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. 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.
Definition
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 nonrivalrous 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.
Usage
This Wikimania submission from 2019 shows how the definition of a public good evolves into a digital public good:A public good is a good that is both non-excludable (no one can be prevented from consuming this good) and non-rivalrous (the consumption of this good by anyone does not reduce the quantity available to others). Extending this definition to global public goods, they become goods with benefits that extend to all countries, people, and generations and are available across national borders everywhere. Knowledge and information goods embody global public goods when provided for free (otherwise the trait of non-excludability could not be met on the basis of excluding those who cannot pay for those goods). The online world provides a great medium for the provision of global public goods, where they become global digital public goods. Once produced in their digital form, global public goods are essentially costless to replicate and make available to all, under the assumption that users have Internet connectivity to access these goods.
Examples
In sectors from information science, education, finance, healthcare and beyond there are relevant examples of technologies that are likely to be digital public goods as defined above.
One such example is Wikipedia itself. Others include DHIS2, an open source health management system.
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is an example of digital public good. Since FOSS is licensed to allow it to be shared freely, modified and redistributed, it is available as a digital public good.
Another example of digital public good is open educational resources, which by their copyright are allowed to be freely re-used, revised and shared.
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.