Digital public goods (DPGs) are open-source technologies that countries can freely adopt to accelerate digital transformation, improve residents’ lives, and drive economic growth. For governments and large organisations, DPGs hold the promise of increasing efficiency and technology transparency while preserving their digital sovereignty, and avoiding costly lock-ins.

However, in order to better facilitate the potential of DPGs to deliver on these benefits, governments and organisations should prioritise implementing policies, principles and frameworks. Doing so could allow them to more effectively implement DPGs that address country needs which may include evolving their digital public infrastructure.

For this reason, the DPGA Secretariat included dedicated emphasis on this as part of the Calls for Collaborative Action that were launched in November 2024.

OPEN-SOURCE FIRST POLICIES, PRINCIPLES AND FRAMEWORKS

We call for governments and organisations to create, use, and support open-source first policies, principles, and frameworks, and to share them openly along with learnings and best practices on how to develop, adopt, and implement them.

Progress on This Call in 2025

Twenty-four DPGA member organisations rallied around the Open-Source First Policies, Principles And Frameworks Call for Collaborative Action and came together to develop a strategic approach to ensure countries had practical tools to use and the wider ecosystem could rally to support them in adopting digital public goods. Together, this group collectively identified two objectives:

In order to achieve these goals the need to improve the collective understanding of the current landscape of open-source policies and principles was identified. Doing so, enhances the ability to understand and better facilitate the creation of knowledge products that can significantly advance open-source first policies and principles.

In collaboration with other participating organisations, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) spearheaded the creation of a survey that would be used as a landscaping tool to understand the current state of how and where open-source policies and principles are being used. It’s important to note that it was decided in order to receive more precise responses, that as a starting point this effort would focus exclusively on open-source software, leaving the door open for expansion into open data and content for future iterations.

In June, the Global Open-Source Policies & Practices Survey was jointly launched by the participating members. By October 2025 the survey received 40 responses from a range of governments and large-scale organisations. Working with Melissa Muñoz Suro, resident researcher from the University of Oxford, the DPGA identified a set of high-level trends, findings and suggestions that will help shape how this work advances.

Please note that the survey remains open to new submissions. If you have not yet completed it, we kindly invite you to do so, as every submission is valuable. The importance of governments instituting policies and principles that can better facilitate the adoption of open-source software was a recurring answer from survey respondents. Time and time again it was shared that open-source adoption thrives most in countries that have formalised the policies and processes needed to get the best out of available technical expertise. Another notable finding was the role of the open source community and collaboration in the development and maintenance of open-source software, particularly across borders when looking at interoperability.

These inputs helped shape policy recommendations and a framework with four key principles to support open source adoption:

• Open source by default – Implement “OSS by default” clauses in every request for proposal, requiring exceptions to be justified, published, and time-bound. Establish a standardised Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) methodology that includes the initial acquisition price of software plus costs of installation, migration, maintenance, support, training, updates, and eventual exit or replacement. Establish a mandatory national registry of public software, including license and support metadata, and conduct annual audits to identify exceptions.

• Legal clarity around licensing – Publish a practical licensing manual, define minimum sectoral standards to ensure interoperability (e.g., HL7 FHIR37 in health, OIDC38in digital identity), and require that all publicly funded software include standardised metadata files (SPDX, publiccode.yml).

• Formalising community contributions – Publish standard contribution policies in repositories (CONTRIBUTING.md, code of conduct), fund maintenance and security through time-allocation programs or bounties, and establish community metrics such as bug resolution times or number of reuses, displayed on open dashboards.

• Sustainable institutionalisation of open source within governments – Establish OSPOs with fixed budgets and indicator reporting, create permanent funds for the maintenance of critical software, require security by default through SBOM and vulnerability disclosure programs, and define clear rules on the duration and transfer of projects.

You can learn more about the analysis and recommendations by reading the full report here.

The report also contains a toolkit for implementing countries, broken down by different stages of digital maturity status.

Related Efforts Led by DPGA Members

In addition to the collaborative effort on the survey, members advanced additional relevant open-source policy projects during this time:

• Inter-American Development Bank: Produced a guide explaining what an Open-Source Program Office (OSPO) is and providing an introductory guide for government teams on how to create one to manage their open-source strategy.

• OSPO Alliance Good Governance Handbook: The Good Governance Initiative (GGI) is a handbook and methodology developed by the OSPO Alliance to help organisations implement corporate-wide open-source policies and establish successful OSPOs.

• UNDP/ITU Open Source System Enabler: The Open Source Ecosystem Enabler (OSEE) is a joint ITU and UNDP project that aims to help public and private actors effectively adopt open-source technologies for delivering digital government services.

• Github OSPO repository: This GitHub repository provides a collection of policies, tools, and best practices from GitHub's own OSPO to help other organisations get started and succeed with their open-source programs.

Next Steps:

The OS policy survey remains open, and will continue to collect more data points from countries and large organisations about the landscape of open-source policies, practices, and frameworks, until the end of 2025.

The analysis of this data will continue in early 2026 and drive towards the sharing and creation of new knowledge projects that directly respond to the needs identified by the survey.

Participating Organisations

Agency for e-Government and the Information and Knowledge Society (Agesic, Government of Uruguay), CivicActions, Creative Commons, Digital Public Goods Alliance Secretariat, Digital Square at PATH, the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI, Government of Sierra Leone), eGov Foundation, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), GitHub, the Government of the Dominican Republic, the Government of Ethiopia, German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), ITS Rio, Smart Zambia, the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad, Government of Norway), Open Future, Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), Open Source Initiative (OSI), OpenForum Europe, UNDP, UNICEF, UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (UN ODET), UN Office of Information and Communications Technology (UN OICT).