact. 

Throughout the nomination process, projects are asked to demonstrate their compliance to the indicators in the DPG Standard. Therefore, the navigation of the DPG Resources site includes categorisation based on these indicators and will be built upon over time. DPG Resources also includes an FAQ section that helps individuals navigate the nomination process. 

Feedback on the beta version 

We want to make sure we are providing the tools and resources that are the most useful to projects during the nomination phase. In the spirit of open source, the DPG Resources platform is launching in beta, and asking you to help provide feedback through observation, conversation, and co-creation. Receiving feedback from users as we build, test, and adjust our beta version will help make sure we are supporting projects with the most relevant resources. All feedback or questions regarding this platform are warmly welcomed and much appreciated. Your thoughts on how we can improve can easily be provided through this form.

This is just the beginning

The resources currently available on the DPG Resources site are just the beginning. We want to be constantly evolving by providing new content and links as frequently as possible. If you know of resources that could be relevant to projects working to become digital public goods, you can suggest them by using this submission form.

If you know a project that could qualify as a digital public good, please consider nominating them. 

Have a question about a nominated project? Please reach out to nominations@digitalpublicgoods.net.

To learn more about the Digital Public Goods Alliance:
Join our mailing list.
Follow us on Twitter @DPGAlliance.

One of the first actions we embarked on was to build a registry of digital public goods to aid their discovery. Doing so was partly as a landscaping effort to know what projects already exist that are working towards a more just world, and partly a community-building effort, welcoming input by a broad set of interested parties and contributors.

Architecturally, the industry-standard would have been to create a database, build a well-polished front-end website, and offer an open API that welcomed others to contribute. However, that approach was neither quite right, nor good enough. This is in part because whoever runs the database would ultimately own the data, as it would inevitably be hosted on closed infrastructure (insert here any cloud hosting provider or in-premises computing). This approach is simply not transparent enough. As a technical co-lead for the DPGA, I knew we could do better.

Enter the beauty and simplicity of a collection of text files hosted on a version control system. The format of text files was JSON, a lightweight data-interchange format. This makes it easy for humans to read and write. It is also easy for machines to parse and generate. You have the best of both worlds.

Due to its popularity and common use throughout the global developer community, the version control system of choice was git with hosting on GitHub. While we didn’t invest much initially on the “well-polished website” aspect of our infrastructure, we reaped the benefits from using GitHub early on. On GitHub, any code repository comes by default with the functionality of issues and pull requests, providing a transparent communication channel to discuss potential changes with collaborators. Plus, all the data is easily accessible to read, inspect and modify. That was indeed embracing the open source way.

If you wonder about data consistency, conformance, and integrity, you may be concerned at the thought of managing a large dataset with plain text files. So was I. That’s where having a data schema in the form of a JSON schema ensures data validation and checks all of the above dimensions of data quality. Pair such a JSON schema with a continuous integration (CI) pipeline to automate the data workflow, and the result is a very strong and fully transparent backend. 

As all this data is hosted on a public code repository, we postponed the offering of a dedicated API, since the data is already publicly available on the DPG repository. Also, GitHub already offers their own API, providing endpoints to access the raw contents of what is available through the website. Yet, we have been longing to complement our offerings with a data API that could enhance our collaborative efforts and make it easier for others to build on this growing dataset. The beauty of storing all our data in JSON is that it is the same format that REST APIs use. Thus, little work was required to repackage this data and serve it through an API. In a clever twist of repurposing the infrastructure that GitHub provides for free through their GitHub Pages (initially conceived as a hosting for static websites—primarily documentation sites), one can pre-generate all possible API endpoints, create the underlying folder structure to host the content for all these endpoints as JSON files, and have a very robust hosting for an API that leverages GitHub’s massive Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ensure high availability and low latency all over the world.

This brings us to this week, when the DPGA releases its API, with its accompanying public repository. We welcome your integrations while continuing to build together on this dataset for a more equitable world.

Are you a software developer, product manager, UI/UX designer, or community manager that enjoys a creative exploration of innovation and technology while contributing to digital public goods for a more equitable world, including the benefit of children worldwide? Stay tuned because DPGA Co-Host UNICEF’s Office of Innovation will be opening positions in the coming weeks, keep an eye on their Twitter and LinkedIn feeds for more information.

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

Nominate digital public goods through this form.

Cover Image: “Embracing openness at Bryce Canyon National Park in winter” by Victor Grau Serrat is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.