Research Type: Spotlight

Good infrastructure is critical in promoting healthy, prosperous, and interconnected societies. And in today’s world, data infrastructure is becoming increasingly important as a means of ensuring people are able to benefit from the power of digitization. But, how does it compare to more traditional forms of infrastructure, like roads and bridges? The paper unpacks lessons to be learned – and insights to be gleaned – from the history of infrastructure and what they mean for us today.

In order to understand the reality on the ground, the Digital Impact Alliance has produced three mini-briefs based on initiatives in mostly developing countries that seek to reach and provide highly localized digital products and services for digitally marginalized populations through a human-centered approach to data governance.

The lifecycle of Digital Public Goods consist broadly of four stages — Create, Deploy, Sustain and Evolve. Current funding models for DPGs focus primarily on the first two stages. This paper applies the lens of an open source practitioner to look at funding models that support all four stages, and is aimed at DPG funders and developers.

Could algorithms be the answer to government’s most persistent problems, or simply create more?