Open Data for Public Interest AI – Calls for Collaborative Action Progress Update

Last year, the DPGA Secretariat launched its first-ever set of Calls for Collaborative Action following discussions with experts in the open source ecosystem, digital public infrastructure, climate action, and public interest AI. These calls are designed to galvanise support and signal to stakeholders the actions they can take to contribute to the success of digital public goods in highly impactful areas. One of those calls is the Open Data for Public Interest AI, which clamoured for DPGs that can make identifying, preparing, sharing, and using higher-quality open training data easier. The development of public interest AI depends on the opportunity to train models on both existing and new high-quality openly licensed datasets. In a time where generative AI is advancing at breakneck speed, and the term “open-source AI” is often misconstrued to describe systems that fall on varying degrees of openness, such as releasing model weights without transparency around the training data. Thus, it has become increasingly imperative to work towards a transparent and open way of building AI systems that serve the public interest.Several challenges, including infrastructure limitations, funding constraints, and limited access to open solutions, exist that impede this at a larger scale, underscoring the need for greater resources to produce and share open data across diverse geographical contexts. In an earlier blog post by the DPGA Secretariat CEO, Liv Marte Nordhaug, she mentioned that “DPGs, as open, adaptable digital solutions, with documentation that can help facilitate reuse, can play an important role as tools for addressing common challenges to scaling public interest AI – both in the near future and longer term. In particular, DPGs can help unlock more and higher-quality open training data and data sharing.” Thus, over the past several months, we have focused on exploring how DPGs can help reduce some of the technical barriers to having more high-quality open training data, particularly for use cases like the development of language models that address language gaps in AI development, solutions for public service delivery, and research-based climate action (monitoring, mitigation, adaptation). One fundamental way we addressed this challenge, with multiple stakeholders participating on the call, was by creating an adaptable and reusable toolkit that can be recommended to countries and stakeholders to facilitate the collection, extraction, processing, validation, and preparation of data.

Investing in the Future: DPG Product Owners on Why Now Is the Time to Step Up and Support

The Digital Public Goods Alliance is committed to the long-term success of digital public goods (DPGs), including helping those who run and maintain DPGs to make their voices heard. In response to a shifting funding landscape, DPG product owners have come together to issue an open letter reminding digital transformation supporters from different focus areas worldwide of the vital role DPGs play in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals.DPGs are already helping countries and organisations deliver public services more effectively and are serving as the solutions needed to address critical challenges—from climate change and healthcare to education, financial inclusion, strengthening information integrity efforts, and beyond. They are also enabling more effective digital transformation by helping countries and organisations avoid duplication, reduce costs, and scale impact through open, interoperable, adaptable technologies that can be tailored to local contexts. As development assistance models evolve, the cost, speed, and collaboration advantages of DPGs underscore why they are the solutions we need now more than ever.This letter, written and signed by more than 15 product owners, encourages governments, funders, civil society organisations, technologists—including system integrators and hyperscalers—and all others across the ecosystem to read and reflect on the important call to actions highlighted within the letter, and consider how they can help ensure the continued sustainability of DPGs.