Navigating what’s next: Takeaways from the Digital Public Goods Alliance Meeting
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — The conference was a sea of laptops, smartphones and buzzing conversations, but the one constant was the aroma of coffee. It wafted through the air like a warm blanket, uniting the attendees in their caffeine-fueled quest for knowledge.
The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) recently held its annual meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, bringing together policymakers, technologists and civil society representatives to discuss the critical role of digital public goods (DPGs) in advancing sustainable development.
If you can judge a tech conference by the quality of the brew, the birthplace of coffee wins, hands down. Members kicked off the three-day event with a traditional coffee ceremony, complete with loose grass spread over white hotel tiles and steaming caffeine served from traditional ceramic Jebenas.
The get-together served as a platform for sharing insights, fostering collaboration and charting a course for the future of DPGs.
Open Source was front and center from the beginning. Yodahe Zemichael, executive director of the National ID Program in Ethiopia, noted in the opening plenary that Open Source is important but isn’t enough, alone.
“You can end up creating ‘digital bads.’ Capacity building is important, successful DPGs have decentralized communities,” he said. “If you don’t implement it correctly, you can still have lock-in – it’s not any better if it’s big tech or a local firm.”
The assembled crowd was quite a change from 37 members at a “ramshackle” first Member Meeting in Oslo 18 months ago, says Liv Marte Nordhaug, DPGA co-lead. Looking out over the hundreds of faces from around the globe she concluded, “Now’s the time to co-create the future we want.”
Four key takeaways from the DPGA meeting:
The importance of shared public infrastructure
CV Madhukar, former global lead at Omidyar Network in digital identity and cybersecurity, emphasized the significance of shared public infrastructure in the digital realm. Drawing parallels with traditional infrastructure, such as roads and power grids, Madhukar highlighted that shared digital infrastructure can lead to greater efficiency, collaboration and innovation.
“To realize the full power of a digital economy and enable seamless exchange of value between people and private or government entities, a few more questions become critically important: ‘Who are you?’ – enabled by digital ID which can be used to authenticate oneself (especially for high integrity/high-value transactions), ‘how do I transfer cash to you?’ – enabled by interoperable instant payment systems, and ‘how do I share my credentials to you in a non-repudiable manner’ – enabled by digitally signed verifiable credentials.”
Synergy between Open Source and DPGs
Norad is seeking proposals for the Open Earth Platform Initiative (OpenEPI) – Digital transformation through open digital architecture for climate adaptation and nature data. The project aims to address the lack of truly open data solutions for nature and establish a robust and openly accessible infrastructure for climate adaptation and nature data. Proposals must adhere to the digital public goods standard. The pilot phase budget is 14 million NOK (about $1,316,672 USD or €1,205,104 EUR.)
Now’s the time to boost Open Source understanding and adoption in the community
The Open Source Initiative artificial intelligence workshop, held on the first day with about 40 people, split into seven groups of five to six people each. They were asked to review individually the four basic elements of the draft Open Source AI Definition and provide suggestions. Most were policymakers with a smattering of tech experts – and no lawyers. Many were unfamiliar with the four freedoms as well as the standing definition of Open Source. It was fascinating to see the proposed edits they made to the current working definition for Open Source AI, many of them included field-of-use restrictions and legal strictures. (More on this to come on the OSI blog.)
Christer Solheim Gundersen, senior advisor at Norad, stated that two of the challenges they face in the OneEPI project above are that there’s “no real way to support the open source developer community” and there’s “no scalable way to support existing bedrock of the open movement that we are all depending on.”
Mike Schwartz, CEO, of the Linux Foundation Janssen Project, offered an incisive summary of comments we also heard during the week that under score just how much work looms ahead.
Mike Schwartz
“As a DPG product owner, my biggest concern was regarding a misalignment on how to fund the continued maintenance and innovation of DPG Open Source software. The pervasive sentiment among DPGA members is that open source software should be free of cost…At the closing plenary, Lucy Harris from the DPGA Secretariat said that Open Source software should be “freely available,” by which she meant it should not cost anything. It’s important to align the incentives with the desired outcomes. For DPG software, the activity we need to incentivize is continued maintenance (the boring stuff that still needs to be done) and innovation. If the software is free, the result we’ll get is less innovation, less security, and less of everything else that comprises the product (documentation, training, deployment assets, community engagement, QA, etc.)”
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash
