As the world faces the worst economic recession in eight decades due to COVID-19, countries have expanded social protection, leveraging digital financial services. With that, the need for ensuring that everyone can verify their identity in order to access such services and benefits has never been more urgent. Instead of being built merely for administrative purposes, digital ID systems are increasingly seen as an opportunity to accelerate development by connecting marginalised communities to vital public services and social benefits. Likewise, the ability to share data in a secure and privacy-sensitive manner is important for being able to reliably validate or exclude the eligibility of beneficiaries.

Put simply, the countries that already had in place these foundational digital public infrastructures – digital payments systems, digital ID, and trusted data ecosystems – have been better equipped to mitigate the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic. The same can be said for the delivery of vaccines, for which the same tools have been used by those countries to more efficiently and equitably roll out one of the most critical mass vaccination campaigns for generations.

With this, there are lessons to be learned and optimism for the challenges that lay ahead. The borderlessness of COVID-19 has helped spark global agreement that the world needs to be better prepared for future pandemics. Utilising inclusive digital public infrastructure is one key way to do that.

In our previous blog on how to strengthen the digital public goods ecosystem, we described the need for sustainable core funding for foundational digital public goods as generic state of the art solutions. In this sequel, we want to drive attention to the need for providing comprehensive technical assistance for countries to assess, pilot, deploy, and manage these technologies. 

What technical assistance means in the context of implementing foundational digital public infrastructure

Countries are at different points in their journey to digitising services. Laying a digital foundation is a monumental task, often requiring moving away from antiquated, sometimes paper based systems. In many cases these are greenfield circumstances – where there are no legacy systems to build from. In this scenario, foundational systems can be the most complex given the expertise and time needed to implement them. That’s why support requires a multi-faceted approach that reflects the needs of each country. 

Enabled by sustained funding, support to countries can have the greatest impact when it is holistic and optimised to achieve good principles and practices. Design of these digital public infrastructures to maximise inclusion, trust, and developmental impact requires support of the broader enabling environment including institutional and legal frameworks (especially data protection and cybersecurity), end-user engagement, capacity building, and assessment of appropriate technologies, among others. In the context of digital public goods – often a new approach for many government actors – there is a need for a mindset shift in terms of how systems are conceived: not as vendor-supported products but as country-owned platforms.

International development partners are increasingly more active in supporting the digitisation of services. This, combined with the urgent need for foundational digital public infrastructure, has led to a surge in demand for timely technical assistance that is context-appropriate and based on best practices.

For instance, the World Bank has two multi-sectoral initiatives to help countries realise the transformational potential of digital ID and G2P ecosystems: Identification for Development (ID4D) (funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UK Government, French Government, and Omidyar Network) and G2Px (Digitizing Government-to-Person Payments) (funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). The cohesive approach of these sister initiatives harnesses the power of combining the foundational digital public infrastructures (or ‘digital stack’) for maximising a variety of development outcomes, from financial inclusion and effective delivery of social assistance to women’s economic empowerment and digital transformation, while mitigating the exclusion, data protection, and technology lock-in risks.

Over the last couple of years, ID4D significantly increased its technical assistance engagement with more than 30 countries. In the midst of the pandemic, G2Px also quickly scaled up to provide technical assistance to 35 countries that were facing the challenge of how to leverage digital technology to deliver social assistance payments effectively and safely in the context of the pandemic. 

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has similarly seen significant increases in country demand for broader digital transformation support, with 20 developing countries requesting such assistance. Guided by an inclusive digital transformation framework, UNDP has supported national governments to conduct digital readiness assessments for identifying gaps and priorities, developing national digital strategies, advising on the design of agencies that would drive the national effort of digital transformation beyond individual ministries, as well as suggesting global solutions (including DPGs) and partners, while strengthening local governments and ecosystems. 

The case for open source solutions and open standards

Countries must be supported in their efforts to rapidly deploy and adapt digital public goods to meet their relevant infrastructure needs. The alternative – pursuing proprietary options – may not be conducive at the speed and scale needed. Additionally they may lack localisable features, and lock countries to singular vendors and particular technologies. Many ID projects have faced vendor lock-in, preventing implementing governments from achieving interoperability or modifying or adding functionalities without significant change request fees. This leads to low country ownership, weak results, and often the need for these projects to start again and thus deal with difficult legacy challenges.

On the other hand, digital public goods provide the ability to establish a digital foundation based on more easily integrated, interoperable and adaptable solutions. They can also enhance country sovereignty and long-term sustainability. By being able to see ‘under the hood’ staff can understand the technology they are using. Growing a country’s internal capacity can ensure software can be built and maintained locally or with less dependence on external suppliers. Beyond that, it can help foster competition in local implementation and customisation, and stimulate the local information technology market.

The way forward for country technical assistance

Together with sustainable core funding for generic technologies, increased technical assistance which enables countries to successfully deploy these solutions is needed to unlock the broad potential of digital public goods to help address today’s most urgent global challenges.

The next blog in our series on financing needs in the DPG ecosystem will expand the conversation from assisting countries to deploy DPGs, to enabling countries to deploy, create, manage, and iterate digital solutions to address future needs.

COVID-19 has turned the world upside down. Globally, there have been devastating effects on healthcare systems and economies. The residual effect on human welfare will be felt for years to come. While vaccines have provided a light at the end of the tunnel for many, vaccine ubiquity is far from worldwide. The tools for effective management of immunization information are not equally available or accessible. 

There is a need to look at opportunities for new digital cooperation and openness.

Ensuring that everyone is able to be vaccinated is in the interest of all. Guaranteeing that the digital solutions necessary for effectively managing immunization delivery are digital public goods will strengthen digital cooperation and promote equitable distribution of vaccines across the globe. 

In order to be a digital public good, projects must be open source, adhere to applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the sustainable development goals.(2) Many of the tools used for managing vaccine delivery meet most of these requirements but are not yet open source, limiting countries ability to freely adopt them.

For this reason, the Digital Public Goods Alliance is calling on all digital solutions that are relevant for immunization delivery management to be open source. 

We consider tools to be relevant for immunization delivery management when they address the following dimensions from the WHO-UNICEF COVAX Vaccine Delivery Innovation Team: infodemic management; micro planning; counterfeit detection; communication for demand generation; health worker training; vaccination status tracking; vaccination monitoring; and safety monitoring within a health context.

We urge relevant technologies to follow the lead of solutions like DIVOC, DHIS2, CommCare, mHero and other health technologies to take the following steps to become open source: use an approved open source license(3), clearly define their ownership, document the source code, use cases, and/or functional requirements of the project, and ensure a mechanism for extracting or importing non-personally identifiable data from the system in a non-proprietary format. 

Open source solutions can accelerate vaccine delivery and set countries up for long-term success. 

In Sri Lanka the first suspected case of the novel coronavirus was registered on 27 January 2020. Within just two days, following a request from the country’s Ministry of Health, a DHIS2 tracker for COVID-19 was created by local developers that focused on the registration and tracking of travellers arriving from regions with a high risk of COVID-19 infection. It was deployed at Sri Lanka’s airports just days later.  

Sri Lanka is using DHIS2, an open source health information management system and a digital public good.(4) Globally, DHIS2 is used in 73 countries which account for 30% of the world’s population.

After developing the DHIS2 tracker Sri Lanka shared their user guides with the global DHIS2 COVID-19 response team. The tracker is now integrated into openly licensed training material publically available for worldwide use. An application version of the tracker has since been released for global adoption allowing other countries using DHIS2 to more adequately track the virus.(5) It is now operational in 38 countries and under development in 14 more.(6)  

In the case of immunization delivery management, this is just one example of why open source is preferable to proprietary systems. When the code is open source, systems and platforms can be adapted for new circumstances by creating tools that can aptly respond to diverse challenges beyond just pandemics. As in Sri Lanka, these adaptations can then be shared widely, allowing for other countries to benefit from innovative solutions while strengthening global cooperation between and amongst countries. 

Outside of increasing accessibility and cooperation, open source technologies provide short- and long-term benefits, not only in regards to vaccinations, by assisting countries to build their digital infrastructure.

In the short term, open source solutions: 

• Can be easily adopted by national governments without fear of vendor lock-in, which can bind countries to rigid technologies at a high cost;
• Can be adapted to meet unique local needs and contexts specific to their country or region; and
• Allow countries to leverage multiple partners and vendors to quickly deploy solutions at the speed which pandemic response requires.

In the long term, open source solutions: 

• Help foster robust digital governance, by providing countries with sustainable tools that can be adapted for other use cases, even across sectors;(7)
• Build country capacity by increasing the skills of government staff who learn to manage, and adapt open source solutions. This opportunity to learn from, and build off of, existing open source code can aid efforts to create sustainable, local digital capacity;
• Allow researchers and academics to more easily find and review non-personally identifiable data and extract lessons learned for future scenarios;(8) and
• By virtue of their transparency, foster public trust which helps strengthen government institutions.(9) 

The global community must make strong commitments to support quick, equal and open access to digital public goods that enable governments to fight COVID-19. 

The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) is committed to increasing the discoverability, investment and use of these digital public goods. In the coming weeks, the DPGA will be releasing a list of solutions that are digital public goods and global goods of high relevance for immunization delivery management as part of the Community of Practice (CoP) for Health convened by the DPGA and co-chaired by UNICEF Health.

Open source immunization delivery management solutions can save tens of thousands of lives while giving a chance for already fragile states to return to normalcy. That is why digital public goods for immunization delivery management should be prioritized and tools for immunization delivery management that are currently proprietary should become open source.(10)

1. UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ opening remarks to the Africa Dialogue Series on COVID-19 and Silencing the Guns in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities, United Nations
2. Digital Public Goods Standard, Digital Public Goods Alliance
3. Licenses & Standards, Open Source Initiative
4. DHIS2 – Digital Public Goods Case Study, Digital Public Goods Alliance
5. Innovating DHIS2 Tracker and Apps for COVID-19 Surveillance in Sri Lanka, DHIS2
6. COVID-19 Surveillance, Response & Vaccine Delivery Toolkit, DHIS2 
7. DHIS2 – Digital Public Goods Case Study, Digital Public Goods Alliance
8. Digital Solutions for COVID-19, Johns Hopkins
9. Building and Reusing Open Source Tools for Government, New America 
10. How to Become an Open Source Enterprise, GitHub

We would like to share our deepest gratitude with the advocates, owners, and maintainers who have made this possible by submitting nominations to the registry. These nominations account for an incredibly diverse set of open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content tackling real world issues – everything from sustainable farming to healthcare, from digital identity to vaccine coordination. 

People submit nominations to the registry for a variety of reasons including discoverability, recognition, and support. But, don’t take our word for it. Take it from the nominators themselves: 

Tor-Einar Skog, Senior Adviser at NIBIO shared that, “I’m proud to contribute software to help reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals”. NIBIO are creators of the open, online, free of charge forecast and information software for integrated management of pests, diseases and weeds, VIPS (now a digital public good).

Or, Pedro Reynolds-Cuellar, an educator and nominator who shared that, “[a]s with several other tools I used, I always thought about them as something people should have free access to. In the era of software, the idea of commons and communal benefit from the tools at our disposal takes a new meaning. In my mind, these nominations are an effort to bring forward tools that can benefit us all to a space where they can be found and highlighted.”

And, Martin Bedouret a developer from Cboard, a free web application for children and adults with speech and language impairments that facilitates communication with pictures and text-to-speech, who saw nominating their work as an opportunity to reach their goal by increasing the possibility for it to be found. “We want to reach many countries, and especially developing countries. The nomination will help us with this goal, as the platform is open and well prepared for international collaboration, we need visibility in order to reach out to collaborators and people who need a voice to communicate!”

Nominees, their creators, advocates and maintainers are at the core of everything we do. So, thank you for helping us reach this milestone! 

While we’re thrilled to have gotten this far together, this is not the final destination. In fact, we are just getting started. Our ambition is for the DPG Registry to include hundreds, even thousands, more open nominees that advance the sustainable development goals. 

Why nominate to the DPG Registry

Nomination is the first step towards being recognised as a digital public good. Once a nomination is submitted, it is reviewed against the DPG Standard, a baseline of 9-indicators that serve as a minimum standard that all digital public goods must meet.

So, what is the value in submitting a nomination to the DPG Registry? 

1) Discoverability 

Nominations and DPGs alike can be found on the DPG Registry. As an added bonus, the DPG Registry is partially compiled from, and feeds back into, partner systems like the Catalog of Digital Solutions maintained by the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL). This method of cross-pollination enhances discoverability and accelerates the likelihood of a nominee being found and adopted by organizations and governments looking for innovative solutions.

2) Support for adoptability 

Digital public goods have clear documentation, open licenses, and follow standards and best practices that make them easy to adopt. We support nominees working to meet these standards. When nominating to the DPG Registry, projects can utilize DPG Resources, a set of curated tools that assist them in becoming a digital public good. Additionally, our technical team helps nominees navigate which documentation or requirements are needed to ensure they not only meet the standard, but even surpass it. 

3) Development impact

It has been said that open source will be at the core of future international development efforts. We couldn’t agree more. As part of the digital transformation unfolding globally, governments and development agencies are reframing approaches to international development with a focus on creating and adapting open source projects. Submitting a nomination to become a digital public good signals alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and a commitment to making an impact. DPGs are a part of a growing network committed to open source principles that also respect privacy, strive to “do no harm”, and help attain the SDGs. 

4) Becoming a Digital Public Good

And finally, becoming a nominee is the first step toward being reviewed against the DPG Standard, and – if found to meet that standard – confirmed as a digital public good. Becoming a DPG provides exposure to development organizations including UNICEF and members of our communities of practice who review projects with high-impact potential so they can receive the support needed to be adopted by governments globally. 

Our ambition is to fill important gaps, ensure interoperability and avoid vendor lock-in to foster a flourishing ecosystem of digital public goods. Submitting a nomination is the first step to achieving this goal. Please consider submitting a nomination, and be part of even larger milestones yet to come! 

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.

Follow our blog, or join our mailing list.

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.

For the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), reflecting on 2020 actually begins with our roots – the 2019 United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation report calling for the establishment of a broad, multi-stakeholder alliance, to facilitate access to and use of digital public goods. In December 2019 the DPGA was launched to answer that call, which meant kicking off 2020 with a lot of momentum.

Throughout 2020 significant steps were taken to support and accelerate the discovery and development of digital public goods that tackle real world challenges. We started the year off with two main goals, (1) establishing the foundations of the DPGA as a strategic entity with the potential for long-term impact and sustainability and, (2) to produce valuable outputs with immediate utility for the DPG ecosystem.

With these two goals in mind, and strengthened by the June 2020 Roadmap on Digital Cooperation, the DPGA achieved significant milestones in 2020.  Here is an overview of our top four achievements: 

1. Defining Digital Public Goods

The DPGA coordinated with other stakeholders to provide input to the definition of digital public goods that was published by the UN Secretary-General in the 2020 Roadmap. This definition contributes to a universal understanding of what constitutes a digital public good, laying the groundwork for how the DPGA can support open projects.

Building off this momentum, the DPGA thereafter operationalised the digital public goods definition into the DPG Standard, a set of nine indicators that comprise a comprehensive and shared assessment criteria for identifying projects as digital public goods. This standard is itself an open project and has benefited from several iterations. The DPGA is thankful to the communities and individuals that have helped support its development by contributing their thoughts and endorsements including CHAOSS, Creative Commons, DIAL, and Mozilla. The DPG Standard has also been featured by the Open Source Observatory and opensource.org.

2. Launching the DPG Registry

The DPGA mission includes promoting the discovery of digital public goods. To that end, in 2020 the DPGA significantly evolved the DPG Registry, which started as a prototype in early 2019. Today, the DPG Registry contains 471 nominated projects, and 20 verified digital public goods that have been assessed against the DPG Standard.

Our work relies on the ethos of open source. So, in December 2020 we launched a community sourcing experiment asking for public participation to review nominated open projects against the DPG Standard with the ultimate goal of distributing and expediting the process of determining if a project qualifies as a digital public good. This experiment will run through January 2021 and has already had engagement from teachers, students, tech practitioners, and many more. We continue to invite public participation in the experiment at validate.digitalpublicgoods.net.

3. Engaging Experts in Sector Specific Communities

In 2020 the DPGA began facilitating Communities of Practice (CoPs). CoPs convene thematic experts with the aim of identifying, assessing and  advancing high-impact potential projects that work towards the attainment of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Thus far, CoPs have focused on technologies for enhancing Early Grade Reading skills, Financial Inclusion, Digital Health, and Climate Change Adaptation. These groups include more than 60 experts from 40+ different institutions including NGOs, governments, think tanks, international banks, and funders.

In 2020 the CoPs began making an impact. In November, we released a paper on the relationship between digital public infrastructures (DPIs) and DPGs, and the particular relevance of their intersection for driving financial inclusion. In addition, an assessment of nine early grade reading projects was completed. 2021 will take the efforts of the CoPs even further.

4. Launching Country Engagement Pilots

Eager to document and share learnings that can help facilitate the impactful implementation of digital public goods, in late 2020, the DPGA developed an initial approach for piloting country engagements in low- and middle-income countries. In 2021 we will begin deploying short-term pilot activities in partnership with DPGA co-founders.

No 2020 year-in-review would be complete without a reflection on the challenges we all faced as a result of the global pandemic. While COVID-19 brought near-insurmountable challenges, it also illustrated how digital technologies can both create and prevent inequities, ultimately highlighting the need for countries to accelerate digital transformation. The need for quality digital public goods that are accessible, adaptable, and deployable is clearer than ever.

The increasing awareness of COVID-19’s long-term economic impact added urgency to international conversations about digital public infrastructures, sparking new energy and interest in understanding, assessing, and promoting digital public goods with the potential for countries to deploy as part of their  digital foundations.

In 2021 we hope to capitalise on our early successes and build on the momentum in the DPG ecosystem. There is more clarity now than ever before on the urgency of digital transformation and we have a unique opportunity to scale up international cooperation around digital public goods. 

Read more about our year in review here.

To learn more about the Digital Public Goods Alliance:
Join our mailing list.
Follow us on Twitter @DPGAlliance.
Nominate digital public goods through this form.
Participate in the community sourcing experiment.

However, the process of identifying which “approved” licenses to include in the DPG Standard was, and continues to be, the result of a complex series of debates and discussions. The aim of this post is to share some of that discussion and the thinking behind the licenses that appear in the DPG Standard today. This will provide context for those considering submitting an openly licensed project to the DPG Registry, as well as for projects who are choosing an open license for the first time.

At present, the DPG Standard’s second indicator reads:

By design, open source software licenses promote collaboration and sharing because they permit others to make modifications to source code and incorporate those changes into their own projects. They also encourage others to access, view, and modify open source software to build solutions for their own purpose. Read more about why we require DPGs to be open source in our previous blog.

Licensing Content

For Open Content we require the use of a Creative Commons license and encourage projects to use a license which allows for both derivatives and commercial reuse (CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), or the ability to dedicate content to the public domain (CC0).

When choosing which licenses to include in the DPG Standard for content, we took into account key considerations. For example, we allow the Creative Commons NonCommercial (NC) clause for content and data, but not the No-Derivatives (ND) clause. This decision was made because ND licenses put restrictions on reuse and adaptation. For example, for content that is under a ND license, translation is not allowed. A NonCommercial license allows for reuse and adaptation as long as it is not for commercial purposes. While this does limit the opportunity for commercial scalability models, we took into consideration that many stakeholders will still be able to benefit from reusing and adapting content that cannot be commercially reused. Furthermore, this increases supply, as many who have invested heavily in content creation will be more willing to use open licensing if they can apply a NC clause. 

Licensing Software

For software we chose to accept the Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses not only because these licenses are widely accepted, but because they have all been vetted against the OSI definition of open source. The Open Source Definition is a list of ten clearly defined requirements for a license to be recognized as open source. The distribution terms of any software with OSI-approved licenses must comply with the Open Source Definition. Additionally, the vetted licenses undergo a review by the open source legal community. This rigorous process helps to filter out ambiguous or vague licenses that don’t explicitly comply with the requirements. However, the OSI license list is also quite long and only a few of these licenses are used in practice. 

Licensing Data 

The Open Knowledge Foundation has in its open definition requirements for open data in much the same way OSI does for software, including a definition and a list of approved licenses. However, in the open data space many countries have in parallel developed their own open government licenses for data and content, and many of these national licenses have not been approved by the Open Knowledge Foundation. This is something we are working to navigate as we develop the DPG Standard further. 

A Note on Up/Downstream Sharing 

Presently, in order to be DPG Standard compliant, the open licenses we list apply only to the core or generic project. The type of open license used for the generic project will determine which open license requirements, if any, apply for national implementations. For example, if the generic DPG project uses what is commonly called a full copy-left license like the GNU Public License, a national implementation will be required to be similarly licensed. At the other end of the spectrum, most permissive licenses, like Apache, impose no restrictions on which licenses can be used for implementations, and allow also for proprietary approaches.

The Case for Clarity

Ambiguous or vague licenses are problematic because they’re open to interpretation and may cause confusion for stakeholders seeking to re-use technology, data or content. New licenses often only add to this challenge, as they are frequently developed based on bespoke use cases and purposes, and without sufficient attention to ensuring clarity and consistency in terminology.

To enable the growth of a global community of sharing, we have therefore only included licenses in the DPG Standard that have been approved by leading stakeholders in their respective domains such as OSI, Creative Commons and Open Data Commons. As a general rule, these licenses are clear and allow broad use, modification, and sharing, without onerous restrictions (refer to the full list of approved licenses).     

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

In alignment with the UN Secretary-General’s 2020 Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, we define digital public goods (DPGs) as open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable best practices, do no harm and are of high relevance for attaining the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Many types of digital technologies and content – from data to apps, data visualisation tools to educational curricula – could accelerate achievement of the SDGs. However, it is only if they are freely and openly available, with minimal restrictions on how they can be distributed, adapted and reused that we can think of them as “digital public goods”. 

Why Open Source? 

Not all open source projects are digital public goods, but all digital public goods must be open source. 

Open source is broadly defined as when the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. This is a crucial part of digital public goods where, for example, software, content and data must be accessible independently of any particular vendor and allow software, data and content to be freely used, modified, and shared. There are many existing open licenses, and the choice of license has implications on how the code, data or content can be reused. We’ll therefore dig deeper into the process of identifying which “approved” licenses were included in the DPG Standard, and why, in our next blog post. In this post we present an overview of the case for open source. 

“Open” ensures the software, data, AI model, standard or content we’re working with can be adopted, scaled and adapted in various country contexts. It also ensures transparency, can contribute to project sustainability, and reduces the risk of vendor lock-in. Below we describe each of these benefits in turn. 

Adoptability, Scalability & Adaptability 

For digital public goods to scale across markets, they must be freely adoptable and adaptable. 

For example, the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), a technology that helps governments implement a foundational ID, can be freely adopted by countries who can adapt the open software to fit their local needs. This can help build long-term ownership and agency within each implementing country and can also allow the platform to scale over time across many countries. 

Transparency & Sustainability 

Open source licensing allows a digital public goods’ code base to be independently scrutinized and audited. This can increase accountability and facilitate discourse about the steps that have been taken to design technologies that are inclusive and do no harm. 

Having a transparent code base can also allow for greater sustainability. As each implementing country adapts or iterates on the code, these changes can be shared back to help evolve and better the source code. 

Vendor Lock-In 

It can be costly to obtain licenses from vendors. This can also cause ‘lock-in’, meaning that a government or organization is beholden to that vendor for relevant service or maintenance for the duration of the contract. Additionally, state-owned solutions could suffer from politicization of access, where states may choose to give permission to their allies over others, making access vulnerable to geopolitical shifts and tensions. 

While the cost of implementing and configuring open source software is often comparable to purchasing a license, open source offers more control and independence and reduces the risk of vendor or political lock-in. This makes it easier for governments in particular to plan their digital futures in a holistic and long-term way.

Finally, an open approach to digital development can help to increase collaboration and resource mobilization in the digital development community, avoid duplicating work that has already been done, and attract new investors and contributors to initiatives with high-impact potential. This allows programs to maximize their resources — and ultimately their impact — through open standards, open data, open source technologies and open innovation.

Open source is a necessary condition for any technology to be considered a digital public good. It enables sharing, reuse and adaptation to suit local needs. And, combined with the right support and funding structures, open source represents an unprecedented opportunity to fundamentally alter power balances in international development. This means more creation and iteration can happen locally; trust in technology can be built through agency and transparency; and, best practices and learnings can be shared across geographical, institutional and expertise borders. We believe this is critical to advancing a more equitable world and is why open source is fundamental to the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).

Learn more about the Digital Public Goods Alliance

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Nominate digital public goods through this form.

Please find an excerpt below.

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children and believes that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support the realization of children’s rights are critical to improving their lives.

As recognised in the UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation Report in June 2020,  digital public goods – defined as “open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content” have a critical role in accelerating achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

UNICEF along with the Governments of Norway and Sierra Leone, and the India-based think tank iSPIRT have jointly established the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a multi-stakeholder initiative to accelerate the attainment of the sustainable development goals in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods. The DPGA is an effort to convene a network of partners from different sectors that will contribute to the identification, support, scale-up, and use of software, data, and algorithms that can advance humanity. 

As partners explore and scale efforts on digital public goods, UNICEF is sharing its experience in setting up operational processes and tools to support and build open source across all of it’s work.

Continue reading here: https://www.unicef.org/innovation/stories/unicefs-open-source-approach-innovation

Last week we kicked off a four part series. In each part, we will share exciting work from one of the Co-Founders of the Digital Public Goods Alliance. This week we’re featuring Norway.

If you missed Part 1 on iSPIRT last week, you can see it here.

As we said last week, one of the fundamental strengths of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) is its decentralized, yet coordinated structure. 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. In this four part series, we’re pleased to offer a snapshot of the exciting work being led by each of the current ISG members. This week we focus on Norway. 

Norway

Norway believes in the deployment of digital public goods as a means to help countries accelerate the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals and is a proud champion and co-founder of the DPGA together with the government of Sierra Leone, UNICEF and iSPIRT.

Their work funds high-impact digital public goods in several sectors including health, early grade reading, climate and weather services, and plant pest management. 

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Norway has worked on expanding existing digital public goods in both the health and education sectors. One example is DHIS2, an open source, web-based software platform for data collection, management, and analysis, used by governments and NGOs in more than 100 countries. Starting with a pilot in Sri Lanka, more than 30 countries have deployed standardized DHIS2 COVID-19 surveillance digital data packages since the pandemic began. 

Norway has also seen a rapid scale up in the use of the Global Digital Library platform for openly licensed early grade reading resources, and together with ADEA and UNESCO are also supporting a number of countries in translating early grade reading books into local languages, and fast-tracking the availability of learning resources.

As the DPGA develops, Norway would like to engage other bilateral and philanthropic donors in conversations on how each can best contribute to supporting the global architecture around digital public goods.   

You can find out more about Norway’s commitment to digital public goods by reading their white paper for Digital Transformation and Development Policy or watching this address from Prime Minister Solberg. 

Norway is co-hosting the DPGA and will engage at the forefront of the Climate Adaptation Community of Practice. 

Visit their website or follow Norway on Twitter to learn more.

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.

Follow our blog, or join our mailing list.

Want to contribute with funding, technology, or expertise? Sign up here. 

Nominate digital public goods through this form.