We have joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance

Today, Public Digital joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).

The DPGA brings together organisations with a mission to accelerate reaching the sustainable development goals in low and middle income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods.

Digital Public Goods are open source software, data sets, standards, AI systems, and content collections that are set up and supported to help governments and related organisations accelerate their digital progress and meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They build on existing open practices with additional focus on ensuring privacy, minimising harm and providing a focus on sustainable development.

Public Digital is thrilled to be participating in the alliance.

We believe that our experience, research, and the work we are doing with digital teams around the world can play a critical role in helping to achieve the DPGA’s mission.

In joining the Alliance, we have made a set of commitments on our future projects which will feed into the DPGA roadmap and build on our previous work.

For instance, we will be revisiting the report we published in 2021 on creating the conditions for success with open source in government, publishing an update that bridges those findings with recent developments in this fast-developing field.

We will be following up on a roundtable for funders on funding digital initiatives we hosted in 2020, organising a fresh convening of people funding digital initiatives. We hope this convening will connect those who we hear are struggling to make their work sustainable due to the nature of the funding they can access, with funders who are keen to find new ways to address that challenge.

If you fall into one of those groups, we would love to hear from you.

And, of course, we will continue to support digital teams working to transform their institutions and improve outcomes for citizens. We know that those teams are at the heart of digital progress, with the unique capacity to make use of internet-era tools and practices - like those considered to be digital public goods - and apply them to meeting outcomes.

One of our positions is that “Community and consensus were the values that shaped the internet from its earliest days, and we think they matter”.

We see our membership of the DPGA as a clear reflection of that.