A conversation with Liv Marte Nordhaug, Secretariat CEO of the Digital Public Goods Alliance
Edition #117 The head of DPGA talks digital government collaboration, defining DPG's, and the power of collective action...
The DPGA has been a leading international grouping for more than six years, central to international collaboration on open-source digital public goods. This week, we sat down with the Secretariat CEO to find out why that is, and how she thinks DPG’s will shape the digital government space for years to come.
Nordhaug will also be joining interweave and our partners GovInsider for the second edition of GovMesh, in Berlin on June 4th. Please reach out if you’d like to be involved in this or future events.
In preparing for my interview with Liv Marte Nordhaug, Head of the Secretariat of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), I am struck by the longevity and continued momentum of the grouping.
In a world where so often new and shiny forms of digital collaboration come in fits or starts, or are formed for a particular moment, for six years the DPGA has been central to international collaboration between countries on open-source digital public goods.
In fact, since being formed in 2019 by Norway, Sierra Leone, the Indian think tank iSpirt and UNICEF Innovation, the DPGA has scaled up from 4 members to 44.
Founded as a global network for promoting the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals through secure open-source digital solutions, the DPGA is today responsible for maintaining a public registry of verified digital public goods and a standard for assessing them, as well as promoting member-led collaboration on building and scaling DPGs.
As global debates heat up around digital sovereignty and regional tech stacks – from EuroStack to AfricaStack – these themes are incredibly present and pressing today.
But early in our conversation, Nordhaug pulls on that thread of longevity with a comparison of DPGA to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. A cross-government, cross-political-spectrum project to build a global backup for crop diversity in case of crisis, that vault has been built to last at least 100 years.
Similar principles are at the heart of DPGA, and Nordhaug warns against flash in the pan attempts at international collaboration.
Building a durable international alliance
Nordhaug’s approach to running DPGA has largely been inspired by her time advising then Norway’s Minister of International Development, Mr. Nikolai Astrup, during his participation in a high-level UN panel on digital cooperation.
There, Nordhaug and her colleagues saw open-source as a way to reduce duplication in international development, improving scalability through examples like the DHIS2 health information system.
DHIS2 was an example of an early open-source DPG (Source)
Focusing on “doing the tangible”, unlocking the potential of tools like DHIS2, has been a fundamental tenet of DPGA and a reason for its longevity. “On a personal level”, Nordhaug says, “I appreciate the messy reality of sticking your neck out there and doing something tangible”.
The DPG registry is one such example. It is a live directory of different digital solutions that have been verified to meet the DPG Standard, a high-level list of criteria (licensing, documentation, do-no-harm-by-design).
In contrast to many other registry efforts in international development, the products listed on the DPG Registry are re-evaluated annually to ensure they are still compliant and actively maintained. The list contains examples ranging from open-source APIs detecting cyberbullying intent to digital platforms for citizen participation.
The key to the success of tools like the DPG registry, says Nordhaug, has been “not to get tempted to grow too big”. The DPGA secretariat team is 12 people, and Nordhaug says she has committed to the DPGA Board to not grow it above 15.
Rather than attempting to duplicate what DPGA members do, the Secretariat maintains a tight mandate of providing key coordination functions, mobilizing resources for the DPGA ecosystem, and gathering and showcasing the work that member organizations do.
This more organic structure, in combination with a five-year strategy setting priorities related to digital public infrastructure, climate change, information pollution, and other urgent global challenges keeps DPGA flexible, says Nordhaug.
When new opportunities arise, the DPGA can quickly pivot. This flexibility also extends to how DPGA members work together, and Nordhaug is particularly excited to share their recently launched “calls for collaborative action”.
Driving progress through collective action
Right now, there are four ongoing collaborative action calls: open-source first policies; open data & AI; climate; and DPG4DPI financing.
By focusing on our members’ operational experience above all else, says Nordhaug, DPGA can be a space to mobilise real contributions – policy templates, cost-effectiveness calculators or technical tools – rather than vague discussions. “It is a more structured form of sharing tools, learnings, and best practices”.
If the seed bank is an apt metaphor from a longevity perspective, then, so too is it from an organic perspective. Two examples in the current moment are discussions around multilingual AI and information pollution.
“Take social media as an example. Today’s big platforms were never designed with a public interest mandate”, says Nordhaug, “it wasn’t meant to be infrastructure, it just became infrastructure. We will use the upcoming Internet Governance Forum to discuss how to scale public interest social media, including the role digital public goods can play”.
Beyond these discussions – and with that principle of building something concrete in mind - DPGA in late 2023 also launched an “advocacy for implementation” initiative in 50-in-5 (alongside partners Co-Develop).
“Despite great country uptake and interest in these first 16 months of the initiative, we should not be complacent about not becoming a talk shop”, says Nordhaug, framing 50-in-5 as a practical mechanism for bringing 50 countries together as they are designing, launching, scaling, and evolving components of their digital public infrastructure.
50-in-5 is a global initiative aimed at practical collaboration on DPGs (Source)
Through sharing lessons, best practices and technologies relating to digital IDs, payments and data exchanges, the idea is that countries could support each other in reducing costs, building capacities and shortening implementation journeys for DPI.
Rather than being overly ambitious on high-level events, the DPGA is prioritizing virtual webinars and other more lightweight opportunities for countries to just “come and participate” when a topic is relevant for them, and when they have something to share. “Countries are saying, ‘we’ve written this template – it may be useful for other countries’. That’s the kind of sharing we want”.
As Nordhaug tells me about the direction of evolution of 50-in-5 – of increasing focus on regional conversations or Ukraine’s Prozorro Sales presenting to countries about open-source procurement – I return to that idea of the seed vault and the ethos of being long-lasting and organic.
“Time is a really scarce resource for our members”, says Nordhaug, “people are already stretched thin with their daily work responsibilities, and our activities need to add value to their work”. The focus of the DPGA Secretariat therefore, is on under-promising and overdelivering, delivering not talk shops but concrete ideas exchanges and operational collaboration tools for the long-term.
For all the excitement of a bold declaration or a quick win, DPGA’s success lies in something rarer: quiet, purposeful continuity.