I'm at UNICEF today/tomorrow w/ Chris Fabian to iterate on the dream of
offline knowledge-distribution. The addition of digital public goods +
knowledge into the procurement model for provisioning + ensuring access,
and involving NORAD for long-horizon plans, are nice developments.
Sharing FYI, suggestions welcome. Rabble - Paquete contact? Matt -
relevant to our chat Thursday.
Warmly, SJ
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From: Christopher Fabian <cfabian(a)unicef.org>
UNICEF Ventures, in collaboration with the Norwegian Agency for Development
and Cooperation (Norad), is hosting an unconference on *December 15 and 16,
2018* to kick-off the creation of a platform for Digital Public Goods. In
the late ‘90’s, UNICEF and other agencies worked to create an alliance for
vaccine procurement. This pooled financing mechanism became GAVI, a
multi-billion-dollar-a-year partnership that spans government, private
sector, and development and procures and delivers vaccines globally,
fairly, and at scale. *We want to do the same for information and
information products, for digital goods, for megabytes, and the content
that they can hold.*
The platform could enable governments/organisations in any country to
identify and deploy packages of digital goods (for example, Wikipedia,
MOSIP, U-Report, Project Connect, or the Global Digital Library). It will
be easy to add to / extend / and build on.
But – we don’t know how to build it. So, we want to work through issues,
problems, and opportunities we’ll face.
*More on Digital Public Goods… *
There is a now a global consensus that digital technologies have the
potential to create tremendous opportunities to accelerate sustainable
development. However, at the moment, there are deep inequalities in access
to technology and digital products, the lack of which further deepens
inequalities. A concerted effort to make technology and digital goods for
the public good easily discoverable, accessible, usable and customizable
will enable the attainment of the SDGs by 2030. The ‘*GAVI for Digital
Technologies*’ is the foundation of this effort. The proposed platform for
Digital Public Goods (DPG), will understand the demand for DPG, negotiate
favourable terms of access to DPG, and develop a financial mechanism to
ensure continuing access, especially by developing countries, to
much-needed information and other publicly useful digital goods. It will
help identify where the useful digital goods are, where there is a lack,
move kilobytes to the lacking areas, develop a financial mechanism to
create and buy useful kilobytes, and shape the digital industry to ensure
fairness and equality in the ecosystem.
*Think of it like “github for good” with physical distribution and a
better interface and some money behind it. This project is funded (jointly
by UNICEF Ventures+NORAD) for 6 months. *
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Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266