WHAT ARE DIGITAL PUBLIC GOODS? Lika Døhl Diouf*
In 2020, following a series of multi-stakeholder roundtables, the United Nations Secretary-General issued his recommendations in the Roadmap for Digital Cooperation in 2020. The Roadmap outlines eight key areas for action, including “Promoting digital public goods to create a more equitable world”.
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Digital public goods are defined as “Open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable international and domestic laws, standards and best practices, and do no harm”.2 The report of the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation notes that many types of digital technologies and content could accelerate achievement of the SDGs. It also explains that technologies can be thought of as “digital public goods” when they are freely and openly available, with minimal restrictions on how they can be distributed, adapted and reused.3
2. Use an approved open license, for example a Creative Commons license for open content.
The Digital Public Goods Alliance, a multi-stakeholder initiative welcomed in the Roadmap, aims to accelerate the attainment of the SDGs in lowand middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods. The Alliance has developed the Digital Public Goods Standard, which elaborates on the definition of digital public goods provided in the Roadmap. According to the Standard, a digital public good must:
7. Comply with relevant privacy laws, and all applicable international and national laws.
1. Be relevant to the Sustainable Development Goals. *
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3. Clearly define and document ownership of everything the project produces. 4. Demonstrate platform independence. 5. Have documentation of the source code, use cases, and/or functional requirements. 6. Include a mechanism for extracting non-personally identifiable information, if it collects such information.
8. Demonstrate adherence to standards, best practices, and/or principles. 9. Demonstrate that they have taken steps to ensure the project does no harm, and that it anticipates and prevents specific harmful scenarios. The Digital Public Goods Registry currently contains over 600 entries,3 of which 42 have been reviewed against this Standard and recognized
as digital public goods. Some examples of recognized digital public goods include Apache Fineract,4 an open source software for financial services; the KoBo Toolbox,5 a suite of tools for data collection in challenging environments; Project AEDES,6 a tool to predict potential dengue fever hotspots; the Global Digital Library,7 an open collection of educational reading resources; and the Standard for Public Code,8 which provides guidance to public organizations on how to successfully develop open source software that can be reused by others. Currently, there are no entries in the Registry for open AI models. There is great diversity among the products that fall within the categories of open-source software, open standards and open content. For example, some types of software aim to tackle very specific challenges, whereas other serve as platforms upon which a host of other services can be built. Platforms that provide basic or essential services that allow for other services to be built on top of it are often referred to as “digital public infrastructure”. One example is MOSIP, a modular identity platform designed to allow governments and
Lika Døhl Diouf is an Associate Programme Officer in the Caribbean Knowledge Management Center of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Subregional Headquarters for the Caribbean. 1 Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, [online] [accessed 21 June 2021] https://www.un.org/en/content/digital-cooperation-roadmap/assets/pdf/Roadmap_for_Digital_ Cooperation_EN.pdf p. 23 [“Roadmap”] 2 UN Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation (2019), “The Age of Digital Interdependence” [online] [accessed 21 June 2021] https://www.un.org/en/ pdfs/DigitalCooperation-report-for%20web.pdf, p. 11 3 See: https://digitalpublicgoods.net/registry/ 4 See: https://fineract.apache.org/ 5 See: https://www.kobotoolbox.org/ 6 See: https://aedesproject.org/ 7 See: https://digitallibrary.io/ 8 See: https://standard.publiccode.net/ | FOCUS
