Launched during the 2024 DPGA Annual Members’ Meeting in Singapore, the Call For Collaborative Action: Open Source Policies, Principles, and Frameworks identified that the lack of a formal open source policy within governments is one of the core blockers to implementing digital public goods and open source tools at scale.

Since the launch of this call, DPGA members have conducted several key activities:

• We first conducted a survey of open source first policies and published a blog and a report of policy recommendations, with research conducted by Melissa Muñoz, policy researcher and DPGA consultant.

• At the 2025 DPGA Annual Members Meeting, and in virtual meetings, Melissa conducted one-on-one interviews with several key stakeholders, discovering five surprising truths about open source in government.

Taking the findings of this research, we’re proud to announce the launch of a practical tool to help governments – at any stage of their digital maturity – to help develop a strong open-source first policy. Having a structured institutional approach to open source, through policies and principles, can enable, accelerate, and improve the abilities of governments and organisations to discover, develop, use, and invest in digital public goods at scale.

Who Is This For?

Any government wishing to evaluate their current level of open source software adoption across policy, governance, technical capacity, procurement, financing and ecosystem collaboration measures.

It only takes about 12 minutes to complete and provides a usable framework for helping assess where you can best focus or strengthen your efforts.

If you have any feedback, we’re always looking to make this tool better. Please send your feedback here.

Acknowledgements

We would like to especially thank the following DPGA members and collaborators for their time and inputs in helping develop this tool:

• Melissa Muñoz, Policy Researcher

• Julia Dias, Inter-American Development Bank

• Chris Szymczak, UNICEF

• Dan Abadie, Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI)

• Dan Monafu, The Government of Canada