 Yeah Hi, everyone who's listening and online and who's here on the last day of the conference in the second half Thanks a lot for being here. We're gonna hear a little bit about how open source has Helped governments through the pandemic today But one request is that anybody who's in the audience whatever questions you may have comments You may have I would have liked to come down and talk, but that's I think not logistically possible But if you have just you know, raise your hand or don't raise your hand and just speak up in between, right? So this we can keep this a little conversational So let me start by introducing Myself my name is Prajakta Kualaikar and I come from India I live in Bangalore if it wasn't very obvious from what I'm wearing And I work at the digital public goods Alliance right which is a very new initiative and we'll hear more about what that is And how that has helped the pandemic etc. Etc. But that's our website So if you want to like take a look at it while I speak about it You can do that and DPG Alliance is at Twitter handles So if you want to know more about our work stay tuned on that We're in Austin, I figured this would be the perfect image to start my talk with I'm sure everybody's aware of what this bridge is in Austin But why is it there right now, right? Because I wanted to talk a little bit about what public goods are before we go into what digital public goods are, right? And it's very simple in the olden times public goods were essentially highways roadways You know the electricity that you got the power plants that were there and all of these services were given to you by the government using physical infrastructure, right and In lieu of these services you were basically, you know citizen of that country But what has happened is that today's digital public today's public goods look a lot different and Therefore we call them digital public goods because service delivery happens with biometrics with QR codes with You know education happens through the pandemic has completely moved to digital So a lot of key services that the government provides to its citizens have now become digital and therefore We need public goods that are digital. That's really what you know, it boils down to to sort of keep Democratic values of service delivery in a government setting intact, right? And how do we get to these democratic values, right? Why why do we need democratic values? And how do we get to them now imagine if a Government was building a software and this has actually happened in Estonia, right? Where you know, they had a software that was being deployed for You know public service delivery and the vendor who is making that software Sort of didn't come through on some of the promises that they made and some of the crucial services were stopped or stalled for a bit Right, which is why these digital public goods have to be people owned and how better can they be people owned than Them being open source and that's also why we are here we by we I mean You know, I would represent the United Nations and the digital public goods Alliance that basically Is doing this effort? So let me come to how and what the UN is doing about this, right? in 2018 there was a roadmap for digital cooperation that was set out by the secretary general of the UN and What this roadmap did was it basically Got all the member states of the UN the governments that are associated with it and then aid Organizations that basically are a part of the UN the huge structure that the UN is to come together to give You know way to open source products that are good for sustainable development goals And then they laid out a definition in this roadmap, which you see here on the screen, right? But what is important from technology perspective or you know from the perspective of the audience that's there today? the three main elements of you know building these sustained Digital public goods that are good for sustainable development goals now What are those three key elements and what are those products that go through this system to become a digital public good? It's advancing the SDGs SDGs are sustainable development goals. It's basically An agenda that's set forth by the UN for the world to collaborate on certain, you know Necessities in certain aspects of social good They have to be open source I'm not going to explain open source in this room and then they have to do no harm And which is what I think we are going to focus on a little bit as well today in the presentation How do they do no harm by design and we'll come to that now? How is this all functioning right because I got like this slide was not a part of my presentation earlier But I added it because I got a lot of questions at this conference about exactly who's a part of it And what is this alliance because it just seems so unreal to people in tech that the UN is doing something about open source Honestly, right and which is why I added this slide to just talk a little bit about the alliance So it comes so the organizations that you see on the screen are already members of this alliance And the idea is as we build these digital public goods You need partners to a fund them and we deploy them right because if they're not being scaled to Other countries and other parts from where they are built. There's no real like real point of doing this So all of these organizations either are involved in the funding part of it or the deployment part of it Where they go and sort of scale this product to various, you know parts of the world and I will save all because Digital public goods are deployed in more than 70 countries at this point, right? And they're helping many governments especially in low and middle-income countries Deliver a lot of services and we'll hear more about that a little bit But what happened right so 2018 that roadmap came out 2019 this alliance got formed and I want to talk a little bit about what happened right after and which is also the main Topic of today's discussion. How did a digital public good really manage a pandemic in Sri Lanka, right? Honestly, I like telling this story from the people in Sri Lanka They just like really bring it to life, but I'll try my best. So Sri Lanka has this. Let me go back to the First slide and have a little bit of surprise here So within a year after the you know, COVID pandemic had hit the world within the first year Sri Lanka managed to get the pandemic under control and think about prevention using a digital public good Now, how did it happen on 20th of January? Sri Lanka had the first case of COVID registered in the country, right? And that's when, you know, all hell broke loose because Sri Lanka attracts a lot of international travelers And that was like season time. So a lot of people from countries where the, you know Where COVID was not yet a thing were already in the country and they had to obviously leave etc So the government there started working with various You know Technology folks that were available that were present in the country and got a group of volunteers together, right? To build a COVID tracker tool while all of this was happening what The volunteers realized was that in Sri Lanka, they had already deployed something called the district health information system DHIS, right? Now, what does DHIS do? DHIS was essentially delivering all kinds of health services in different like if you see here Right different parts of the health supply chain in Sri Lanka So when they realized that this tool already exists and thus it sort of can help you catapult what you're building They basically just built a COVID tracker on top of this which took less than 24 hours because it was open source already And because they already had a very active community of contributors and you know, this was basically a community that had Started so this project started in University of Oslo But the contributors that you know are a part of DHIS to now are spread across 40 plus countries in the world, right? And obviously they're doing a great job of engaging this community And I think DHIS 2 is also great doing a great job of doing R&D while, you know They maintain the community so they also work with universities in a big capacity where they get funding for the research and development Right and that's how DHIS as a tool sort of comes to life so when the pandemic hit and the COVID tracker got built it was built on top of DHIS, right and What that did was it gave the government a lot of aggregated data on Not just you know, what was happening with COVID but also what was happening on other fronts on on other fronts in the state In the country based on other health parameters, right? And when they could sort of put this data together and analyze it There were a lot of interventions that they could think of so they could prioritize You know the limited supply of health workers where should they be you know, which region should they be dispatched to or Say if they needed some sort of contact tracing, how should that be done? You know patient isolation if you need to quarantine certain areas because in low and middle-income countries It's often hard to educate and spread awareness in a very short period of time So and you know any kind of move by the government that sudden can also come across as something that the people don't support so you have to like balance those you know in a very very delicate way and Therefore a lot of this help them balance some of those slightly, you know a fee aspects of how to manage a pandemic and Then the analytics and visualizations that they could make based on this data Help them prioritize how to do vaccination. So this move from managing a pandemic to preventing You know the further impact of the pandemic within one month all because they already had an open source tool deployed in the country Right and but I mean this is something that happened in Sri Lanka And this is probably why you know despite having limited physical health infrastructure We haven't heard of horrid stories about you know people dying outside hospitals in Sri Lanka for example, right? internationally and that's probably because they could sort of stay on top of it and they could stay on top of it This is the DHS team and they could stay on top of it because of the DHS team But I don't think what I just told you the story of you know the tracker being built within two days The you know vaccination being managed using that you know using the data from the tracker within like a month after that All of that is a great success story, but you know what is a bigger success story? Immediately after this tracker was built it was taken to 14 other countries because DHS was already You know in 14 other countries, so maybe they had to like like think about Contextual, you know building in those 14 places which their volunteers had to get into But the point is it could be deployed in 14 plus countries and now today This whole the COVID tracker and the vaccination part of it is deployed in 38 plus low and middle-income countries, right? And we are what one year into it all of this got done It's obviously because of the awesome DHS team But also because of some of these factors, right because obviously it had an open license You know it had a global community that was already coordinating with DHS's central team They also had and and sure I must mention that they also had like I heard a lot about Microcommunities and their importance and I agree with it because DHS also maintained a lot of micro communities To sort of take this forward in multiple places, right a common issue I think you know the world had already sort of was convinced that we need to deal with this as a Community etc etc and then you know it was built to the standard to the DPG standard Which is what you know, I'm going to come to next because I think that's something Some of the people who are building an open source can really sort of take Inspiration from and build to the standard. So what is the digital public good standard, right? It's a baseline requirement that is set forth by the definition that is laid out by the UN secretary general What we've tried to do is take that definition take those three elements of the definition and try to put it into a list of criteria That any open-source product built towards a social cause can meet so the first one is relevance to SDGs this is very simple if your product does anything that's good for society and Honestly, the sustainable development goals almost cover all areas of you know social good So that relevance and you have to prove it via documentation So you have to sort of have a website you have to have so not just a GitHub repo But you probably have to work a little bit more on the documentation part of it, right? The second one is an approved open license. We have so if you go to Digital public goods net slash standard you will see all the details of you know What are the kind of licenses that we accept? What are the you know license libraries that are a part of this and So we accept open data open AI we accept open software We used to accept open standard as well But we are making some changes to the standard itself, which I will come to later because this itself is an open standard, right? So OSI approved licenses we have creative commons approved licenses for content collections And the lists are already given right the third one is clear ownership now Why we have this is because we want to make sure that there's some amount of sustainability in an open source project, right? Because and and believe me in on our registry There are a lot of projects that don't have very active communities But it has someone who is basically a clear owner and can activate the community if need arises, right? So we need to know clear ownership also because we don't so once you become a digital public good You're annually reviewed right so once you become that that's not the end of it Like you have to sort of retain that status by keeping some of these things going and that's also why we need to know who the owner is Owner could be an organization or a person in an organization both are fine or it could just be an individual Fourth one is platform independence, which is basically, you know to avoid when they're locked in we want to make sure that you know only sort of open tools and Open processes are used in the whole supply chain But also in case you have any kind of you know proprietary tools that you're using you have to You can still make an application to be a digital public good But you will have to provide very functional requirements on what are the open alternatives to the proprietary tools that you've used essentially So even with some proprietary dependency you could be a digital public good Of course, it doesn't have to lead like it shouldn't be that hundred percent of your code needs to be rewritten by that functional alternative But some amount of Discretion is definitely maintained and followed in this indicator. The fifth one is documentation Which means that all your technical documentation has to be in place I don't need to go into details of what technical documentation means especially in this room, but you know We don't look at necessarily your community documentation because as I said, you know, you we don't Necessarily need you to have a very active community. We also don't want to dictate What should be the model for your community because there are many many different models people have in you know Their governance and their community building so we don't want to dictate one model over the other which is why we keep it very loose and very you know prescriptive more than like sort of descriptive here and And we also look at documentation which you know sort of make sure that Anybody even without maybe with a token know-how but with without an ability to code should be able to sort of launch and run this product right and And that's also why this documentation is very important. The sixth one is mechanism for extracting data This is mainly for projects that don't have PII information like personally identifiable information And here they have to again either arrest API again, that's not mandatory, but anyway by which you know you can There has to be a mechanism to extract the data Seventh is adherence to privacy and applicable laws Again, this is where we don't want to say GDPR is better than like not better But we don't want to suggest GDPR over any other sort of policy regime and data So we specify what are the kind of laws that you can look at but you're welcome to sort of abide by whichever Data protection law that your country has right because the idea is also that we don't want people only in Europe to be building this or Wherever else and we wanted to also come from low and middle-income countries The eighth one and here we don't only look at privacy laws We also look at like so for example if the application is collecting any data about children Then we will look at you know, how is the security of that in place? And what are the other laws around? Children for example in a country that are being followed And all of this is self-reporting So it's for the project to sort of look into what are the use cases that they have and what could be the legal liabilities Which I think any big open-source project anyways already looks into right 8 to 1 and we also help projects. I will come to that but we also help projects with The seventh point in case they are wondering what you know, what laws exactly do we mean? 8th is adherence to standards and best practices. This is again, you know, there is Principles of digital development for example, right so those kind of principles and best practices have to be followed by the Products in their build and the last one which is I think quite key is do no harm by design, right? And why is it by design because we don't look at Any implications downstream in deployment right because we understand that in open source you can have You know sort of downstream deployment of applications that can be used for various use cases So the person who has originally made an application to be a digital public good might be doing it for say SDG 3 and 4 and then Downstream it could change so we want to make sure that you know in do no harm by design We're not looking at really deployment and how this product is being used But how that product is built and under do no harm we look at three things one is privacy So your privacy policy is your sort of legal liabilities. We also look at Securities so security of your users and then production against harass harassment, right? So what have you what are the kind of so? Ideas have you thought of all the risks and have you all mitigated them through documentation? That's what we look at in do no harm by design, right? So these nine indicators together form the DPG standard as you can see that it's very baseline We don't want to go into details of exactly how things need to be done that set this is an open standard right and we want to get feedback from the community on How this can evolve and how the governance of the standard itself can evolve so I invite all of you to Go on our github and you know give your suggestions create issues on what you think about the standard Now how is the standard deployed very easy you come to our website? You nominate a project that project goes into a technical review where we you know what I just mentioned Basically our review team looks at your project across those nine indicators and then you enter the registry What is the registry and you know? We are also like one-year-old so when you look at the registry when you look at the standard You'll realize that a lot of things are constantly shifting. It won't be the same thing three months later And which is also why I want to invite invite all of you again to sort of collaborate and you know give your contributions So the DPG registry is essentially a let's say a catalog where various kinds of Implementers right so it could be governments. It could be aid agencies. It could be multilaterals They come to look at different kind of open-source products and there's been a huge conversation And in fact some of the UN organizations have moved on this where they are now only building and procuring open-source products Right so that shift is going to happen very rapidly over the next five years as the digital public goods agenda sort of evolves and with that this registry will becomes a place which becomes like a Like an app store right but what we want to do is our registry is basically just a Certification platform right? We want to connect this platform to other sort of app stores or market places that are coming up in this space Right and this is one such app store or a catalog that you see which is made by digital impact Alliance And this is I think yeah, this is funded by USAID is it's like it's a it's again a very UN driven organization and they're also doing a lot of work on DPG's and they've created this marketplace Which they're taking to various governments across the world right so Eventually your product becomes a part of a lot of these app stores and gets sort of visibility By people who either want to fund it or deploy it right Where does all of this lead right and What happens in the future so I wanted to paint that a little bit because sometimes we You know we think of what is happening today, and we don't if we don't see where it's leading We tend to Sort of not be connected to its core cause and that's what I wanted to get to which is the core cause of all of this Right in the future. We want to move on to digital public infrastructure, right? In 10 more years governments government services all of that is going to be 100% digital and how do we sort of make sure that we have a gov stack Ready to deal with this eventuality of governments also functioning digitally And so a lot of this is in Thinking process like we have a lot of communities of practice that we host on this We host a lot of round tables that you can be a part of to talk a little bit more about what gov stack is what digital public Infrastructure is but you know, I don't want to like add more jargon to today's chat about digital public goods but this is where all of this is heading and The partners that I showed you earlier, right? They all of them are a part of this one way or another How can you get involved? Now there are many ways by which you can sort of get involved because we are a one-year-old organization still growing so Check if your open source product can become a digital public good we have a quick eligibility test on our website and that test is just like 10 points and then it takes like less than five minutes in some cases if you know everything about your project to know whether you Get you're ready to be a DPG you can also go to our registry and start contributing to DPG's So you will find it like once you go to the registry you might find some familiar names You may not but a lot like X road for example, right? They have a really really big interesting community and a lot of them do do a lot of active community work So you can go to the registry find such projects start contributing to them and Contribute to a standard. We definitely need thoughts and opinions of all of you who are you know attending this to think of our standard As a prudent open standard, right? Again, the standard is one year old and a lot of its you know governance modules are still being sort of worked out But we are more than happy to sort of invite you to any of the council meetings that we host or any of the You know get on GitHub you'll anyway see most of the comments and issues that are open around this standard and you know The various changes that need to be made to various indicators So I think that's about it these are some of the ways by which you can be a part of the digital public goods Alliance that's coming together and That's it. I think that's with that. I think I'm gonna stop and Maybe I should have stopped in the middle and asked if people have any questions But now do any of you have any questions any questions in the audience? Yes, hi good afternoon if I run an open-source project will you or the UN help me become a DPG or you will only certify Thank you So the whole point of this standard is for products to sort of Get the support from various agencies and the systems of the UN to become a digital public good So yes and no because we don't directly provide support in the sense of you're not going to get Contributors and developers from our side, right? But whatever else you might need to sort of grow in the ecosystem That's a support you will definitely get and we do also provide a lot of consulting support So if you say apply to this, you know apply to become a digital public good We are not going to come back to you saying that either you're a digital public good or not We'll tell you if you're not we will also tell you what are the things that you can perhaps improve to become a digital public good So yes, we help you in a way build capacity in that sense But at the same time the actual doing of becoming a digital public good and actual Building to it will have to be done by you. So I need any other questions I'm gonna leave it on this But that's okay, you can come to a github and ask all the questions you have and Thanks a lot for staying through the Second half of the last day of a conference. Thanks