Last week, we had the opportunity to participate in the Annual Members Meeting of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) in Singapore. The meeting is a space for all members of the Alliance to get together once a year to discuss agendas, updates, next steps and participate in discussions about the future of Digital Public Goods. It was also great to formally welcome new members, such as Open Future and the Government of Uruguay, and spend some time with our friends of Creative Commons with whom we shared some panels and interventions.

We had a pretty busy week, participating in several panels and workshops:

DPGs are a Prerequisite to Solve Climate Change

With Creative Commons (CC) we shared how open knowledge is critical for addressing climate change. The session also introduced the Open Goes COP initiative, promoting open data and DPGs in climate discussions.

Fully Open Public Interest AI with Open Data

Together with Open Future, Creative Commons, and ITS-Rio, we discussed the role of Public and Openness in the current context of AI development.

Latin American Lunch

We had an energetic meal with attendees from eight different Latin American countries. We discussed how to advance DPGs in the region and how we can collaborate to tackle specific challenges in the regional context.

Privacy Best Practices for DPGs

With the DPGA team, we facilitated a workshop to gather feedback on the initiative to improve indicator 7 of the standard on Privacy Best Practices. It was a vibrant conversation about properly handling sensitive data in maintaining our DPGs.

The event was full of interesting discussions and topics that for the sake of length we are not going to cover today. However, we want to highlight two main remarks of the event: Call for Collaborations and Owning What We Buy.

Call For Collaborations

We are excited that the Alliance is promoting four Calls for Collaborations that are quite aligned with OKFN’s mission. They are yet to be announced but we can summarise them as follows:

1. Call for governments and organisations to incorporate open-source first principles as part of how they implement and fund digitalisation processes.
2. Call for DPGs that can make identifying, preparing, and using existing open data at scale easier.
3. Call for 250 million USD to finance DPGs that enable the implementation of safe, inclusive and interoperable DPI can be supported until 2030. Regarding this call in particular, we at OKFN think it is potentially limiting and biased towards the universe of solutions around the limited DPI definition (IDs, Payments and Data Exchange) leaving other critical infrastructure behind. Also, it is still to see how this funding will come, from which entities and under which conditions.
4. Call for high-quality earth observation DPGs to help diverse groups of stakeholders monitor, mitigate and adapt to climate change and its impacts.

Owning What We Buy

In one of our panels, Cable Green, Director of Open Education at Creative Commons, shared an interesting phrase: “Buy what you need, Own what you buy, Share what you own.” This idea caught the attention of the event and was used by the CEO of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, Liv Nordhaug, in the Closing Plenary. It’s a very powerful synthesising phrase that relates directly to The Tech We Want vision that we’ve been developing at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If put into practice, it could contribute to our collective efforts to organise an alternative stack of technologies that are more useful, simpler, more durable and focused on solving people’s real problems.

All in all, and in conclusion, we are more than happy to see the spirit of the Commons on the main stage and at the centre of the conversations around Digital Public Goods.