 has been working on, up the of the past year has been working on the question of what is digital public infrastructure on the one hand and also how is digital public infrastructure being used in different contexts and how is digital public infrastructure being used in different contexts and often these conversations around digital public infrastructure or digital public goods is overtly concerned with the technical components of of DPGs and DPI right and we see that as a core problem statement itself because just as we try to figure out the technicalities of how to roll out these complex systems it's just as important to consider how you build the non-technical components around it so we see the non-technical layers so to speak having three elements to it and the first element is communities and that's what we'll be discussing today and this is more than just the community of developers who help build a digital public infrastructure or good. We see the community involving broader actors who help integrate that particular system in the context but also who you know contextualize it for a country or particular geographies requirements so there is in essence something called a community of practice that exists around a digital public good and we see that happening with DHIS there's a vibrant community around of practice around it and the other non-technical layers that API is studying but we will probably not be discussing too much of it today but happy to given that this is a rather small audience is governance of digital public goods and infrastructure so given that a lot of digital public goods and infrastructure mediate access to essential services in the case of DHIS it's health but in several cases you have ID systems that tell you whether you're eligible for food stamps or that tell you whether you're eligible for admission in a hospital or things like that right so those are essential services that digital public goods do mediate so can we roll them out without considering how does it impact people's lives and their rights is also something that we want to understand from the governance perspective and the third non-technical layer is how do you finance these digital public infrastructure and goods what does sustainability look like can countries continue relying on donor support from around the world to build their digital public infrastructure and goods should there be more be a more long-term vision to how you think about digital public infrastructure so that's the third component of the non-technical layer that we're seeing and specifically not narrowing in on the question of communities in the context of digital public goods I want to take a step back and say what are digital public goods right we've seen and we've lived with digital public goods as a part of our everyday life longer than the term itself has existed so DHIS is an example of a digital public good that has been in existence for over two decades now but then there are newer DPGs that have come to the forefront you have something called the modulo open source identity program or MOSIP that is a DPG that helps countries build their own ID systems and you see some of it being you know rolled out in different phases across countries like Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Morocco and so on so that's another example there's also something very interesting called Primero right and Primero is a platform that helps you track instances of gender-based violence and child sexual abuse and that is also a DPG and what unites a lot of DPGs is their connection to something called STGs and DPGs can help accelerate progress towards certain Primero for instance is linked to accelerating progress towards STG-5 which is gender equality DHIS-2 is linked to accelerating progress towards STG-3 which is health for all and MOSIP the other example that I mentioned is related to STG-9 which is industry and innovation so all STGs I mean all DPGs are united in their ability to accelerate progress towards STGs and yesterday's presentation by Lee was also rather interesting because Lee is the head of what is now called the Digital Public Goods Alliance it's a standard setting authority in this space they provide guidance on what is a DPG and what is not and so on and why did we discuss these three examples because DHIS-2 is very different from MOSIP is very different from Primero Primero continues to remain an open-source tool but it's developed internally by Primero itself there is no country-wide or nationwide systems or communities that help with Primero while DHIS on the other hand DHIS-2 is rather interesting because the core remains in Oslo while each country has its own iteration of that particular effort and the reason why DHIS is a lot more robust and resilient is communities we'd like to believe and why are communities important from several levels right they help make a DPG sustainable they help make DPG adaptable to a particular context they also make DPGs relevant for longer than in the short term which is why you can have DHIS being used not only for health but also for different sectors and there are some technical stipulations of what is a DPG the DPGA speaks about it at length I will just mention them briefly basically open standards open protocols open AI are all different components open-source software in general are all different components of what becomes a DPG and in our study on communities around digital public infrastructure what we wanted to understand is now that DHIS-2 has successfully built several communities of practice around itself how can other new and emerging digital public goods also aim to do that and we are particularly interested in this question because in India you have a lot of DPG communities we are working with two of them one of them is called e-government's foundation foundation and the other is the foundation for interoperable and digital economy and the EGA foundation has built something called the digit platform which is a urban governance DPG while the foundation for interoperable and digital economy has built something called the Beccan protocol which has in fact led to the creation of a very unique platform called Namayatri and Namayatri aims to like address problems posed by platforms like Uber they want drivers to be empowered without having to pay commissions to third parties like Uber but both Namayatri and EGA have not been able to scale because they don't have communities around it they want to learn how to build communities to take Namayatri and digit to other geographies so we are engaging with them in their journey of building communities but in engaging with them we also want to learn from legacy open source communities and the legacy open source communities my colleague led several of these conversations we've speaking to people from linux from Apache from the DHIS-2 community and beyond to understand how their own journeys and evolutions look like I will pause here and ask if there's any questions before we jump right in to the other questions that we have set for discussion I will also warn that this you know current session is going to be less presentation heavy this is where the presentation ends the rest of it is more discussions we have questions for you we will use the time to discuss and seeing as we're not too many people we could probably move closer and you know make it more intimate and cozy for all of us having said that does anybody have questions on what I've mentioned so far or on the work Api does anything in general even online should please introduce yourself yes and also your favorite dessert that's great so hi thank you for this presentation I'm Hanine Saad of the access to implementation specialist I'm working in the University of Oslo in the HUSC Center so I'm sorry I I didn't mean from the first but you mentioned one of the DPG is the gender-based violence did you implement the anything that is related to this thing and if you can please talk more about the privacy of data if you want to take this you spoke to Primero we spoke to Primero from the lens of understanding you know whether they have a community around it so we spoke to several like as my colleague mentioned that we did the learn part of it so our interactions were solely focused on understanding what they do but more than what they do kind whether they have like an active community around it in terms of the work that they do I think we more like we I would say that as Saad mentioned they do a lot of work on gender-based violence and instances of that but in terms of whether they have a community or not they do not and the reason of the reason as to why they feel that they don't have a community and it's also we also ask them if that is something that they want to look into in the in the next coming years and to that their answer was no and that's because they have a safety net which is UNICEF so in the case of Primero we see that there is enough funding for them so from the lens of sustainability of Primero itself they feel that you know the the DPG will continue to be or like will continue to sustain given that they have the required funding but unfortunately they don't see the need for the community in the next few years given that they have that safety net so for them community has never been a priority so for us why we still continued to you know speak to Primero and gain insights from them is we want to see through the research that despite having funding do you still have a case for building a community right so that's the question we want to kind of build and kind of unpack through the research is that you know like if you don't have funding then like do we go into building a community only when your funding dries out or do we also look at other you know reasons or make the case to DPGs that you know irrespective of whether you have enough funding or not you should still be looking at building a community and to that our answer is yes because the reason is you may have the required funding but somewhere down the line when you're looking at global adoption and if you're looking at building context-specific solutions we believe that even for a DPG like Primero as they expand and as they begin to like look into you know building out their use cases into like child specific gender-based violence across countries they will be requiring a community which kind of acts like field sensors for them because I presume in especially in cases related to child sexual abuse and gender-based violence it's very context-specific so you need to have a community that acts as you know field sensors however for them that's not something that they're looking at but nevertheless it was very interesting for us to speak to them because it kind of changed our perspective during the course of our research wherein we decided to you know like understand that okay then you know why do we need a community even if you have funding like we kind of want to make the case for that as well. Thank you. And to specifically answer your question about data privacy I believe even though the platform is open by you know nature in terms of like how it is used and integrated the data being able to access on the back end is protected by some sort of role-based control access you need some keys and some there is some level of encryption but not probably the most sophisticated because of the context it works in and it was also recently rolled out in South Sudan where weights of GBV are quite high so they consider it privately as one of the big success stories that you know they could roll out but having set up Primero is still a very small you know platform in that it's instantiated in only about less than 50 countries so I mean it's small only because in the larger sense of the world it's one third of country one fourth of countries right but I hope that answers your question. Anybody else? Any questions? Okay yeah so we'll jump right into the discussion so all of you are part of the DHIS community in different capacities have used DHIS for different reasons are either studying about it or are actively involved in its implementation integration in its contextualization and so on and in your experience what has been you know your own role in in this DHIS ecosystem and and if you ever ran into a problem who is that you approached right and the third question I would ask is has that in any way made you reflect on the broader DHIS community itself if yes how do you think this community has been useful to you yeah just just feel free to jump in raise your hand I can pass the uh you know mic around anybody or a question oh so okay so I was like all of you have been part of the DHIS ecosystem in different capacities right you're studying about it but then there might be country implementers who have been implementing it and then there are others who use it from attacking and monitoring perspective as you know third-party users of the platform so uh how's been your experience of using it or studying about this is one part but also in using it if you had a problem who would you go to and why and has that thought you anything about having a broader DHIS community I believe he wants to speak can you stop I don't know do you want to go ahead now I can start yeah sure yeah uh okay that's a very very big question I'm not sure I'm able to answer all of that but yeah I'll begin from from somewhere uh so I first began so my name is Vettel I'm the PhD student guy I first started studying the address to in my master's studies and I looked at how the the address to was used for innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic so I've actually talked to Pamud here a lot you know because uh and and I've studied his his work from Sri Lanka about how the the system has sort of facilitated innovation locally and and also how local innovations can spread and be useful for for more than just um the ones who sort of started the innovation so from there's so many things to talk about but I think um I think one thing which I've learned from studying the address to as public good I think one of the sort of the ways it enacts being a public good is by enabling or offering a general purpose technology which is not a solution to anything specific and that sounds weird but I think my point is that um and which is also a critique to the DPG Alliance uh I don't think that the value of DPGs are in the way they provide solutions specifically um we at the the the research group over here we and so not me but other researchers has looked at at this this uh this concept of solution versus options and and what the DHS to is really good at is providing options for innovation or um options for customizing or you know adapting the solution to the local needs so there is uh so how does the DHS do that they do it in the design in the architecture the technology part it's very generic it's not made for it's not ready made solutions ready to be you know just downloaded it has to be implemented it has to be adapted and it's made for that it has many mechanisms for being customized one thing is the open source part you know you can directly do changes in the code and so on or you can make more like configurations in the in the interface there's many layers of customizability which enables that you know local fit yeah and then then there is the the sort of um social social part of it was talking about communities i think i think you know the success you know we have always talked about that the success of the HST is not the technology google can make a better version tomorrow if they want to you know but what google doesn't have is the community around it and all the people engaged in trying to make it better so so in so in the work i've done i've seen that you know examples of how use meaning implementing specific solutions can be shared also through mechanisms in the community so that can be you know the through like forums and slack channels and you know basic communication platforms but also collaboration with the DHS to core development they have a really i think a good overview of what most countries want in the in sort of a general um they have a general overview and when they you know in the case of the contact tracing stuff and so on they could see that this was a need everywhere and and um you know uh hypothetically Sri Lanka didn't have to share anything uh they could have just you know made something from themselves and and just you know be isolated but still there was this uh social value thing or something i don't know but uh willingness to share willingness to you know we can share our metadata our configurations apps whatever and not only Sri Lanka but many other countries did that in many other use cases so well i don't know what that is but there's really good people i think willing to to share and and that's what makes it a deep edgy i think yeah so that's a long answer but uh yeah i hope that was good okay uh please introduce yourself everyone this is minna negi technical assistant who uh estimate the trainee original office uh actually i'm working on health system unit i'm responsible for your favorite dessert because that's the rule in this workshop what my favorite what dessert dessert sweet item uh i believe the the cake the spicy cake oh that's nice go ahead actually i'm working as a regional data collection for data collector for the data in our region i'm using which is i'm newly started using it two years ago uh unfortunately when i joined WTO especially this unit health information system unit uh there was no one uh working with the hi s available at this time all this all the old people was already left so uh i try to to learn the hi s on my own uh went through uh the fundamentals and the the available courses online i found it very useful started to uh to use it to design it later on i faced uh some problems uh my supervisor introduced me to sourable or who helped me to to to sell some bugs and issues i faced later on uh i need to stress on what my colleague here said the community of the hi s people and his people is started to be uh something is powerful for the hi s not the hi s itself the community of the hi s people more powerful than the application itself and the platform itself because later on i started to found uh ismael and other uh colleagues from uh afro uh hisps and later i met abdel rahman and hanin uh speaking arabic for our region so this facilitated our facility even thinking how we can develop our uh any platform how we can uh produce uh a real uh high quality outcome from this application sharing experience listening to others yani uh we were uh listening for a few uh minutes ago for palestinian uh an experience in the hi s and implementing it in the country it was very interested for me interesting for me and i found that it's very good and and why not we are not implementing this and uh empowering these people especially it's open uh easy uh people are uh available now to you can reach them anytime anywhere and they can help and support you really not by name and even when i came this first time for me to in uslu i i found that people are happy to support happy happy to share knowledge happy to share experience happy to share problems happy to share uh everything with you so you are you are getting uh a wonderful feedback while you are getting back to your position or country or whatever uh this is very impressive for me thank you to the hi s people thanks to uslu people thank you to all the his people uh are supporting us everywhere and anytime so once again i want to add for what others said i want to focus more on the community of practice so i started working in dhc 2019 i was then one of the palestinian team in palestine i worked five years for the w h o office there so my main role was to build and develop uh many use cases in dhs too so i remember at the beginning so as anyone else you're still a beginner you face many challenges so the first uh the first approach for me and the the quick one to get an answer is the community so in the community you don't have only like the experts from u i o or for from his like the mood and others so uh you can find other people that are experts in dhs too but are located in countries maybe in ministry of health maybe in w h o offices so for example i have my colleagues and me myself before i started here if for example i'm in the community and i find for example uh any problem that i faced before and related to my work i would be more than happy to help and to answer and i for me also if i want to learn anything you knew uh that maybe i get a challenge at but uh i want to mention like some situation happened to me i've been asked to do uh custom working list so if anyone knows what is custom working list in dhs too is is basically a custom list that you cannot configure from the interface it has to be using apis and um maybe a third party um tools so i didn't know how to use it but uh i went to i search through community i found that there was there were others around the countries around the world that that are asking the same questions so i contributed to their questions and i asked more and someone actually helped me he guided me to somewhere in the documentation because you know we have a lot of a lot of documentation uh in the dhs too uh website but uh sometimes you need someone to guide you just to put you on the first step so he only give me like he sent me like a term to search on so i searched on this term and finally i found what i was looking for so then i started to learn more and more through the community and i followed like these issues that are related and i could finally after uh two weeks to finally generate my own my own custom working list so i think uh dhs to community practice is a very successful story it keep growing up day after day and we have many experts around the many regions in rural afro um india africa from universe of oslo so we have a lot of experts that are ready to uh to help so and maybe um this what made the dhs to uh a success story itself and yeah i advised like other platforms to have like the same community the same maybe this sharing knowledge between uh individuals not only the experts and in community you you can find you can find like the basic questions and the advanced one yeah there is no specific topic you can ask whatever you want and uh the beauty in the in the community practice that it's uh categorized based on uh different topics so you will find android you will find implementation you will find budgeting and planning so a lot of things happening there i do recommend everyone to go there and just to have an overview overview of this great uh community thank you oh who wants to go there you go thank you um a slightly different perspective from someone who isn't really a user of dhs to yet um but i think one of the things that i'm uh is interesting is around the kind of just the and maybe more on the topic is just because it's a digital public oh sorry my name is eliz ties well i'm uh uh work for site savers which is a global charity working in education health care um so um i was just contemplating the difference between something which is a public good but something which is also commercial and has a kind of financial impact implications so there is there is a financial element to using and being part of the dhs community but perhaps it's different to the example that you gave earlier in that there isn't a single source of funding for everything that's happening probably most people are using dhs to um through funding from lots and lots of different sources whether it's different you know global organizations different academic things and maybe that has an influence on the kind of community of practice side of things and also from a kind of academic background having its roots in a university situation creates a kind of rolling academic element to it so dhs students who start within the kind of community have a and a kind of approach to learning which lends itself i think to a community of practice which perhaps doesn't ever if an organization doesn't sit in an academic setting maybe you don't have that kind of rolling community you don't have that rolling education you don't have the courses that relate to it in university settings so yeah that from some observations from a very short career involving dhs to so far and that's also a very that not worthy um you know insight mostly because even in our research at art the about communities around dpgs one of the things we realized is dhs does benefit necessarily from having an institutional academic partner which in some case most of the modular open source identity program also does benefit from but unfortunately they decided not to go the academic route they decided to outsource code development to a third party and so that's why there is absolutely no community around it it's just a bunch of people sitting outside in a different company altogether who are doing the code while if the code is open there's it's still most of who controls the keys to how the code is used and implemented uh having said that i think permod wants to comment yeah i mean really good insights from all different types of dhs to users so again i'm permod i'm representing the hisp center at uio as well as hisp Sri Lanka so i have both kind of uh background here as well like from the region i'm the desert police here so it's a very difficult question to pick one so there are like so many different types of ice creams all around the world i have quite so i will stick to that because i get to try different flavors from different regions okay coming back to the core question now the thing about community across dpgs like see why do you need a community so if you just look at it from a very technical as in technological perspective most of the open source solutions i wouldn't say dpgs look at the community as like contributors to the development code right that's that's the case for most of the open source software but in dhs too i'm kind of repeating few of the ideas i shared yesterday in the parallel session so in dhs too of course the developers are included but here the emphasis is also about the people who implement people who conduct research and people who who are donors right and of course marketplace right so that's why i even highlighted this virtual gathering place for dhs too community of practice which is the i mean portal that we have it has a kind of market opportunities so again i don't believe that like you can always argue a digital public good can it not have any commercial value because like if it is a free and open source solution it doesn't kind of you know like even like if you look at the licensing right if it is something like vst it doesn't really limit someone from using it for commercial purpose so actually we don't need to go down that line because if you stick to the question so the main thing about dhs to community and or like like community in general what we need to kind of delineate is like this community is for who and most of the dpgs will only consider and look at it from a very technical perspective yeah and will only include developers but here this particular digital public good has a larger representation in the community that is one and then let's try to compare it of course with like let's say dpg we can compare dpg versus non-dpg without doing that let's think about force free and open source versus yeah proprietary right so but we ask the question like yeah why did Sri Lanka shared whatever the metadata and the initial thing during the pandemic i was actually asking the same question from the director who was from the ministry here like what if they didn't do that yeah but our argument is like the whatever the good that we did to the community would have been much much less if we did not share it like we would have this temporary satisfaction of like okay we were the first that's it that's it right nobody else would use it and like it'll i mean whatever that happened not only us like there were so many hits they were sharing and it kind of made life easier for everyone so in i mean again if you compare proprietary and this it's about like if for the for the proprietary software there is a designated team who produce a code and you have implementers paid implementers contractors right so whatever in proprietary system which is done by whoever paid organizations it's done at a kind of a with with a good heart by all these people in the community so that's why dpg should have community again the question you should ask from the dpg producers like what do they perceive by the term community yeah you will mostly i'm i'm i'm assuming now but like based on my experience they will always say our community is the community of developers again like going back to what i said yesterday because you quoted about mossy that they don't want to have like they are a separate entity they didn't want to have it rooted in academia like so uh quoting from my presentation yesterday in 2016 there was this evaluation done by norad which identified because i think dhs2 also had that kind of a dilemma back then whether it should be an independent entity given that there's so much of funding and it's like doing like some specific work but what they found out was that for dhs2 whatever coming from research and that research is feeding into the core platform is what is driving it and for that to happen it has to be rooted in in in the university i'm challenging you like can you apply the same for like any other dpg and can you say like you know for this dpg this is not valid it probably like it was their choice i don't think it is not valid it was their choice so i mean i know like you must be having some uh yeah so i'm talking too much but i i just wanted to highlight these two couple of no i have responded to this but i don't want to comment yeah and i will be quick i will just add one barrier or maybe one challenge when uh building a community is to support multiple languages so uh multiple languages so now i'm i'm supporting arabic speaking language countries me and my colleague abed so one thing that we are facing right now is no there's not a lot of resources in arabic in dhs2 that's why university also recruited me and abed so this one thing we have to consider when we build a community is is to um to include the the languages of the targeted audience of course english is very perfect but maybe we have some time to think about other languages thank you in addition to english english is not common for uh some english language in arabic uh yeah so uh when we have now the from original news i can see that we are going to see a more implementation and more uh success for dhs in our uh Middle East area so that's why including all these people uh having multi languages uh covering the the area we use a different language than english or french it's better than having the the only language one and i'll just use this one uh no i was just going to quickly display to what you were saying uh which is that language is such a huge part of how people perceive and also like understand a particular platform and experience right and uh in india we have many platforms uh and a lot of our services are available online and one of the services that was made available online was our covid vaccination service through the covid platform and uh we spoke to some of the people who are involved in uh the process of you know explaining to uh it was made compulsory the government didn't give anybody a choice to use covid or not but to explain it to district level officials the covid platform developers had to create manuals in so many languages at least 10 languages because and the covid platform itself was initially only available in two languages which is english and hindi which is the other large language spoken in india but also hindi is not a language that the whole of india speaks my colleague and i barely speak hindi because we're from the south of india and so if if my say i wanted to use the platform i could use it in english but there are people even my like my my friends or their grandparents or so on they're not going to be able to use the a smartphone in english right so find one of the things that they have to do very early on in that covid experience was to make the platform available in local languages and uh completely on like like recognize the value in creating contact specific resources for different languages and there's also in fact a problem that uh i keep going back to this example which is moseph but that's also because moseph is one of those dpgs that's being ruled out at a national scale across countries and this is being rolled out in philippines where they speak spanish and their local languages but also in morocco and ethiopia two two countries in the same continent but different languages again right and one of the biggest problems that moseph is facing despite having support from governments is they don't have anybody in their own internal teams to be able to uh sorry yeah uh they don't have anybody in their own internal teams to be able to help officials make sense of the platform in their own languages which is why moseph has now invested and is thinking about creating a community of practice around uh so you want to come in power designing you have to invest also on skills of people who are working precisely and uh having a different language having different people from everywhere covering everywhere covering every language covering uh different programs this is improving uh the dh is more on more and more that works out you can keep that that's fine uh yes so yeah and uh because sometimes you can't find a lot of software that you can call it for that source but in the deities but if we are talking about dj school so for example so i think those important things consider dj school and the community as a real as a real open source so for me it's not having access to the code this is the important but maybe all these things yes took together as a bundle to be considered as open source and a digital public good that was very helpful uh and and this is something that we are addressing in our research also what is the difference between open source and in the notional sense of it versus the real sense of it right what does it really mean to be open source in a way that it allows your platform for update among different contacts and people and so on having said that this is just question one of three questions we have to pick your brain i will quickly move to question three because i think you know i'm switching up the order taking liberty and so on but having said that question three uh yeah question three is how do you discover social champions so dh is we all know the story uh was implemented for a very very you know specific use case in post-apathize africa in the early 90s but now you see dh is being used as you mentioned you want to use it across the added world uh it is being instantiated on over a hundred countries house and we also understand that some of this has been demand driven right but how did we how did you discover that demand uh and and why is there that demand who are the people who decided okay dh is work for health let's experiment with education who are the people who decided this is when you know we can start experimenting with dh is those are the people we think are the social champions for it you mentioned there's a broader social value to platforms like dh is which is why we're calling them social champions as well so um any personal anecdotes about how your own journey to to dh is has been have you been a personal champion uh for dh is any reflections haven't spoken at all you must also know what to do before you jump in yeah hi i'm sort of uh so yeah i mean uh i already told my desert when i introduced myself um yeah so i think it it took uh uh some years of experience to kind of uh kind of say kind of self-qualify myself as a dh is to jump in so i think me and pamo that's been like 12 years now working on dh is to so now you have that confidence that if someone reaches out to you the you can suggest the right ways to do things within the software and even not looking at technical areas only but looking at the implementation principles as well um but then that knowledge has come from when you've got your own hands dirty doing implementations building systems talking to the community of course because users are the only source of information for us in terms of what they want and and that comes to us in terms of the requirements there's challenges their problems and then we try to resolve them so i think each implementation has brought its own learnings uh so i think when you work with the network uh you know that uh you have reached a certain level then of course the onus is on us to build the future generations so that's why i think uh the capacity building plays a very key role when you talk of the his network that we can't keep things only to us and not disseminate them so uh we hire interns we hire younger minds to to learn the same things that we learn but then in much less time because when we started we didn't have uh these online courses and documentations we we all relied on some old manuals to look at stuff but then now we see that they as the things have advanced uh the younger people coming in have much more resource material for quickly learning the aspects which we took a lot of time to learn uh just by doing stuff because we didn't have any examples to look up to so i think that has really helped that uh one is your own knowledge plus how you can disseminate what you've learned in a much faster turnaround time to the new people that you're bringing in the ecosystem uh that will help you to kind of build more champions in a much smaller time uh time frame as it took with us so i think when people join his pindia we tell them that when we joined no one was there to guide us we were just sent to implementations read them and we'll do stuff but here we are to mentor you to guide you so take that opportunity and and learn as fast as possible and i think uh honey mabdu and these are all products of the whole ecosystem that worked with his groups worked with the ministries learned up and now they are leading implementations on their own so i think it's a continuous cycle you learn something you disseminate through workshops trainings courses and then you have more people uh kind of reaching your same level that you have and then they can fit like a chain reaction uh so i think that really helps in building these social champions yeah that's why i just pass it on to you there was a question however in the chat online which is how do you how do we define social champions very simply we see social champions as people who are key in disseminating a platform so in the context of dh is to we see them as people who help uh bring it up with their national authority saying hey there's this platform that we can use for not only for health but also for education but also people who in some ways try to uh uh you know grow the community right uh the people who help networks or who are the starting point for a dh is value chain in a country those we see as uh social champions and why we are interested and i'm sorry i'm a very bad researcher i should have told you why we are interested in the question of social champions is because while dh is a general purpose solution that's solved for education health there are also dpgs in general can be general purpose solutions for different things and what we have in terms of say the beck and protocall a collective we work with is now they try to solve for urban mobility now they also try to solve for e-commerce so amazon's a big bad brother let's have an indian version of amazon but they want to be able to use the protocol to solve more than just e-commerce and urban mobility how do they find social champions for that in the case of the urban mobility it was a retired government official who is very very annoyed with the state of fs in bangalore about uber being so expensive so he said let me go to the tuk tuk drivers union and speak to them about whether they want to create their own app which will not have any commissions and that's how the urban mobility solution came about but he's just one retired official we need several more inspired and i'm not sure fully retired but more inspired people to be able to do these things right and somebody yesterday in the use case bazaar told me how someone who worked in the health department moved from there to the agriculture department and he realized that the south african agricultural data tracking system is a nightmare and he was just like we need to do something about it and how you have a solution let's use dh is and now they have something called apsa or apsa was the yeah yeah apsa and they're building a whole agricultural data tracking analytics platform on the dh is uh you know code base and that to me even though he is in position someone in the middle level is still a key social champion because he communicated the value of the platform right in that context so yeah this how we describe social champions but having said that i will hand it over i think i'm basically gonna repeat your last point and i think um the question was around how things move from health to other areas i think at the moment it is possibly a bit of a happy accident rather than strategic and that might impact going forward in that i don't know whether in dhs too you know there is a kind of like strategic let's do um another sector next um you know 25 years ago when i was researching in health you you were in house you weren't in a cross sector world whereas a lot of academic research models have changed from you know specifically might do cross sector it's the topic that you're researching not necessarily the area and that might impact on that kind of dhs too being used in other sectors and it might be because a person moves into that sector it might be because an organisation used to work exclusively in health and then moves into another field branches out into social inclusion or gender based violence and they take their dhs too skills with them or they recruit someone with those skills and so it's and and maybe that's a there's something about the difference between a strategic targeting an area versus the happy accident and sometimes the happy accident works best you know if you try and target an area in a kind of strategic business sense sometimes it doesn't work because you're bringing what you think is required versus what is required the happy accident is when someone sees the need and uses you know their skills to fill the need rather than well you have to do it this way and i think from a kind of end user point of view one of the things that we find most challenging is when we're given when this we're told the solution because that's what people know so if you work in an organisation that is predominantly Microsoft all the solutions have to come from the Microsoft suite of solutions even if it's not the rest of the best solution because your organisation is signed up to it so of course that's what the IT team will recommend and that that sort of fixed view versus you know what's the best solution is is kind of a bit of a challenge and sometimes it maybe i don't know in commercial organisations sometimes it's harder because you're constrained by those rules where you might not necessarily be in an academic research point of view so um yeah two things i will answer your question on social champions but i mean the thing is this right so you know we are talking about social champions but there is always a gap we have to bridge so one quality of dhs2 as a platform it's modular plus plus most importantly customizable we may have modular platforms which is not customizable meaning you always have a gap between the developer and the actual people who are using it actual people who are using it can be the end users as well as people who are implementing so the thing is like what dhs2 has been so good at comparing couple of tpgs i have worked with is like to make things more digestible to simple people right not the techie people so that's why like when you when when you listen to someone presenting on dhs2 or like you just happen to go to say a covid vaccination and you never look at the system you are able to comprehend what it is and can relate right because these people who make these decisions are administrators or i mean like they are none of them are techie people that's the thing so dhs2 has been so good i mean like i can tell you two examples like we'll take from Sri Lanka how did we introduce dhs2 for emis or education there were two things so um yes by accident i would say like accident plus strategic in that way because like we opted to engage with academia we opted to engage why so we happen to be teaching in doing lectures on on a on a information systems management program where we happen to have students from different different sectors in the government right so dhs2 was part of this course i mean not to kind of teach them but like just to show them that there's a software like this and they kind of picked it up from there and started applying it to whatever their routine work so that was one application of dhs2 i mean like that i mean these are the kind of accidents but like that's that's why like they're so engaging with academia like we we talk about like um introducing good things in schools for kids because like if we want to do a change make a change couple of like decades down the line we have to introduce at that level disseminate so that's one and coming back to social uh champions quite coincidentally uh i mean we have a big academic conference in information systems happening parallely somewhere down south of norway in christiansen so uh me and one of my colleagues presented a paper yesterday and it was about this from a more uh technical perspective like looking at using academic theory so we were trying so there is this theory called institutional theory which is widely used in many domains so in information systems we were trying to focus look at these dhs2 implementations using this concept called institutional entrepreneurship so this is basically your social champion so what we tried to look i mean we analyzed some scenarios and we found out you had individuals you had a collective of individuals for example from Sri Lanka's perspective the director from the ministry he was talking about this set of people called health informaticians they were some medical doctors who did a master's program so they were acting as a collective during the pandemic in implementing the solution that they that they introduced at national level so it's a national level introduction and they implemented and then we also figured out like for example talking about dhs2 and uh dive work and mosaic like you had government institutes acting as champions so i would say like socially um i mean it is not necessary the society it could be even organizations institutes exactly so we of course have some academic back in it's not published or anything but like published as represented but uh you won't find any papers but we are planning to write a paper on that and there's also an interesting oh yeah please uh there's also an like another thing we're doing is looking and reading this book called the entrepreneurial state so oh my god we already read the same thing yeah yeah so uh yeah the entrepreneurial state is interesting because she's looking at how digitization is also changing how governments do their work of being a government and uh and in some ways it borrows from uh startup nation theories and so on and so forth but one of the things they mentioned is institutional entrepreneurship uh in that uh having said that we'll just go to the person online quickly and yes hi can you hear me yes oh that's great well it's good to see you guys and uh i'm actually really happy about the conversation that you're having and uh i thought i would just jump in with the with the sum of the facts that i have and especially the idea of of discovering uh champions i think it's what this question is directly related to the question before which is it can be community practice and uh i think while you're having these conversations i'm also remembering spots words when he was talking about developing apps for the analytics uh for analytics so for geisha and general he emphasized on the point where he said we're only like developing when there is a real need to these features a real use case and i think that really touches the subject of what we're talking about because special champions will have that apart they will know when there is a right they will know that when there is uh when there is something that uh that will contribute to the public good and uh and i've seen this from from the community of practice well i have not introduced myself but uh in the community practice as community practice i've been the community practice coordinator for about uh this is the third year and i've seen that it's it having that sort of environment where it's an open public form accessible to everyone there is this equality there is this uh for everyone to share to contribute right and also the contributions are highlighted so one question that i could ask and it's uh it actually i would start before asking this question is i would say the phrase you know what you saw so if we really uh i like that the word uh happy accidents if really selling happy accidents that's what we're going to get uh but but if do we have the environment for social champions to contribute uh another idea was okay so really great we have experts they're building software and they're contributing or they they have they have the uh instant implementations but is that an experience being documented uh do we have the knowledge of for example in crisis uh people are sharing their stories they're sharing the challenges they're sharing the solutions to the challenges and we have that sort of live documentation that is not just a couple of the documents that are online but things that has this interaction things things that allow uh knowledge caring and builds this builds the community and uh this sort of relations actually like has the environment the social champion to make use of to uh present their ideas and support the with with further progress and i think uh this has been very very uh evident in and tries to be life experiences where uh just um the the so many different uh cases and implementations across the globe and i believe that's because there is enough environment or there's a proper environment for social champions to contribute and make use of of uh all that's available and uh one important thing is uh is that this builds these values across then it can transmit from generation generation it doesn't stop somewhere it keeps growing and um so for example started way back in that south uh the south uh africa and i think brought from country country and now it's 2023 and we're still growing and and uh contribute uh from people from all around the world uh so i i think i don't know if i if i touched the so many general terms uh but i think uh uh you know that's how i really relate with everything that you got that you said and the conversation so uh that's why i'm also really happy to pinpoint some of these things that i mentioned um of course do you have any questions from or from what i said i'm coming to go further and talk okay yes he mentioned you are the uh promoters added that you are the dhi's to community of practice coordinator i'm just wondering why you came so late but having said that everything what you said resonated with us and we have duly made to know made note of it in our little mirror which by the way we want to make a community resource so if anybody's interested in um you know getting a copy of this we'll be happy to just note down your email at the end of this and send it to y'all because uh all of our research is public and we will definitely share it with you but haven't said that you had an intervention i'm not sure how much time we have but uh i'll just add one okay okay uh i'll just want to reflect a little bit about the happy accident thing uh you know when you look at the countries using dhs2 norway is on there and they weren't weren't that before covid-19 the reason why norway is using dhs2 is because one lady in the northern parts of norway who did a really incredible job of of you know introducing dhs2 for contact tracing in norway and i just want to you know be a little bit critical or you know try to to look at this on another way uh one thing is that we can say it's a happy accident that she sort of found dhs2 and you know started working on implementing that then you know disseminating and all sort of stuff but what she did was actually you know doing a really good work of trying to understand all the different systems similar to dhs2 so it wasn't necessarily sort of a happy accident but actually sort of a part of an analytical process which she conducted where she compared all the traits of the system and try to understand how uh which one can best you know fit the very changing context of of covid-19 and she chose dhs2 because because of the customizability because it's free they could bypass all the procurement processes and and so on and you know very interesting so maybe it was just because the system was really good at what it was supposed to do in that context so maybe it wasn't an accident maybe it was a very actually no uh intentional thing uh yeah and then i really just want to say i really just want to say one more thing and that is um and that is uh you know what you just mentioned on zoom having an environment for for contribution uh there's this philosopher called McIntyre he has looked into what is virtue and and what he says is that you know you're not virtuous first and then you act it's action first and then the virtue comes with action and i think you know how do we facilitate for social champions how do you facilitate for sharing how do you facilitate all all this good stuff we have to you know make environments make interfaces places where virtuous actions can be you know materialized you have to enable the actions and that and i think that's a very you know key thing in about dpgs yeah i'm going to like to speak for one minute because i have two questions so that's the one is a statement other one it's a question so what he mentioned so this is where the community has to be there not just as a principal implementer the localization yeah the same way you approach countries sometimes in Africa and Asia the same method doesn't work probably in some other context like no that's one like so to do this localization you need to have a community and not a principal um like organization the question i have is like okay you build this community do you have any thoughts about the governance of the community right so i mean you can have a very big let's see 100 plus countries you ask everyone to join okay how does the community works the governance that's the question i have so this is something that we ask a lot of dpg builders this right are you comfortable with having a community because what is it to say someone takes your dh is and decides to use it for wrong things right or or that like your back in protocol is today now being used for urban mobility solutions but tomorrow maybe they want to use it for drug sales what do you know right and and this is what uh sujit nair who is the and i don't want to miss photo more anything but i will tell you what he told us uh which is think of the community as a forest and not a walled garden right and in a forest you have big beautiful lush histories and you do have weeds and and then the forest has a way of weeding out the weeds the forest has a way of letting trees grow tall despite the existence of certain weeds and he says he wants dpg communities i mean i know it has its own problems and forests are dying climate change and so on having said that but it is still an admirable analogy to keep in mind in that while a dh is or a beckon can facilitate thousand beautiful use cases it's still far outweighs the one bad thing that a dpg can do and which is why there is value in seeing it as gender purpose solutions i completely agree with you which is my critique to the dpg definition as well and in a walled garden you regulate who has access to your protocol you regulate who has access to your software then the perhaps dh is too will have been implemented only in 50 countries so far as opposed to the hundred and seven where it finds resonance right and it's precisely that analogy which makes sense to me in this context which is the governance is something that evolves over time and there is i mean there needs to be some basic requirements a sort of readiness assessment i guess that needs to go in place before you decide to take this up for instance i think primaris shouldn't be implemented in countries that doesn't have and this is my personal opinion of course that doesn't have a data protection or data privacy law right if you're dealing with sensitive gender-based violence data the least you can do is guarantee privacy as a right to your citizens and i don't think it should be but it has been anywhere right so having those basic minimum requirements in place building institutional capacity right alongside technical solutions is also important having said that i know my colleague hasn't had a chance to say anything throughout i was just wondering if you just like to jump in on the question that you asked from mod so you know we just had like a round table workshop before coming for the conference and there was beckon in the room and of course eager and we did ask them that you know like how do you want to look at community governance and what came across apart from what saujanya mentioned is that why do we have to even govern in the sense we want the community to decide how they want to be governed so the question of governance when we were thinking about it and i would say you know when we started off the research about two months back we were also very we were grappling with this question of governance and we were like how do we like deal with this like do we have like a core set of people who will put down rules and regulations and all of that and during the course of our research we realized that i think at the end of the day the purpose of the community is that you have so many people and the way the community will evolve soon you will have so many people that you you know it will just be there'll be a time where you can't manage it and that's all right and it's fine for the community to decide how they want to be governed so i think that in itself talks about how a community works which is you know collaboration and having people to participate so there can't be any you can't have gatekeepers to the community so the question of governance how we'd like to think about it in this aspect is very similar to the fact that you know when it comes to code code of conduct and things like that yeah you can have like a baseline documentation of you know like ethics and all of that but beyond that i think you need to let the community flow and grow and you can't gatekeep it and allow the community to decide for themselves it has any questions for us where in the past four minutes of workshop and i must admit even though this was small this was a lot more valuable than what we even set out to achieve we've had lovely i think it was personally very lovely to be able to speak so freely about questions that some of us in this space like grapple with on a daily basis there's sometimes nights when i just sit up reading and not finding answers as a researcher but there's also been reassuring to learn off how each of your experience in working with DHIS and around DHIS is so diverse but one of my professors said this in college which is creativity is a noble failure so we might have failed a hundred times in trying to experiment with a platform like DHIS we might have failed a hundred times in answering our research questions but i think it's still so valuable so long as we're able to say why we failed and how we failed so that people after us don't fail which is i think the DHIS story it said while one country is still learning how to implement there are 500 other organizations and people and things that can help you do that and thank you so much if anybody is interested in this meet or boat situation please do drop your email i will pass on my book and you will get it sometime early next week when my colleague and i'm back in at our desk any questions anybody okay thank you