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Digital public goods must be designed and developed to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and demonstrate such by providing links/documentation that support their relevance.
Digital public goods must demonstrate the use of an approved open license. For Open Source software, only OSI-approved licenses are accepted. For open content collections, the use of a Creative Commons license is required. DPGs are encourageed to use a license that allows for both derivatives and commercial reuse (CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), or dedicate content to the public domain (CC0); licenses that do not allow for commercial reuse (CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA) are also accepted. For open data, an Open Data Commons-approved license is required.
Ownership of assets that the digital public good produces must be clearly defined and documented. For example, through copyright, trademark, or other publicly available information.
When the digital public good has mandatory dependencies that create more restrictions than the original license, it must also require a proven independence from the closed component(s) and/or indicating the existence of functional, open alternatives that can be used without significant changes to the core product.
Digital public goods require documentation of the source code, use cases, and/or functional requirements. For content collections, this should include all relevant/compatible apps, software, or hardware required to access the content collection, and instructions regarding how to use it. For software solutions, this should be technical documentation that would allow a technical person unfamiliar with the project to launch and run the software. For data projects, this should be documentation that describes all the fields in the set, and provides context on how the dataset was collected, and how it should be interpreted.
Digital public goods with non-personally identifiable information (P.I.I.) design for possibility of extracting or importing non-PII data and content from the system in a non-proprietary format.
Digital public goods must be designed and developed to comply with applicable privacy laws.
Digital public goods must be designed and developed to align with relevant standards, best practices, and/or principles. For example, the Principles for Digital Development.
Digital public goods must be designed to anticipate, prevent, and do no harm by design.