Appendix: Examples
This appendix provides brief summaries of a few open projects -- largely open-source projects -- that exemplify a topic or recommendation covered in this paper, or that were interesting projects and products in some way. Not all are DPGs.
Open Source and Collaboration : Canada's Covid Exposure Notifications Mobile App
The Canadian Digital Service (CDS) is a centralized resource for the federal Canadian government that builds tools, technologies and processes that can be (re)used across agencies, with the goal of improving public services. Their products are developed under open-source models and freely available on GitHub. All are licensed under the common MIT license in order to encourage broad collaboration and greater reusability across potential open -- or proprietary -- downstream projects.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the CDS's familiarity with open source enabled them to quickly bring in private partners, such as Shopify, Blackberry, and the non-profit consortium the Linux Foundation, and work across multiple government agencies to create a mobile app that notifies people who might have been exposed to the virus. The core of the contract tracing app was formed around the set of privacy-protecting open standards and APIs for exposure notification that were jointly created by Google and Apple. Open APIs for the web-based results portal gave local governments flexibility in how they choose to support Covid-positive users in sharing their status in a privacy-preserving way. The Linux Foundation Public Health managed an open and public security audit.
SORMAS
Developed by a consortium of German and Nigerian public health research institutions, SORMAS is software for managing and controlling epidemic outbreaks. It is used extensively in response to Ebola outbreaks in multiple countries.
Lutece
The Lutece government services portal was developed by the city of Paris, France and has recently become the subject of international attention, as they make greater efforts to support multi-jurisdictional adoption.
VITAM
VITAM is an open-source project used throughout France by jurisdictions and private companies to manage archiving of government documents.
Open Data and Standards: Open Referral API
Every government struggles to connect individual citizens with the vast array of social services they might need. Few people need help from just one program or agency. Governments often rely on social work specialists to know all the options and help people navigate bureaucracies. Those specialists need tools to help them keep track of those options-- often something as simple as knowing whether a program is taking new cases can be difficult. Open Referral is a project that allows aggregators of such information to share it in common ways and to support such tools.
Open Referral publishes an API Open Referral Human Services Data API (HSDA) and related open-source tools to support their mission. More importantly, they've engaged in several years of advocacy to spur adoption into existing solutions and by a variety of governments and agencies. Open Referral is a prime example of how open APIs mixed with a little technology and backed by policy engagement can power tools that ensure government services have impact.
Policy : Estonia's E-Government Services
Estonia is famous for its pioneering work in digitizing almost all government services in order to build more trust and efficiency across its society. The country is also widely admired for its integrated use of national policy guidance, direct investment and economic development policy, regulation, and even foreign policy to drive and support development of the necessary open IT infrastructure.
Estonia's earliest guidance focused on how to efficiently build interoperable infrastructure that was thoughtfully user-centric. Open standards for interoperability, use of open-source solutions and attention to privacy were key points of guidance. Most of Estonia's e-services software is now open-source. The government eventually created an e-state code repository for its software: koodivaramu.eesti.ee (based on open-source GitLab). It's notable that this code repository was created by the Ministry of Economic Affairs as well as the Information Systems Authority, as a key goal of the government's use of open source -- as well as of open data, available through the Open Government Data Portal -- is to encourage the private sector to also develop commecial or non-commercial services using the same common infrastructure.
In recent years, Estonia has used its open approach to software development and data to its advantage in working across borders. Estonia recognized that many of its e-services -- such as digital identity and e-signatures -- need to function across national boundaries and that its regional neighbors would benefit from collaborating on common digital infrastructure useful to each state. In 2017, it founded the Nordic Digital Infrastructure Institute to help govern and foster the joint development of basic e-service infrastructure across regional partners. Estonia, Finland and Iceland are members. Estonia moved the governance of X-Road, its open-source data exchange software that powers much of its government e-services, to this new organization, along with a few other components. X-Road is under an MIT license, but the trademark is still held by the Estonian government, giving them the essential tool for protecting trust in the technology.
Estonia planned thoughtfully for how their policies should specifically support their open technology approach. For example, Estonia's Public Information Act prohibits government agencies from creating separate databases to collect and store the same data, and it's actually illegal for new public e-services to design systems that store the same data in different repositories. In combination with the creation of X-Road data exchange platform, this integrated approach drives remarkable efficiency as well as data security and protection.
In June 2021, Estonia also began enforcing legislation that requires state software source code be made available in the e-state code repository, free to the public, with limited exceptions.
Policy: Singapore
The Republic of Singapore has thoughtfully engaged private industry to spur greater innovation and help deliver digitized government services more broadly and quickly.
For example, Singapore partnered with private industry to provide subsidized, affordable mobile plans for seniors. This helped remove one barrier to this vulnerable population's use of Singapore's digital services -- such as the Singapore Financial Data Exchange (SGFinDex), which aims to help citizens with financial planning, among other things.
In 2017, the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) launched APEX, a centralised data exchange platform that helps agencies share data amongst themselves and with private companies through a published set of open APIs.
Along with APEX, the core of Singapore's digitization strategy rests in its national digital identity platform, called SingPass. SingPass gives citizens access to over 1,700 digital services. Over 70% of Singapore residents rely on the service, which is supported by an array of open APIS that help private industry (and other government agencies) leverage common infrastructure for things like identity verification and document signing. For example, Grab -- a 'super app' that helps users order food, book hotels, find rides, get groceries delivered, and more -- relies on SingPass's MyInfo digital identity profile for user verification.
Singapore was one of the first governments to deliver a community-driven, mobile COVID contact-tracing app, pioneering the use of Bluetooth wireless communication in this space. The government open-sourced their reference implementation of the BlueTrace protocol, OpenTrace.
Singapore works to harmonize ICT regulation, help regional businesses reach wider audiences, and strengthen the regional digital economy through bilateral digital economy agreements (e.g. cybersecurity agreements with Australia, Canada, Estonia, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and the US) and regional mechanisms, such as the ASEAN data management framework and the ASEAN model contractual clauses for cross border data flows.
Open Source Readiness : United States Web Design System
A recommendation in evaluating Open Source Readiness -- and in moving up the 'readiness ladder' -- is to look for places where collaboration through open-source co-development could address common problems through small-scale, low-risk and even experimental engagements. Solving common problems can drive quick efficiencies and financial savings and build goodwill for greater collaboration. These are often most easily identified at the inter-departmental level, but inter-agency level issues are also candidates if there are well established relationships that would support collaboration (although clear and trusted leadership is also a requirement, especially if such collaboration is new) and if it seems an early success could be gained without a deep investment.
An example of a successful "low fruit, high shared reward" approach is the United States Web Design System (USWDS). (Infrastructure for web site development and management has often been an area of early open-source DPG collaboration). This open-source design system helps federal agencies build accessible, mobile-friendly websites and saves significant time and effort. Not all of the thousands of web sites managed by over 400 US federal agencies need different forms, buttons and search bars! USWDS was an early open-source project across seven federal agencies, including 18F and Digital Government Services. A shared open-source web analytics solution was published around the same time. The reliance on open-source development and attention to community development has fostered vibrant participation from hundreds of government employees across agencies as well as volunteers from non-profit organizations, like Code for America.
Product: Checkbook NYC
The city of New York operates an open-source financial transparency application called Checkbook NYC. It allows citizens, journalists, and government contractors to see payments made by the city to vendors. People use it to understand government spending, and also to collect data for analysis of opportunities for government contracts. Subcontractors use it to know when their prime contractor has been paid, so they know when they are owed payment. Journalists use it to root out corruption and write about policy. Researchers use it to track government activity.
A couple years after New York deployed its site, a Travis County, Texas, deployed Checkbook NYC to provide similar transparency to its citizens. They've bundled it as a Vendor Payment Details application into a broader financial transparency site.
Checkbook NYC is a good example of how open source can take investments by larger jurisdictions and more-resources governments and create benefits that can be used by jurisdictions who might not take up tool-making on a large scale themselves.
Product: GeoNode
When the World Bank considered its mission and the mapping tools available to support decision-making by governments, it realized there was a gap in the ecosystem. Existing, entrenched vendors were not meeting all the mapping needs of civil society organizations. Their tools were also prohibitively expensive. The World Bank kick-started an open-source project to fill the gap and lower prices and later successfully transitioned that effort to a community of organizations that took up development. Vendors joined the ecosystem to support the product. Other open-source efforts arose to interoperate (e.g. QGIS). The entire GIS sector enjoys much more open-source support than it did before.
Today, various tools from the original GeoNode codebase have migrated to other projects, been integrated in proprietary tools from new vendors (chiefly BoundlessGeo), and are all available at significantly lower cost than before. Overall, World Bank's GeoNode investment in open source is a realistic take of success at using open source to achieve goals in a sustainable way. The work demonstrates that open-source investment can create many different types of outcomes.
For an analysis of GeoNode's open-source work, please see A Case Study On Institutional Investments In Open Source.
Product: SORMAS
SORMAS (Surveillance Outbreak Response Management & Analysis System) is an open-source, mobile health platform that supports "the collection, organisation and analysis of real-time data for both disease surveillance and outbreak response, and has been designed specifically to operate in resource-poor settings." It was created to address the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014/15 through a public-private partnership between German and Nigerian public health and research institutions and a private software company.
SORMAS was originally created in a closed model but ultimately moved to open source in 2016. The reasons behind the project's move to open source underscores its benefits: making sure the product remained free from vendor lock-in; enabling faster adoption to different needs, including advances in surveillance and outbreak management; able to more easily integrate and interoperate with emerging digital health ecosystems; and fostering collaboration between developers, epidemiologists and other health specialists to further develop and maintain the product. This is exactly what's happened: SORMAS's original process models were quickly adopted to include monkeypox, cerebrospinal meningitis, Lassa fever and measles (this work done in Nigeria 2017-2018, which rolled out a model for monkeypox in 14 days) and again to new COVID-19 coronavirus in 2020. It now covers 19 infectious diseases. Original deployments were in Ghana and Nigera; Switzerland, France, Germany and Fiji implemented SORMAS during the pandemic; and Afghanistan, Nepal, Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire are preparing for deployments. SORMAS interoperates with District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2) and aligns with other popular digital platforms in the region, such as the electronic IDSR system and Epi Info. It's also a Digital Square-approved global good.