So we are now entering into the part of the introductory period where I mumble and try and
talk and fill space until we actually have time for these speaker to begin the presentation.
Usually takes about one minute to introduce this speaker and then we don't have to kind of sit
waiting for the, oh, you have a long bio. Okay, we're going, no. All right. I will cut it down.
I will cut it down. All right. So, friends, please join me in welcoming Mike Gifford for the presentation
on digital public goods incentivizing collaboration. Mike is civic actions open standards and practices lead
and a thought leader on open government as well as digital accessibility and sustainability. He has worked with
governments in North America and Europe and spoken internationally and he is a W3C invited expert and recognized
authoring tool accessibility expert. Mike has served for two years on the board of the digital services coalition
and in his last year he served as president of the board where he helped better define what it was to be a digital agency
and in this role he met with leaders in government and the private sector who are working for modern digital government.
I know this is the part where I'm going to hand you the mic and you're going to mic up and then I'm going to stare at the clock until
it's five minutes past so we're aligned and the video operation center people are happy and the live stream people are happy
and we've seen as it clicks over, we welcome you with formal applause. Excellent.
Is the, is the audio working okay? Is everybody here, Mike?
All right, fantastic. When it's stop off the stage in just a moment, I will say formal welcome and there will be applause
and then you should be able to hear.
Marvelous.
I'd like to make sure that we run a tight ship folks.
Also snacks, just in case I have to mention the snacks and not obsessively we still have more.
And do you want to carry them down the stairs?
Oh, that I got no.
Okay, I got that.
Okay, excellent.
We have eaten enough now but that becomes a less painful process.
We're really welcome Mike, please.
Thank you very much.
So how many people here are excited and filled with energy at this point of the day?
Yeah, that's all we want to hear.
This is the last talk, right?
At least when we're talking.
Well, you need to keep up the energy and I will not be able to talk for longer because this is not the last talk,
but thank you so much for being here so late in the day.
It is definitely a long, long process.
So how do people here have heard about digital public goods?
So I've got some ideas about digital public goods.
It's still forming.
But since I'm an editor and Wikipedia, I sometimes go off and edit things.
I have opinions there.
But Drupal is an example of a digital public good.
There's also other ones.
It is open source, open standards, open data.
There's effort to try and build it out and expand it.
So you're dealing with with a lot broader set of criteria.
And it's not simply looking at code.
But they're also, if you're looking at the certified digital public goods, you're also looking at
and other elements that are more holistic to the project.
They're designed to support the public good.
So that's one of the pieces of this is that you're not just looking at
it at a licensing discussion, but looking at the public good.
The DPGA, which is the digital public goods alliance, is trying to structure this around the UN Sustainable
Development Goals.
And these are very broad guidelines on how what we need to do in the next five years to go off
and to make the world more sustainable.
So that we can live on it as a species.
Now, how many people have been to one of the earlier STG talks?
Because there's actually a couple of them that are happening this weekend.
A couple of people?
Good.
I think there's a little bit more tomorrow as well.
So do you try and take a chance to learn about this new framing of how we can
collaborate more effectively together?
Yeah.
So this is about when we're trying to go off and build a respect for best practices.
We're going to have security and privacy as well.
Those are things that are built into the process.
So I wanted to make some comparisons around the free and open source software.
Because I think that a lot of the ideas and momentum has come from from FOS.
And the open source has really helped to inform open data and open government.
And that sort of set of ideas about collaboration and sharing.
FOS is being very successful at trying to go off and build and share knowledge across different
domains.
And it's also highlighted the challenges of trying to go from build structures that allow
for maintenance because it's much, much easier to to start to build a project and to set something up.
Then it is to maintain it over time.
And there's so many different projects out there on GitHub and other places that have been spun up.
But there hasn't been enough momentum and energy behind it in order to go off and to keep it last and over time.
There's also been a challenge of how do you make sure that if something is is free,
that people understand that as it being free isn't kittens as opposed to free isn't beer.
And even free isn't speech because these are the idea that you have to give back and contribute to and that it is free.
But it does not mean that it is free of responsibilities.
It means that that you're using this, but you have to, there's an obligation inherently to go off and to find ways to to give back to the community to make sure that it's there in,
you know, in five or ten years time when you still need to use the service.
That freedom doesn't come without costs.
Despite a lot of people believing that free means that there aren't no costs.
Freedom is nothing less left to lose, nothing of the phrase.
So, so this, yeah, loss of challenges or make makers and takers and how to go off and make projects sustainable.
So, I did mention Drupal earlier, but there's a few other DPDGs I want to mention.
And there are a lot of projects that are, are good projects that are open source projects that are doing good.
But these are ones that have been gone through a process by the digital public goods alliance that have been certified to say that they,
they, they conform to the, the set of standards that they've constructed.
So, making sure that they align to the SDGs, not to all of them, but to some of them.
And they've made an explicit connections to some of the, the 17 sustainable development goals,
that they're respecting respect for privacy and security, and that they have documentation practices in there.
So, that the, the people are using those products are not going to be left without the ability to help maintain and carry them forward.
So, Drupal's one, I was involved in getting Drupal to submit their application to, as a certified digital public goods years ago.
And glad that we went to the process and begin that, that being that early.
D can and C can are also ones.
More people will probably heard of D can, I'm sorry, C can.
How many people here have heard about D can?
D can is, is basically a Drupal implementation of a knowledge, a knowledge network like the, or knowledge repository like C can is.
So, it's a similar kind of product, but, but it's done with a Drupal base is opposed to, I believe that it's a Python base for C can, I hope that's right.
But there's also different operating systems.
We have Fedora versus Rocky Linux, so some, you know, different standards there.
There's also community-minded initiatives that are part of this UGD, StreetMap, also things like X-Road and Decidium that are really structured around governments and governance and how to try and organize around.
Around governments.
People here at X-Road, people who at X-Road is.
Every government should have X-Road.
It's just like such a great sensible way to go off an organized data.
So much more secure.
So if you're organized, look up X-Road in the stony if you're, if you're all interested in government and where things are going.
I also wanted to highlight OB, which is a accessibility tool for scanning websites that's done by the, it was built by the government digital services.
And access mods. There's a few other ones that are there, but it's interesting to see that there are.
Sometimes multiple tools that are sharing the same sort of community space.
That are that you can choose from that.
It doesn't mean that that there's only one way to go off into build a particular pattern.
But despite the fact that DPGs are fairly new.
That there are there are options of different types of software tools that you can choose to implement it.
That might be better to suit your purposes.
So I did, this is the first time I've given this talk.
So I probably should have mentioned the digital public goods.
Earlier, you're formally in this slide so you could have seen this.
But it is really quite interesting to go off and see how this, this organization has, has come in to try and help facilitate this.
And provide more of a government structure around this.
Gentleman and Nicholas Groen was the first person to to coin the term digital public goods.
And he did that for an open data report that the, that was, was set up a while ago in open data.
And yeah, it's an interesting, there's, there's lower case digital public goods.
Those things that are informally structured and certified digital public goods.
And there's a lot of programs, a lot of projects will probably never go and be submitted to a,
submit themselves as a digital public good because it does take some effort and it's administrative work and not everyone's interested in necessarily doing that.
But it's, yeah, if you're thinking about about your, about your project and impact of your project and, and how, how you can try and motivate your, your people and participants.
Having signed up as a DPG is one way that might be helpful to go off and help to motivate people to be involved.
And I think it is useful to have more organizations striving to become digital public goods because I think that, that open source is not or free software.
These are talking about the licenses that motivate some people.
But it doesn't motivate most people.
Most people are going to rally more around the idea of doing good than they are around a license, no matter what that license is.
So yeah, as I said, just a moment ago, most people are not inspired by license discussions.
I think that, that there are also options to go off and to think about good and framing good, even public goods, even trying to think about, you know, public infrastructure, public goods as being things that people are,
are, are able to understand in a more tangible way. So I think there's, there's elements that that's, that's going to be useful as well.
That, that effort to commit as an organization to documentation, security and privacy and to do that public, publicly can also be important.
Particularly here in Europe where there are, there's legislation like the GDPR or for that matter, the CSR team for sustainability.
You're trying to look at document and organizing how and why this, the tools you're using are supporting a progressive or an effort towards the planet and thinking to document and organize the structure and the planet.
I think it's also easier for clients to understand the idea of digital public goods as well.
They're going to get more excited by it because again, people don't care about licensing.
You're contributing to an open source project that software who cares.
But if you're contributing to a project that is being used by thousands of other sites that are helping to support healthcare around the world, and you can build that story.
That's something that people get excited by and a story that people can feel that they're, they're contributing to and that they're helping out and feeling good at the end of the day.
So that's, that's quite useful.
Yeah, the, okay, excellent.
So the thought is 15 minutes is easy.
So the, the next one is looking at at incentives for individual contributors.
So this isn't necessarily new people, people probably already seen this, but I think it is useful to go off and think about it about how and why people contribute to open source.
And for that matter, open data and other projects.
And reputation is definitely part of it.
It's an ability for people to gain to, to build and experience and to put their name out and say, this is what I did here.
Some patches that have got accepted not in popular projects.
I actually know things because you can see my name, the list.
I'm listed as a contributor to this project.
That can be really helpful.
Share benefits.
So again, being able to build something that meets your needs to customize it to, to scratch your itch, but working with a larger project around that.
Mission alignment.
Again, there's, there's interesting problems out there.
Then most of the people who are here are interested in captured by, by solving interesting problems.
How do you find those, whatever those problems are and try to make sure that you're, you're bringing your people on board and getting them tied to that.
Engaging them in those interesting problems to keep them involved and invested.
I've already mentioned proving your contributions, fixing problems like again, we are as developers.
We should be thinking about this ourselves as being empowered to fix problems.
We don't always think that way, but I think that that sense of open sources.
You can't submit a bug request. You can do a pull request like that is all within our capacity to do this.
We can be contributing to the tools we're using fixing them to make them better.
And you know, there's, there are also people who just want to give back our society.
There's also business and organizational incentives around, you know, being involved in digital public goods.
We know that, that Microsoft, but GitHub, not because they like the Octocats, I don't think that was the reason.
I think they bought it because they realized that they needed to hire good developers.
And that if they had access, it's probably a lot of other reasons as well, including training AI models on it.
But I think that the, a big part of it was being able to access those people who were building the future.
And those were being done by open source.
I think a lot of businesses taking on this is setting up our sustainable business stream.
Trying to say that like, how do you make sure that you're able to have, have a set of technologies that you're going to be able to work with.
And there's going to be demand for.
And making sure you're not going to be locked into a project that is just going to fall out of fashion or fall out of favor.
If you know that there's organizations who are, are looking for, for projects that have, have a backing, then that's one way to potentially to,
to look for, for, for, for projects or engagement.
Make sure that some credibility behind it.
I think there is a way of getting the competitive ecosystem.
Businesses also gain advantage through providing services associated to the free software.
So things like using my mic, sorry.
Doing things like shared hosting and support.
And other things that's often how how businesses make make them many on it.
They also often will take some of their intellectual property and pull it off so that it's not tied to, there's a premium model.
So like seek editors, a great example of this.
The main tool seek editors free, but there's all these other add-ons that you can add.
You have to pay for in order to go from management in there.
They're proprietary, you know, services go off and pay for their open source services.
Government has another sort of element to this because they're involved in, in both shaping the market.
But also, they buy things.
There's no other agency in the world that is as as large as as the government in most countries.
So if you're looking to shape an economy, if you have the largest purchaser going off and seeking to buy digital public goods,
or open source software, those are things that can be really helpful to go off and bring more people on board.
Because then there's suddenly a demand for this across across the, across a country, perhaps around the globe.
And that government's going to be so much to try and help drive that forward.
To try and say, how do we, how do we try and take these, if they want to go off and to shape a shape involvement around these concepts of digital public goods?
You can, required in, the code is is, or the data or the documentation or our structure.
You can, you can hard code in your contracts that, that you have to buy or you have to give preference to digital public goods.
And bring that into pulse into RFPs and, and, and contracts that people are starting to, to work with that.
Making it clear that you're favoring that transparency and the openness behind those contracts.
And, and also trying to align each project so that, that, like, so many, so many people here, we have worked for government at some point in their past.
Either as a contractor as a staff. So, you know, we know that so many government projects are focused on the projects themselves, and not on the bigger vision, even the bigger vision within the organization.
It's all about how can we accomplish this task to satisfy the person who's next up the chain, or maybe they're boss, but it's, it's all within that silo.
And if you can get organizations to think beyond that and, and digital public goods and sustainable development goals are part of that way to go from say,
this is all part, yours, you're a small part of a much bigger puzzle.
So, how do we find ways to get people to collaborate across the board to share, to break down our, that, that ability to sort of say,
I need to solve my problems, and I'm not interested in anyone else.
DPGs can be a good way to do that.
And I did also want to go off and add that there's an interesting piece of legislation that has come out of the US.
You will have heard, I'm sure, a little bit of unusual news from the US these days, that there's a bit more disorder in chaos than there has been in, you know, perhaps in past.
But it's, there's a really interesting bipartisan act called the, the Share Act, which is, is designed to, to help, to force governments to start to, to build either an inner,
an inner source or open source repository that they, they can use to share and collaborate intentionally, that that documentation is there.
And it's, it's, I think, a really excellent example for, for other governments to look at, say, how can we build on this and go beyond what, what the US has done.
Because if the US can hard code that sharing of repositories and to help foster collaboration in, in law,
certain other countries should be able to pull that off as well.
So, I'm also interested in trying to expand the growth of DPGs because this is a fairly new standard.
And there's things that I think are not necessarily part of this just yet.
And there, because the DPGA is a, a standards body that's, that's built on, in the open, there's a GitHub repository with issues that you can add to as well.
But, but I think one of the things that's missing from the current DPG standard is, is accessibility and I am an accessibility expert.
I, I work, I'm in a triple core accessibility maintainer. I care very much about trying to make the world more inclusive because I think it all matters humans are mortal.
Let's not pretend that that we are anything else other than fallible meat bags that go in and are going to be, you know,
Yeah, that need support because we are, we are limited to fallible more to mortal beings.
But, but I think that, that's a piece that can be added.
I think that all DP, DP, GAs should be setting and trying to strive for accessibility standards that, that help to push the level.
I also think that there is a, an environmental impact of using digital technology that we forget about.
And I'm also one of the, the, the co-chairs of the web sustainability guidelines, which is a WC3 effort to try and codify the, the best practices of building a green website.
And to, to build that into it as well.
And I think there's space for, for DPGs to, to take on that effort of, of green software, our green web implementation so that there's a, an understanding that, that,
that these, these, these, these organizations understand the importance of, of, of that software commit of software on the world.
Um, I think that, that there's also more like me down around software monitoring and that, that supply chain is being interesting sort of think about.
Um, the role that, that's the governance conversation here had and how do you try and structure that and how do you provide that transparency.
Um, how do you look at how, um, other efforts to, to manage the, just the, the flow of software that, that is, is involved in different communities that are part of every project now.
Um, so how do you try and, and look at the whole, the whole supply chain is involved in the projects that are maintaining there, that, that, that, that are being contributed to the digital public goods.
Um, because we want people to be able to, to invest in and build trusted systems that support privacy and, and security.
Um, I also think it's, it's, it's really important to, to build a community around this as well to try and, and find ways to get more people excited to get more people involved.
And it's a great and wild and crazy event, but it's in one, it's once a year, in one country and lots of people come around the globe for this, but this is something that needs to be replicated and, and fostered out and broken down and lots of different ways.
There's more people doing this type of work.
Um, there's still a lot of good, yes.
So there's a few different roles as a, in the digital public, public good space.
So you don't necessarily have to be a developer for them.
I wanted to talk a little bit about, about those, certainly, developers are, are a key part of this, but, but governments also play a role.
Trying to think about how, how do we try and seek and implement those cost-effective solutions that avoid vendor locking and make that more of the norm?
Because it isn't right now. There's, there's a lot of open source software that's used by all governments, but it's often bundled or part of larger proprietary systems that include quite a lot of,
of vendor locking and that actually drives up the cost and the ineffectiveness of, of governments around the world.
And we really need to be able to scale those up more effectively.
Um, the other issues like looking at non-profits and ways to go off into, again, organizations that don't have a lot of capital,
but want to increase their social impact.
Um, and, and also, private sector has a role in trying to go off and promote these efforts as well.
And, and also initiatives like the digital public goods alliance.
Um, AI is coming down the pipe.
It's probably not news to people here.
Um, and there's, there's, there's, last year I was there for a discussion with OSI and their AI policy.
And it's being interesting to see the amount of, of discussions happen since there.
And the focus is happening around training data and the importance of opening up the training data.
Um, the digital public goods is trying to go off and come up with their own standard to try and, and, and define what is a,
a DPA, a DPA, a DPA, a AI policy.
Um, and that will be including the training data to make sure that that you've got something that that can be fully reused by everyone,
that you're not going to be, um, allowing somebody to put out information that, that it won't allow for that reputation.
Um, and building on the learning that is, that is possible from open source software or, um, other DPPGs.
And, yeah, looking at transparency, building those, the trust between across different organizations
trying to build more inclusively to collaborate more across different systems.
I think this is really an effort to move beyond licensing to find ways that we can address
the gaps in our training data and our documentation.
But also to look at how do we think about our footprint?
How do we think about the ways that, as we're bringing more AI into our communities?
What is the environmental impact of that?
And is there a way that we can be choosing a software and AI that has a lower environmental impact?
And it's interesting with DeepSeek now that that's actually something that's made clear
that there are actually our ways to go off and to have a frugal GPT implementation that you're not.
That the model that the big AI players are being pushing isn't the only model to go off and get to a point
where we can use the tools and the structure of vectors and algorithms to be able to build on that learning.
So yeah, there's a lot more room for expanding this and to encourage a growth in the ecosystem around DPGs and to have like a series of different DPGs that are part of all sort of different layers of it.
I did mention the digital public goods initiative, sorry, the digital public infrastructure, which is another concept and it's also the idea of government stack or gov stack.
I think it's gov stack global is the domain for this.
But there are other initiatives that are tied to are associated with the digital public goods.
And it's worthwhile to sort of be aware of these other conversations that are going on about how how we might try and collaborate and work together to build better, more effective, more powerful services that can meet the needs of citizens around the globe, particularly in the global south.
But not exclusively. And I think it's also useful to try and find ways to discuss solutions that are both very global and and also finally very local.
And yeah, review the list of DPGAs, they're on the digital public goods alliance website.
Look, the fossil offer that you see if there's a ways or if there's projects that you might want to contribute back to that.
And find ways to get more people involved and to encourage more people to collaborate and contribute to the great software that's out there.
And that's it. Any questions?
Yes.
I would like us to explain how did you step up on the course on the digital performance?
What's the difference?
So, how did digital public goods relate to digital comments?
I think that there's there are some similarities in that, but it's that there's certainly the DPGAs as a standard, which they're and a process to register and become a certified DPG. So that's certainly a difference that is set them apart from digital comments.
But probably it's a matter of trying to go off into to have a term that people can can can agree on and and work towards.
And there's nothing wrong with the term digital comments, but I think that there's there's momentum behind this, particularly around organizations like the United Nations who have.
And for that matter, the OSI and and other the open knowledge foundation, who've gotten behind the DPGA to say, this is a term that we're trying to go off and get behind and promote.
Because we think that this is one that will will be be more effective in trying to go off and to carry the message forward.
Good.
I mean, there's a lot of I mean, co-ops themselves have an inherent part of the co-op movement is to try and work with other co-ops and open source software is not exactly part of that, but it really should be as well as things that are part of like.
These co-ops are part of the of a, they are a digital public good as far as I'm concerned they're not an uppercase certified, but they could be that closer to process the documentation.
The community behind that.
There's there is definitely software that's involved in in that as well as as other knowledge open knowledge as part of the co-op community.
But I yeah, I'm definitely in favor of it. I just don't know that there is is something that I love the idea of the the tech co-ops.
Thank you very much.