Cutting the Gordian Knot of Social Media

Today’s big social media platforms are directly manipulating and polarising public discourse in countries worldwide, and are undermining individual and societal wellbeing. What if, instead, we had social technologies that enabled open, informed public debate – and helped individuals and societies thrive? In many countries today, the main space where citizens encounter political candidates, hear campaign messages, debate local priorities, and even learn where and how to vote is not a public forum — it is Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X, or YouTube. These platforms have become default infrastructure for democratic participation. Yet they were not designed to support informed deliberation or civic trust. They were designed to maximise a primitive form of engagement as measured in clicks and likes, often by amplifying outrage, polarisation, and misinformation.This example points to a deeper issue: many of the social functions we rely on most — civic debate, community organising, public consultations, local information sharing — are not inherently global. They operate within national and subnational jurisdictions. Yet the infrastructure enabling them has been ceded almost entirely to a handful of global platforms, with little interoperability, accountability, or public-interest governance.In this blog, I argue that a solution to this issue is not only possible, but critically important to achieve. I propose that countries should reclaim the power to set the rules and mechanisms for digital spaces where civic discourse occurs, and apply an infrastructure mindset. They should advance social technologies to strengthen people’s relationship with, and participation in, the jurisdictions they are part of. We can imagine national digital spheres - where participants would first verify their affiliation with that national jurisdiction to enter. These spheres could allow users to discover and connect to technologies that enable democratic deliberation and debate, local communities formed around hobbies and civic engagement, and other solutions that the private, public, and civil sectors could be inspired and incentivised to build. Crucially, these solutions should be built on open protocols to ensure interoperability with a broader landscape of better regional and global solutions that are simultaneously underway. To do so, the DPGA Secretariat is working with practitioners with deep technical expertise to bring these different worlds together through a verifiable credential technology that can be used to build trust and information integrity. We will be working with partners, including DPGA members, to test this approach in the months to come.To understand why we are focusing on the concept of national digital spheres enabled by social technologies, it is helpful to first look into why people use today’s big social media platforms.

DPG4DPI Financing – Calls for Collaborative Action Progress Update

Last year, the DPGA Secretariat launched its first-ever set of Calls for Collaborative Actions as a way to galvanise members, DPG product owners, and other stakeholders around priority actions needed for advancing collective impact. Reflecting the priority that countries worldwide are giving to building and evolving their digital public infrastructure, which can also be seen in the 50-in-5 Campaign co-coordinated by the DPGA Secretariat alongside Co-Develop, one of the four calls is for “250 million USD in financing so that DPGs that enable the implementation of safe, inclusive and interoperable digital public infrastructure can be supported until 2030”.2025 Key Activities and Stakeholder OutputsAn initial step taken by the DPGA Secretariat was the creation of the DPG4DPI Collection, in order to point to the most DPI-relevant solutions available on the DPG Registry. Criteria for determining which DPGs should go into the collection have been developed with inputs from Co-Develop and the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI), and the DPG4DPI Collection will be expanded when additional relevant DPGs are identified. We have also convened multiple discussions with relevant funders, including the EkStep Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), and the Steele Foundation for Hope. In addition to encouraging new financing, another objective of these conversations has been to understand the motivations of different funders that are interested in supporting DPGs4DPI, and also how they see their financing as part of broader sustainability and contribution models. We are aware that several of the funders we have convened have made, or are planning to make, new financial commitments for DPGs4DPI in 2025, and we will provide updated numbers once they are public. We have also engaged additional stakeholders interested in contributing to the call in different ways, such as the sharing of learnings and best practices and case studies. These contributions were from UN agencies such as UNICEF, product owners like OpenCRVS, and civil society organisations including the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). A key suggestion made by OKFN was to engage multilateral development banks more in evolving DPG sustainability models, given their important role as both grant providers and lenders to countries implementing their digital public infrastructure. This is particularly relevant given the large cuts to international development assistance in 2025, which are making funders ask more questions about the cost-effectiveness of interventions. As freely adoptable and adaptable, and open-source components, DPGs are extremely well positioned to be at the forefront of a new international development paradigm built around reuse, sharing, and collaboration, but only if we create the right enabling environment and recognise their broader value.Next Steps - Priorities for 2026In 2026, we will continue to mobilise stakeholders to achieve the 250 million USD goal set out in this call. However, we will increasingly see the effort to mobilise grant financing as part of developing a more comprehensive sustainability model. Our goal is for this to be a model where multilateral development banks, private sector companies, government agencies, and other stakeholders involved in DPGs4DPI planning, implementation, and maintenance processes all contribute back so that the core project remains robust and relevant.

Private Sector Stakeholders and DPG4DPI-Sustainability: A Mutual Benefit Approach

At a time of rapid geopolitical change, cuts to international development assistance, and increased emphasis on digital sovereignty - investing in digital public goods (DPGs) represents an attractive option for countries looking to build and evolve their foundational digital public infrastructure (DPI).As open source solutions that incorporate safeguards and best practices by design, and which can be adapted to meet contextual needs, DPGs provide an important starting point for helping countries implement and strategically maintain their most foundational components faster, better and at lower cost-over-time compared to leasing proprietary technologies or building from scratch. Few governments have the capacity and resources to do the planning, financing, deployment, operation or hosting of DPI components fully by themselves, and entering into well-structured agreements with different types of private sector stakeholders is therefore vital for the success of these digital transformation processes. However, when these agreements include the deployment and maintenance of DPGs, especially as part of building DPI, there are risks that may undermine the advantages that open source solutions provide. For these DPG4DPI-deployments we need to evolve a paradigm where a vibrant private sector benefits from actively seeking to meet implementing country objectives and to preserve the advantages and long-term sustainability of DPGs. To inform this topic, it is important to first highlight the broad variety of stakeholder types that are covered by the “private sector” term. Important groups include: Systems integrators (SIs) that specialise in bringing together various components, including hardware, software, and services, from multiple vendors to create a cohesive and functional solution for a client; Independent system vendors (ISVs) that develop, market, and sell software applications running on existing third-party infrastructure, and who tend to create specialised software solutions for more narrow markets; and Hyperscalers/cloud providers, global service providers that offer highly scalable and flexible computing infrastructure, and that provide a wide range of services, including compute, storage, networking, and AI. These different types of private sector stakeholders are similar in that they are all involved because of the expected commercial gain, but they differ widely in size, scope, engagement and business models. Hence, we must recognise that there is immense variation in the bargaining power, resourcing and contribution capacity within the group we collectively refer to as “private sector”.DPGs and the risk of extraction and lock-insThe open-source licence of a DPG ensures that access to the solution is non-exclusive, such that an implementer doesn’t need permission to adopt or adapt the solution to their needs and preferences.Most DPGs that are relevant for implementing DPI take this one step further by having permissive licenses, which give even greater freedom to the users to choose how to modify their own version of the solution, even allowing them to re-license derivatives under a proprietary license. In the context of system integrators (SIs) and hyperscalers, this offers greater flexibility for them to innovate and build upon existing code. Allowing for more seamless integration into existing proprietary systems and greater interoperability. However, it also gives these technology partners, who are at arm's length from the government, that same level of discretion in how they engage with the DPG, sometimes without clear incentives for contributing back to the source product. For example, larger private sector companies supporting multiple implementations of a DPG in different countries may find it more advantageous/profitable to offer a modified version under a new, proprietary license that they own the rights to, or make changes or configurations that result in detrimental forks and other types of lock-in. This risks undermining both the implementing country’s agency and the long-term sustainability of the core DPG.How can we shape private sector engagement in the deployment of DPGs, so that it results in genuine partnerships where country objectives are met alongside commercial goals, with sustained benefits also to the DPGs that are being deployed?

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