IGF 2021 Open Forum #24 The GovStack Initiative - digital government cooperation

Government institutions, by design, have a strong path dependency and limited flexibility to adjust their course to address today’s challenges and meet the expectations and needs of their citizens and the global community. This is especially true in the digital domain, where rapid technology evolution requires particularly agile decision making and implementation in order to ensure that digital solutions meet used needs and steps towards the use of digital tools risk being underestimated and misunderstood. For a long time, governments have failed to realize the transformative and collaborative potential of digitalization, and have mostly invested in vertical, monolithic digital solutions where each agency or department builds and maintains its own vertical solutions. This has resulted in a constant reinvention of the wheel and led to the creation of fragmented digital services and user experiences.

Transitioning to digital solutions is key to improving access to essential services for all citizens and to support business continuity. Especially following the unevenly distributed negative impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating the ‘digitalization’ of services must be done in an inclusive manner in order to avoid increasing the ‘digital divide’ among the population, between those with differing access, comfort and abilities to adopt new technologies, and between countries and regions.

Especially in emerging economies and rural areas, weak technological infrastructure, high costs of technology, low levels of digital literacy and skills, weak regulatory frameworks and limited access to services mean that these areas run the risk of being left behind in the digitalization process. In order to proactively bridge this digital divide, it will be necessary to accelerate digitalization of high-priority services that are critical to recovery efforts, public service delivery and business continuity. Governments need to lay out their overall digital government transformation strategies, build digital platforms that scale and integrate services around the needs of citizens and businesses, while investing in capacity development at all levels.

Against this background, the GovStack Initiative, founded by Estonia, Germany, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL), aims to build a common framework and technical practice for the design of reusable and interoperable digital components – referred to as “digital building blocks” – needed to digitally transform government. By investing in digital building blocks which are easier to design, implement, and scale across sectors, GovStack is set out to help governments simplify the cost, time, and resource requirements necessary to create or modify their digital platforms, services, and applications. GovStack will create a model digital government services platform, which will demonstrate elements of reuse across services and sectors (i.e., use cases).

The Initiative now joins forces with the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) to advance global digital cooperation and support the discovery and implementation of digital public goods that can function as core components (digital building blocks) and enablers of sector services in a “whole of government digital architectural approach” or GovStack.

The UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation in its report from June 2019 recommended “that a broad, multi-stakeholder alliance, involving the UN, create a platform for sharing digital public goods, engaging talent and pooling data sets, in a manner that respects privacy, in areas related to attaining the SDGs”. Endorsed by the UN Secretary General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, the DGPA 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.”

In 2020, the DPGA secretariat began convening Communities of Practices (CoPs) as an integral part of the Alliance’s work on identifying digital public goods of high-relevance for attaining the SDGs in low- and middle-income countries. Through these CoPs, the DPGA facilitates the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods to accelerate attainment of SDGs. In May 2021, all partners established a new GovStack CoP in order to support the discovery, identification and implementation of digital public goods that can function as modular components or layers in a “whole of government digital transformation approach”. The CoP will focus on identifying in-country examples of where multiple digital public goods are interoperating as “building blocks”, enabling governments to create and modify their own core digital platforms, services, systems and applications as part of their GovStack. Through the CoP the partners aim to leverage increase donor and resource alignment, coordination and mobilization, and enhanced country engagement.

Both initiatives further collaborate in terms of capacity co-development and support of DPG promotion in government service digitalization planning and strategy efforts of low- and middle-income countries interested in implementing DPGs.

Focus of Event and key questions:

This event will focus on how global digital cooperation and joint efforts to advance the development, management and implementation of digital public goods can create a more equitable world in order to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs. Taking the community-based approaches of the “GovStack” and DPGA as examples, this session aims to highlight the opportunities of global digital cooperation by including a diverse range of stakeholders from international and regional organizations, governments, civil society, and the private sector.

The event will address how governments, the private sector, multilateral institutions and civil society can increase their capacity to plan, adapt, implement and contribute to technical developments and digital solutions, and thus accelerate the digital transformation of government services. In this context, the partners will present their collaboration and work in the GovStack initiative and DPGA CoP. They will share howtaking an architectural approach centered around open source, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and microservices can help unlock monolithic legacy systems where core data and services are siloed and promote how this will increase the speed of IT project delivery, leading to more effective, transparent and cost-efficient digital governments which are also more responsive to the needs of businesses and their citizens.

As practical examples, the session will highlight potentially exciting applications resulting from the partnership with the Horn of Africa Initiative (comprised of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan as partner countries), as well as country case examples highlighted through the DPGA GovStack Community of Practice, to illustrate how such a more holistic and comprehensive approach to integrate, adapt and reuse state-of-the-art open source technologies can enable and accellerate the implementation of digital government strategies both nationally and regionally.

The event session will take place in an online/virtual format. The proposed duration of the event is 60 minutes, out of which approx. 20-30 minutes are planned for presentations and 30-40 minutes are planned for questions from participants and interactive discussions. The event will aim at accommodating the participation of stakeholders present onsite in Katowice or participating online as much as possible. The onsite participants may choose to join the online/virtual event session from the assigned meeting room at the 16th IGF in Katowice or some other space they feel comfortable in, through the official IGF Online Participation Platform. As outlined by the IGF, the meeting room will contain the necessary technical equipment such as a screen on which the online/virtual event session will be projected and a microphone to enable onsite participants to contribute to the discussions via the online platform. A member of the IGF technical support team will provide information and support the participants onsite on how to contribute to the discussions and/or ask questions. To facilitate the online/virtual discussions and ensure participation of online and onsite participants, the event organizers plan to engage a team of moderators for the event, out of which one will be dedicated to moderate and monitor the chat. Moreover, depending on the technical possibilities of the IGF official Online Participation Platform, the event session may use complementary tools to further increase participation and interaction of participants, e.g. word clouds, polls, etc.