Interview with Kari Moe - NORAD

**** Role of NORAD. Funding DPGs.

 Have supported DPGs for a number of years, dating back to 1990s
 w/ DHIS2.  Coherent thinking is more recent, though, dating back
 to about 2014/2015, when started working in education sector w/
 Open Learning Resources -- had open competition on that.

 Started supporting new partnerships around DPGs.

 List of DPGs keeps growing.

 DHIS2 is one of the larger ones

 Mostly funding, not implementing.

 UNICEF, UN Tech Envoy's office.

**** Where does funding go? NORAD supports core activities of the larger DPGs. Not involved in contracting decisions.

 Have not prioritized guidelines on open source

** Who is the toolkit's audience? she asks in-country offices, leaf nodes basically it's for non-hostile audiences ** Particular projects * DHIS2 In 70 countries! Very widely used. Get DHIS2 primer from DPGA web site. Model is based on academic collaboration; "very interesting model", and they wonder if it could be a model for DPG collaborations in general.

  key is collab btw ministries and academic institutions.  impl is
  driven by ministries, core dpg is developed and maintained by
  the university.  She thinks it's fairly unique.

  She'll put us in touch with the team.

* MOSIP Modular Open Source Identity Platform team in India. Grew out of Adhaar open source but inspired by Adhaar.

  Very new -- established in 2018
  pilots in Morocco and Philippines, and others in pipeline
  lots of interest grew during covid pandemic
  receiving a lot more interest now

  Implemented w/ World Bank's "ID4D" program

  Also a university team, supporting directly
  the countries that do support it, but limited
  capacity -- couldn't do 100 countries with
  this model.  Not exactly the same as how DHIS2
  works.

  For digital public infrastructure, thought of not relying on
  commercial interests, and of maybe staying within academic
  world

* NORAD keeps discovering new DPGs e.g., main weather forecasting model used by meteorological inst there, used around the world, and happens to be openly licensed. So plenty of DPGs just happen. * OpenLMIS Just knows it by name, doesn't know much about it. * Global Digital Library NORAD led the development of this one themselves. flagship project in education sector

  Today managed from NORAD, which is tricky, b/c not supposed to
  impl just to fund, but they are impl and managing it now.

  It's going quite well.  May evolve over the next year.

  Example of cross-gov replication.

**** How does NORAD make decisions / receive proposals / etc? She is in the "Innovation Unit", small unit that initially grew out of education sector, so initially a lot of projects were ed related. In 2014/2015 when started was driven a lot by personal initiative. She came in in 2016, but still small team of two people. Still very much driven by interest/passion/opportunity. But now expanding a bit and formalizing, so future is likely to be more methodological.

 Norwegian priorites push, e.g., MOSIP matched priorities around
 COVID.

 Their unit has to convice the other thematic units that something
 is worth funding.

**** Who asks NORAD for help, and if so, what do they ask for? Most funding is through open calls in certain areas.

 Some dedicated funding through inst collab btw universities

 Most Norwegian aid goes through multilateral agencies.  But
 innovation unit is operating a bit differently from that.

 Budget is growing; generally this program is seen as successful.
 See themselves as leveraging other funders.

**** Who are those other funders? Philanthropic donors, "bilateral donors",

 Tendency for funders to want to plant their flag on successes,
 which discourages other funders.  But openness of DPGs promotes
 collaboration, or rather expands the area available on which to
 plant flags; e.g., you could fund DHIS2 in a new country -- and
 part of what you get to say is that you were "collaborative" :-).

 NORAD is encouraging other Norwegian gov agencies to use/make
 open source, and they are receptive.  It's not NORAD's main
 responsibilty, but they do get asked for advice on that.

 In partners (like NGOs, or partners NORAD is funding operations
 at), "DPGs" is becoming a bit of a budget.  But NORAD has very
 limited capacity to give support.  There's a lot of demand for
 understanding how NGOs can develop and use DPGs.

 NORAD has a few people to point to for licensing advice, but
 there isn't really a go-to place for DPGs in general.  The DPGA
 is not that -- secretariat is too small to be that.  Right now
 all it can do is screen to verify that something is a DPG, but
 "the capacity to provide sustantive input and feedback is going
 to be fairly limited".

 Have thought about hiring consultants who could be on call for
 that; been exploring that option.  Having written materials only
 goes so far.