Announcing the Open Standard for Digital Public Goods

đź“Ł Sustainer Talk
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Hey Sustainers!

Last week, the DPG Alliance published the Digital Public Goods Standard 1.0. The Standard is a set of specifications and guidelines designed to maximize consensus about whether something conforms to the definition of digital public good laid out by the UN Secretary General in the 2020 Roadmap to Digital Cooperation: open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the SDGs.

The standard itself is open to contribution and we invite anyone who uses and benefits from the standard to join our growing list of endorsers.

Nominate a Project

We are now working to apply these standards to projects in order to identify digital public goods and test the submission process. We would like to invite you to share and/or nominate prospective digital public goods through this form.

For project owners this process will take about 15-30 minutes, for third party nominators this will take you anywhere between 5-50 minutes depending on your familiarity with the project.

We highly encourage nominations by people who are not directly connected to the project, however the final section of the submission must be completed by someone authorized to speak on behalf of the project. If you are nominating on behalf of a project, please complete the initial 2 sections and then either contact an appropriate individual to finalize the application or submit the application without the final section and we will follow-up with the project.

Why Nominate

Nominating projects is a great way to both recognize the quality of an open source project and to support the DPG Alliance.

Projects that are assessed through this process will be officially considered a Digital Public Good, showcased on the website and may be eligible for additional recognition and support.

Additionally, each project submitted through this form helps us to test, improve and perfect the process so that we can continue to build a large, public repository of digital public goods.

You can read more about The DPG Alliance in this earlier post “Introducing the DPG Alliance”.

We look forward to receiving more information about your project, or projects in your network, and to increasing the prominence of open source projects that contribute positively to the world.

Best,

Lucy Harris

Co-Lead, DPG Alliance

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Thanks for sharing Lucy. This is important work. Do you have a running list of projects that have been nominated or approved?

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Hey @GeorgLink absolutely you can see them all on the website - https://digitalpublicgoods.net/platform/

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and Lucy wrote more about the process here: https://digitalpublicgoods.net/blog/digital-public-goods-roundtable-update/.

From what I’ve seen, this is still very immature. Lucy, good luck. I reviewed the “Template Technical Assessment - Early Reading Indicators : Indicators”. If you’re better able to separate the domain/category specific criteria, then this might have a better chance of moving forward and getting consensus…but you probably already knew that.

Like Georg, I was on the Digital Impact Alliance webinar yesterday. While I am a skeptic, I also have 20+ years experience doing tech public policy work. I am here to help. Just ask.

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Thanks for @LawrenceHecht, it looks like you got the blog links mixed up. The blog about the Standard is this one: https://digitalpublicgoods.net/blog/setting-a-standard-for-digital-public-goods/

For context, I’m the technical lead for the Digital Public Goods Alliance, and I work closely with @lharris.

For additional context, the “Template Technical Assessment - Early Reading Indicators” that you refer to was our first pass at developing such a standard, so it’s fair to say it was immature. However, we have iterated that a fair amount and condensed into the standard the @lharris referred to in her first post. That standard now lives on GitHub: https://github.com/DPGAlliance/DPG-Standard and it’s open to comment, feedback and modifications via Pull Requests (we have 3 under discussion currently).

So, I’m taking up on your offer to help: comment on the current version on GitHub and help us make it more mature. We are currently iterating, and explicitly seeking input from the community to land a version that we can all rally behind.

Thanks again :pray:

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I’ll go look at the PRs. I had typed up an “issue” with a question regarding something in the standards that I didn’t understand.

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