DPG Backlog

[amreenp7]

UNICEF is a co-champion of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a multi-stakeholder initiative to facilitate the discovery, development, use, and investment in digital public goods. Endorsed by the UN Secretary General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, the DPGA defines digital public goods 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.”

For the last two years, we have been building a registry of digital public goods compiling nominations for digital public goods (a.k.a. nominees) and screening those goods against the Digital Public Goods Standard, after which they become digital public goods. These DPGs have various needs (financial, technical resources, non-technical resources, mentorship, community-based, etc) that need to be met in order to advance their work. UNICEF has explored a skills-based volunteering mechanism through which volunteers can provide DPGs with short-to-mid term support on their specific areas of need.

Challenge
These DPGs have various needs (financial, technical resources, non-technical resources, mentorship, community-based, etc) that need to be met in order to advance their work. Often, DPGs need to build technical assets or products but do not have the capacity or resources to do so.

Goals

• Develop a consistent, user-friendly, and time-efficient process and/or product to match available resources to relevant DPG project needs

Proposed Solution
UNICEF has explored a skills-based volunteering mechanism through which volunteers can provide DPGs with short-to-mid term support on their specific areas of need. Volunteers can be sourced through:

• Partnerships with individual companies that have similar programs (e.g. programs at GitHub and Google)
• Bringing visibility to DPG project asks and repos on open-source platforms (e.g. GitHub, Ovio)
• Bringing visibility to DPG project asks through other communities

High-level Implementation Plan

• Establish (V1) process with existing partners (Github, Google) based on the previous iteration
• Connect a set of DPG asks with partner volunteers through (V1) process
• Explore existing open-source products that facilitate resource-project mapping
• Create and test a (V2) proof of concept
• Determine long-term product plan
• Develop outreach strategy to gain user traction