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DPG Charter Whitepaper: Announcing a Call-for-Evidence on DPGs and DPI

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The recently announced Digital Public Goods (DPG) Charter is rallying a growing coalition of governments, civil society, and technologists around the opportunity to leverage secure and open digital technologies to lay the foundational building blocks for digital government.

Provide more information and fill out our brief survey here!

The recently announced Digital Public Goods (DPG) Charter is rallying a growing coalition of governments, civil society, and technologists around the opportunity to leverage secure and open digital technologies to lay the foundational building blocks for digital government. The DPG Charter is galvanizing political and financial commitments to advance DPGs that enable countries around the world to sustainably design, develop, and govern foundational digital public infrastructure (DPI) for the public good. DPI can enable the provision of quality public and private services at scale, promote innovation economies, and collaboratively address urgent global challenges such as hunger, pandemics, and climate change. For more on the concepts of DPI, building blocks, and DPGs, see this recent explainer.

The DPG Charter effort is jointly stewarded by the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL), a ‘think, do, replicate’ tank generating knowledge and partnering with governments to pursue inclusive digital transformation, and the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), an advocacy entity established to promote DPGs. The DPG Charter campaign is intended to mobilize financial and political commitments to accelerate the adoption and implementation of DPGs for DPIs. The DPG Charter is a truly collaborative effort to align and mobilize diverse stakeholders, initiatives, and resources around a shared vision whereby digital public goods enable countries to build safe, trusted, and inclusive digital public infrastructure at scale. The Charter process will mobilize high-level endorsements coupled with specific pledges from governments, private sector companies, private philanthropy, UN multilateral institutions, and civil society organizations. If successful, the Charter will ensure that collective and coordinated action to advance foundational digital technologies will contribute to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. 

The DPG Charter team is kicking off the process with a series of global consultations to define the parameters of meaningful DPG Charter commitments and to map these commitments against the needs of the ecosystem, as identified by the broad community of stakeholders involved. These findings and recommendations will coalesce in a white paper to be shared at the 2022 United Nations General Assembly. The DPG Charter white paper will crystallize key insights from across the DPG ecosystem, as well as the role of DPGs in global development. The white paper will both help to make the case for how DPGs can support countries invest in inclusive DPI at scale and to landscape the current state of the DPG ecosystem. Most importantly, the white paper will explore the challenges and risks (real and perceived) in the adoption of DPGs for DPI, and make a series of prioritized recommendations to steer collective action. 

This last area is where we need your help! As we begin assembling literature and consultative inputs from across the digital development ecosystem, we are unlikely to capture all the relevant existing knowledge on our own. Therefore, we are requesting the help of the community in sourcing additional literature on DPGs and DPI that will help us to accurately reflect the most current thinking on the use of open technology for development in the DPG Charter white paper. In particular, we are looking for supporting evidence in these three areas across key themes such as: financing, governance, country capacity, legal and regulatory frameworks, business models, commercial partners/ecosystems, and software communities.

If you or your organization has the time, we welcome your input. You can respond to our brief survey and call-for-evidence here, which will not take more than 5-10 minutes of your time. Please reach out to info@dpgcharter.org if you have any questions. We thank you for your support!

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