Digital Public Goods
Description
1. Gitcoin:
"“In economics, a "public good" refers to anything that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, that is, people can't be barred access, and one person's use doesn't degrade another's.
Clean air is an example of a naturally occurring public good, while the electric grid is a public good created by people.
What are the public goods of today's industrial-knowledge society?
Open source code, which supports millions of companies and independent developers, is often thought of this way.
The cypherpunks considered privacy itself as a kind of public good.
A great public good should:
• Be values-based — in service of a set of values your community cares about. • Have longevity — be achievable and maintainable. • Create positive externalities — benefits a public beyond an immediate set of users.
Gitcoin started off focusing on Digital Public Goods (like Open Source software) but we have now expanded into real-life Public Goods."
2. From the Wikipedia:
"Digital public goods are public goods in the form of software, data sets, AI models, standards or content that are generally free cultural works and contribute to sustainable national and international digital development.
Use of the term "digital public good" appears as early as April 2017, when Nicholas Gruen wrote Building the Public Goods of the Twenty-First Century, and has gained popularity with the growing recognition of the potential for new technologies to be implemented at a national scale to better service delivery to citizens.[1] Digital technologies have also been identified by countries, NGOs and private sector entities as a means to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This translation of public goods onto digital platforms has resulted in the use of the term "digital public goods".
Several international agencies, including UNICEF and UNDP, are exploring DPGs as a possible solution to address the issue of digital inclusion, particularly for children in emerging economies.
A digital public good is defined by the UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, as: "open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the SDGs."
Most physical resources exist in limited supply. When a resource is removed and used, the supply becomes scarce or depleted. Scarcity can result in competing rivalry for the resource. The nondepletable, nonexclusive, and non-rivalrous nature of digital public goods means the rules and norms for managing them can be different from how physical public goods are managed. Digital public goods can be infinitely stored, copied, and distributed without becoming depleted, and at close to zero cost. Abundance rather than scarcity is an inherent characteristic of digital resources in the digital commons.
Digital public goods share some traits with public goods including non-rivalry and non-excludability"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_public_goods)
Typology
From the Wikipedia:
Free and open-source software
"While the original motivation of the free software movement, was political in nature - aiming to preserve the freedom of all to study, copy, modify and re-distribute any software/code, given that the marginal costs of duplication of software is negligible, FOSS becomes digital public good.
FOSS has allowed greater dissemination of software in society. Since FOSS applications can be customized, users can add local language interfaces (localization), which expands the availability of the digital public good to more in that country/society/region, where users speak that language.
Open Educational Resources
Copyright law makes the default copyright as 'all rights reserved', this applies to digital content as well. The open educational resources (OER) movement has popularized the use of copyright ('copyleft') licenses like the Creative Commons, which allows the content to be freely re-used, shared, modified and re-distributed. Thus all OER are digital public goods. OER have reduced the costs of accessing learning materials in schools and higher education institutions in many countries of the world. In India, the Ministry of Education has supported the development of the DIKSHA OER portal for teachers to upload and download materials for their teaching-learning.
OER itself is an output of using editing/authoring software applications. The Commonwealth of Learning, a Commonwealth inter-governmental institution, has been popularizing the use of FOSS editors to create OER, and has supported IT for Change to develop the Teachers' toolkit for creating and re-purposing OER using FOSS. Such an approach will lead to expansion in one digital public good (content or OER), using another digital public good FOSS.
Open Data
Digital public goods as defined by the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation published in The Age of Digital Interdependence includes open data.
Beginning with open data in a machine readable format, startups and enterprises can build applications and services that utilize that data. This can create interoperability at a large scale.
The UNCTAD Digital Economy Report 2019 recommends commissioning the private sector to build the necessary infrastructure for extracting data, which can be stored in a public data fund that is part of the national data commons.[8] Alternative solutions include mandating companies through public procurement contracts to provide data they collect to governments (this is being tested in Barcelona, for example)."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_public_goods)