The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Hello everybody. A warm welcome to you all who have joined us in this room and also to everyone who has joined us virtually.
A big thank you for the attending this session Creating Digital Public Infrastructure That Empowers People. My name is Aishwarya Salvi. I am and advisor at the German Agency for International Cooperation, GIZ, working in the field of governance digital governance. I'll be your onsite moderator today.
Brief note on the housekeeping what we planned for the session. Our session is being held in a hybrid format and it be a a round-table discussion with open Q&A. We highly encourage all participants to contribute to this discussion. For all participants who are joining us virtually, please keep your microphones muted during the session. You are encouraged to post questions and comments in the chat box at any point in time. My colleague, Torge Wolters, will be monitoring chat and fielding questions from there for our Q&A rounds.
This session is organized by the German Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport together with GIZ. The ministry engages with Digital Dialogues seven key countries to ensure that we shape better framework conditions for digital transformations of our governments, economies, and societies.
As multi-stakeholder initiative, the digital dialogues provides a platform for direct exchange between policymakers, regulators, businesses, and civil society.
The goal of this session to share lessons on approaches undertaken by countries represented on this panel in the implementation of digital public infrastructure.
We all know digital technologies have drastically transformed the way we interact and transact in the world. The most notable means of digital transformation has been the development of digital public infrastructure.
What do we mean by DPI? DPI are society-wide digital capabilities that are essential to participation in the society and markets as a citizen, entrepreneur, and consumer in the digital world.
With the growing demand, governments are now adopting different approaches to implement DPI based on the availability of resources, engagement with the private sector, interaction with civil society, and citizens, and also, support from international organizations.
In this session, we set out to understand the existing DPI ecosystem in the countries that are represented on the panel. Also, we understand the steps taken by the governments to balance differing needs of interests of the stakeholders.
Additionally, we will use this opportunity to exchange the lessons from the DPI implementation and discuss how international cooperation can foster the creation of inclusive interoperable and accountable DPI that empowers people.
For this discussion, we are joined by our esteemed panel members who have contributed extensively in the field of digital transformation. First off, we have Valeriya Ionan, Deputy Minister of Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine joining us from Kyiv. Valeriya oversees Ukraine's national digital literacy policy, development and growth of SMEs entrepreneurship, regional digital transformation as well as Euro-integration and international relations.
Next we have Dr. Pramod Varma joining us virtually from the US. Thank you, Pramod, for waking up so early in the morning for us. Presently he's serving as the CTO at EkStep Foundation and co-chair at the Center of Digital Public Infrastructure. His extensive experience as a former chief architect of India's Aadhaar program and his work with India's Stack layers, eSign and Digital Locker, makes him a prominent player in India's digital infrastructure.
Next up, in this room, we are joined by Mark Irura from Kenya. Mark is currently a technical advisor for the FAIL Forward Artificial Intelligence For All Project at GIZ. He possesses valuable expertise in data and digital system management. His previous background includes his role as the consultant at Open Institute and project manager at Development Gateway. He has extensive experience in implementing various digital initiatives Kenya.
Finally, We have the dynamic Adriana Groh. She is the cofounder of Sovereign Tech Fund in Germany, and former director of impactful tech projects such as prototype fund at Open Knowledge Foundation. She has been a prominent figure in advancing digital sovereignty participation as well as open digital infrastructures.
A round of applause for our panel members.
[applause]
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Before we dive into in our discussion, I would like to make a special mention here. As said earlier, this session is organized by the Germany Ministry of Digital and Transport, and we are joined by Regina Zawisza, Director at National European and International Digital Policy, and I would request her to kindly give her opening remarks.
>> REGINA ZAWISZA: Thank you very much. Welcome everybody. It's wonderful that you are all here and it's a great pleasure for me to engage today in this discussion on digital public infrastructure, a very timely topic, obviously, and I must say that, in particular the India G20 presidency did a great job in bringing this topic of the center of the state.
In the process, we learned a lot about what India has achieved in the field already, which is quite impressive. I assume we'll hear more about also today. There are other countries that have already done impressive projects in the field.
It's great that we engage into further discussion today, talk about lessons learned and, obviously Germany, is also doing its share in the field. We don't usually call it digital public infrastructure internally. We rather talk maybe about digital public services, but probably, in substance, we're doing same thing. We certainly do have an EID, which is supposed to get smart. On your smartphone this year, we are moving it in the direction of an EUID, which can be useable within the entire European Union.
There are pretty important projects and for good reason, they are central in our national digital strategy because we believe that implementing these projects is particularly important to enable digitalization across different fields and branches.
Another example for national work would be, this actually something that my ministry is doing, building in ecosystem of mobility data, which we use to really make public data available, but we also fuse with data that is provided by private sector players. So bringing the two together, we hope will have an impact on making new business models, new options possible.
This is just examples of what we do at home. Maybe the more even spectacular thing is what we do together with partners internationally, and not just us, but colleagues from the Federal Ministry of Economic Operation and Development and, of course, GIZ. That is a GovStack initiative, which is a pretty impressive project that we also, during the Indian G20 presidency, talked about quite a lot.
It's all about open, interoperable elements that are reusable offering them to countries to use them to build their public infrastructure. As I said, was a focus on interoperability and openness, reusability, which is very, very important. So yeah, this is maybe something that we can bring to the discussion and talk a bit about lessons through this.
Now I'm really excited to hear what others do and I know that there are very impressive examples that we hear about, so looking forward to the discussion and the debate and very glad to be here. Thank you.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Thank you so much. We've seen Germany has always supported inclusive and interoperable digital services and the work that GovStack has done has also helped other countries introduce and implement these digital services in their countries. Thank you so much.
We now jump into the discussion. We have two rounds each round will be followed by a Q&A. We have reserved three minutes for each speaker to respond to these questions in each round.
I want to read today that we will be strict with the time in order to allow everyone including the audience to participate in this discussion properly. So in the first round, we will look at the existing DPI ecosystem.
We all know that creation of DPI in several countries is a result of cross-sectoral partnerships between governments laying down digital guardrails, the private sector providing the technical services, civil society academia and citizens providing feedback to their services to make them more user-centric, and each actor in this ecosystem has its own needs and interests.
For instance, IT companies need a return on investments to be incentivized to participate in the ecosystem. We have data-driven models that drive innovation but they also raise privacy-related risks and could lead to exclusion of marginalized communities. Given this context, my question to all speakers is, what role does each actor play in your country's DPI ecosystem, and how does the government strike a balance between delivering needs and interests of these stakeholders?
I would first invite Pramod Varma. He's worked extensively in India and would request him to respond to this question now. thank you.
>> PRAMOD VARMA: Good afternoon. I hope you can hear me.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Yes, we can hear you.
>> PRAMOD VARMA: Thank you for setting that up.
There are two parts to your question. Let me clarify a little bit of difference in how India is looking at ecosystems.
There are supply side ecosystem. Supplied side means building DPI, to build a DPI who is supporting you. Is private sector supporting you? Is civil society engaging with you? I think that is what you alluded to, Regina, when you mentioned the two ecosystems are joining in. Also, that's been done in most of the e-governance projects in the last two decades. Maybe even more. Many of the countries use private sector to supplement the capacity of the government and get it done. So IT services and other private sector services participating in the supply side, that is, towards the build of the DPI. It's very common, and India is no different, frankly, in that.
Use of civil society or citizen engagement also has a supply side to it to improve the privacy elements, inclusion elements, the desirability of that particular project, is very, very key and that is also essential in building up anything that is infrastructure in nature. So DPIs, by definition, are not full solution and they are just infrastructure in nature, and that's key. But there is a significant difference in India's approach to DPI. There is also the demand side usage. That's very different. That is where you put out something like GPS as a building block, as a digital public infrastructure, and private sector innovation is innovating market solutions. These are not IT services company helping you build it. Use of DPI ecosystem is very key, not building of the GDP.
Use of DPI, we believe and they believe, once the DPI is architected well, interoperable, minimal, I would actually put minimalism as one of the most important principles as well, interoperable like GPS, think very minimum. All it does very, very little. But combining and using these DPIs, market civil society like India's and even government, can build layered set of solutions, like the resolutions on the internet, that actually reaches large populations.
This is key for India because India's diversity and scale is enormous. 1.4 billion people. 22 official languages, but hundreds of languages. It's like a content by itself, so it's creating one solution for EU, or one solution for Africa, for example, the continent, a lot of people. So different culture. Different society. Different context. So one solution is not what we are after. An infrastructure is what we are after. Many, many solutions on top of the infrastructure.
Think of internet, many solutions on internet. Think of GPS as many solutions combining GPS. Think of infrastructure as a means to create minimal, operable building blocks that is left now opened up for the demand side ecosystem, market ecosystem, civil society ecosystem, and government. Even government can innovate an innovation system who can create a very contextual solutions to those people.
In this market, it's very key because market creates sustainability and creates very, very agile innovation unlike government trying to do everything. So market is key for us. And UPI, unified payment interface, is a classic example where multiple unicorns and multiple large countries, like including Google Pay, plays out, but interoperability is being measured in monopolization or colonization, all of that. It is right infrastructure is open and interoperable.
NGOs are even key for us because India diversity necessitates a long tail, the last long-tail solutioning is very hard. Solutioning for the small section, for example, very small vulnerable section in tribal sector is very hard because costs of developing solutions are very high, and so DPI brings down the cost of solutions, which is what happened with digital ID, digital payments, and digital paperless interactions, it dramatically reduces the cost of solutioning and for NGOs as well. We believe demand-side ecosystem is more important for the DPI area than the supply side ecosystem. That creates sustainability of solutions and diversity of solutioning. Thank you.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Thank you so much, Pramod. I think, in India, it's unique to see how the community got involved in the ecosystem, how the uptake was hired because everybody in the remotest villages were able to get a phone to access services on just one device, so I think that is unique to India.
Moving next into the room, I would request Mark to give his response.
>> MARK IRURA: Thanks. To add on to what's been shared already, supply and demand side were mentioned. On the supply side, we have actors such as funders, actors such as government, sometimes even private sector and civil society, they are trying to create something, build something, and the way it's been portrayed as well is that we have people who are sitting in the middle there still on the, almost on the demand side because they are waiting on this package, waiting on a payment system to leverage it to deliver a service. And then we have users, users who do not care, they do not care about the digital government. They know government so they want a service.
So if I could speak to Kenya, previously, before we moved on to like one e-government platform, it was management information systems being layered across various departments. So if you wanted to register a business, you go to one office, you fill in a form, you wait a couple of days, you go back. So when they digitized or automated, you still had go to that office, and then you are sent to another office even though they had a system. But now, everything has kind of been centralized a little bit, but we're still finding a challenge because there is no community in between the demand and the supply to be able to innovate around packages of reusable interoperable components. So because of that, there's no longer-term view about this digital services. What do they look like?
If payments, if today, for some reason, payment platform for government goes down, what is the impact on the economy? If today, for example, there's an outage for 30 minutes, that businesses cannot be registered, and so I think to add on to what has already been shared is the thinking we have system integrators who sit in between. System integrators are start-ups. They have been mentioned, start-ups or even tech companies who are able to latch on to what is already existing and build up on it, but there's some things that government or even funders, they cannot take away.
Let me give an example of responsibility government cannot delegate. The regulation aspect or the vision or the foresight. What does this platform look like 10 years from now? Because whatever we are building now, in two or three years, will be legacy system. So what will that look like? Who will continue to maintain it and sustain it? Who will pay for it?
If we have a community approach, then we don't just think in terms of open source, in terms of open source free beer, but it's open source around how can this develop a community, not resent putting in their intellect and their energy into building this services building them over the longterm. Thank you.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Thank you so much, Mark.
I think concept of system integrators is very important because, as you mentioned, government needs to look at governance and regulations that they need to lay down. When we talk about operational management issues, we need these start-ups and companies to get more involved in the economy and in the ecosystem to do the daily repair work or maintenance of these services.
Thank you so much, Mark, for your response. We now move to Adriana. I would invite her to share her experience of what is happening in Germany, how do we balance these needs of stakeholders.
>> ADRIANA GROH: Thank you. So now I'm stretching the definition and the topic we're talking about a little bit with the work that we're doing with the Sovereign Tech Fund in Germany, but we're not limited to software that is developed in Germany. So maybe a few words about this so you understand how I'm stretching the definition of DPI that we're using right now.
The Sovereign Tech Fund supports open digital base technologies, that's how we call them, to not use digital infrastructure again because, otherwise, the term just gets really bloated. What I mean by that, to put it simple, software that developers use to develop software.
We, not speaking for this room maybe, but most people don't think about that, although it's very necessary. The software is very critical and very vulnerable, and if it breaks, it scales massively through everything that we are using every day. But it's invisible for many people who are not software developers because you're just using the interface, but there is a lot behind that.
And we've seen with Harply way back, and also with Lofer J, how it impacts everybody basically when it breaks. And the Sovereign Tech Fund's mission now is to, well probably won't able to prevent it forever, but to work on it and make the awareness, increase the awareness a bit for this layer of the software stack.
What I mean then by stretching or complementing the DPI approaches we already heard is to, well, basically saying look at it deeper because everything we built relies on software that is running in the background that community and software developers and also companies and businesses need.
I have some numbers, they're all very tellable, but I'm just going to say maybe one day, 64 percent of the 133 most widely-used software components that everyone relies on are in very critical shape and only maintained by a handful of people. Can be two. Can be three. They are doing this, nobody notices. Most people don't notice. It's a community of very intrinsically motivated people. Some of them work for companies, but most of them do this critical work in their free time.
What we need to do is develop a more holistic approach when we talk about DPI in a way that we need to secure the foundations, innovate and maintain. It needs to be the whole life cycle.
I think people in this room know about this, but because this work is also very, not very thankful, it's a little bit like the road you take every day to work. You don't think about that road until it's blocked or broken and there's long maintenance work, and then you're really annoyed. But if it's just working, it's just there. That's the same for the layer, the focus of the Sovereign Tech Fund. If that's not working, all the great missions we heard just about are also not working.
That is my short pitch. I am really looking forward if we're opening up the room for the discussion, because it's a particular topic, production logic, we also heard about this. It's different in this field. So I mentioned intrinsic motivation of very people. It's also a very old legacy, so to speak, and our whole very successful global digital economy relies on this software running. The whole world relies on software, of open source software actually, running in the background, being maintained, being available. That's the reason, one of the key reasons, why we innovate, why we have competition, why we have start-ups and SMEs. It's a really important topic for civil society, for government, and for companies worldwide, and if we manage to have holistic approach, that's going to really get us far, and also secure us, everyone, in a position to act in the future because if the roots are not well maintained, then the growth will not be longlasting. Thank you.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: I think you're absolutely right. We need to stretch the definition of DPI because when we talk about infrastructure, the mentality is, is it hardware, just hardware? It's not. It's also software. And as you rightly mentioned, the entire economy relies on these softwares. So yeah, we should include software as well in the definition when we talk about DPIs.
We now move online and I would request Valeriya to kindly respond to this question.
>> VALERIYA IONAN: Good afternoon, colleagues. I would like to echo in some ways the previous speakers. We believe in golden triangulations. Government, private sector, and civil society, but we think it's not about the building ecosystem. It's about, first of all, creating conditions that enable all participants to work efficiently.
Instead of discussing the ecosystem stakeholders, which are, to my mind, more or less similar in all of the countries, I would like to concentrate on several concrete examples which we have in Ukraine.
For the context, in Ukraine, have our state's super app Diia, which is used by 19.5 million users with digital documents, digital services, digital signature. Even before the full-scale Russian invasion to Ukraine, Ukrainians already have been able to pay fines, to pay taxes through Diia, or use Diia for digital documents. But Diia is not only about digital documents and online government services. We are also digitizing the work flow of both public and private sectors. We use such features as document-sharing, validation and e-signature to speed up document flow and customer service and replace paperwork with digital and intuitive services that reduce costs and save time.
Let's say some organizations can receive electronic copies of digital documents of Diia users using a sharing scenario. Through validation, companies can check the digital document validity just in two clicks. For example, in stores, post offices, or governmental institutions.
Just as an example, the financial sector in Ukraine is one of many industries that most actively uses Diia services. 59 banks have already integrated sharing and Diia signature into their processes. This allows them to conduct quick customer identification and verification, open a bank account without visiting a physical branch, verify a customer when working with payment terminals, et cetera.
One of the most popular banks in Ukraine, Monobank, registers customers using a sharing scenario. The record registration for this is 99 seconds. Also, one of the banks had around 80 gate open bank accounts per day because of basically the possibility of digital signature opening bank accounts online.
Another great example is project Diia education, which is a national education platform for reskilling digital literacy and the majority of content is created together with private sector or civil society. That's really great because that helps us to, I would say, enable our citizens with, you know, expertise which is really needed on the market.
Another great example is our partnership with the private sector. So when the full-scale Russian invasion started, we have been able to create fast an app, which is called Air Alert or Air Alarm, and that sends alerts about missile attacks.
We have basically a lot of other examples where government is communicating and working really efficiently with private sector companies, with start-ups, with civil society. We have this fast track of communication and we think that that's exactly the way how modern government should operate. They should be working like IT companies more, they should be more agile and flexible.
So what we are doing here in Ukraine, we are basically changing, with such solutions as Diia, the way how government communicates with the citizens. With that, Diia really became a love mark for Ukraine citizens. Thank you.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Thank you, Valeriya.
We open the floor for questions. We will one or two questions if anyone in the room has any questions to the panelist. Otherwise, we can move it to the end of the discussion.
So moving to the next round. Thank you everyone. In the next round, we basically look at what role does international communication have in this ecosystem. Considering the diverse professional approaches have been undertaken to implement DPI, it's still an evolving concept and there is still so much we don't know, so much we need to do. We still see a lot of countries struggling to implement DPI because of limited technical capabilities and financial resources.
So my question to all speakers is, what lessons did you learn in implementing DPI in your country, and how can international cooperation be leveraged to build interoperable inclusive DPI that empowers people?
I would first request Mark to respond to this. Thank you.
>> MARK IRURA: Thanks for the question. I'll begin by agreeing with what has been said by Valeriya about governance, so that is very important. In Kenya, we have this platform, Citizen, that has been in use. It's beginning to come under, not scrutiny, beginning to be tested, its limits, and part of it is because there are governance issues that cannot be solved by technology and there are technology issues that cannot be solved by governance necessarily.
On the Governance side, there is need to look at it a little bit more critically. In what ways? For example, how do we have a very robust infrastructure to deliver these services? And how do we begin to look at a community around it? So that's one.
As a funder and those who are in the room, we have to think about this in a longer-term view than we do right now because a lot of times, there's pressure to show results. Sometimes we don't want to accept we are failing, but it is important to show, to think about it in a little bit longer-term view because if we are talking about governance and governance of data, what does it mean now? Yes, it's very convenient, that proverbial click of a button. I can log in and do something in five minute. But data has been shared across multiple agencies without me being aware. What does that mean and what does that mean when I'm aggrieved and I want to complain, so we have to think about that in that extent.
Number 2, we also have to think about the technology and the economics of the technology because there's something for government when they say we want to lower the total cost of ownership of this technology. We don't want to pay the current licenses because we cannot afford it, and that is valid.
So do they have the skills to procure digital public goods? So that is another consideration. Just building that capability, and then that takes time. As funders, are we looking at that and looking at do we understand it even as we speak to it?
I think, lastly, I will just mention that we have to create maybe funding instruments that look at it and maybe collaborate with others so that we look at it as we are putting the foundation of a house on. When you are putting a foundation of a house, and I'm speaking about Kenya now, you sink a lot of money in the ground and do not see results. But once you kind of get, the foundation is done, then you can have a lot of progress when you are constructing. And people will come around and see something, but for a long time, you are just under the ground like just putting in money and people could not see what you're trying to do. But then if you have a longer-term view, you have a robust infrastructure that maybe continues to be relevant even when some of the technologies become obsolete in seven to eight years, but those tools are still in use.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Thank you, Mark. I think we all agree that there is a need for longterm planning because these technologies are fast changing. As government, as private sector, and even communities, we need to keep up pace with these dynamic technologies. Thank you, Mark.
I will now request Valeriya to respond to the question, how do you think international cooperation can be leveraged to build interoperable DPI.
>> VALERIYA IONAN: Thank you for the question.
First of all, it's important to say that all governments are facing the same challenges especially when it comes to digital transformation. Again, digital services, digital literacy, interoperability, cybersecurity, now AI, and many, many others.
And there is absolutely no need to waste a lot of time in order to find the solution to some problems if the solution already exists and operates efficiently.
So it's not just about the concrete technical products or technical solutions. For example, in Ukraine, we are learning a lot from Estonia. Estonia has been our mentor in digital transformation. We are using a lot of Estonian govtech products, including X-Road for interoperability which, in Ukraine, is called Trembita.
But now, with our Diia and Diia ecosystem, we also have a lot of achievements and we are ready to share our experience with the world. So what I'm trying to say is the world should be more aligned when it comes to the questions of digital transformation and understand all the existing solutions in order not to waste and optimize time and use those.
Also, it's not about just products or just about solutions, it's all about the experience in some soft questions. For example, in Ukraine, in 2020, we have created a new position in Ukrainian government which is called CDTO, Chief Digital Transformation Officer. So these people operate on the level of ministers or deputy governors. And for today, we have CDTOs every ministry and every governmental agency and in regional council. So that basically gives us a possibility to move fast with all digital reforms in different spheres and different levels.
We know that when it comes to such kind of organizational structures in other governments, in other countries, the organizational structure is, I would say slightly different. But what we see is that especially these organizational structure was one of our success cases which helped us to make a huge leap in digital transformation just in three years.
If we would have a good platform for communication between governments, civil society, private sector, where we could share not just products, which obviously could be open source or not, also could share such kind of experience, I think that this is something important at least to elaborate on.
Also, there is no great, I would say, academic or nonacademic programs which really prepare people to become chief additional-digital transformation officers for their governments. There are some high-level strategy or leadership courses, but when it comes to some concrete, finding some concrete solutions, I think the new world-class education for digital leaders is from all other world, which will give not just knowledge and expertise, but also possibility of regular and an official networking, would improve a lot and give a lot of new possibilities.
So of course, we can speak in this panel and question a lot about interoperability and lots of different ethical solutions, but I believe this information is more or less available on the web. That's why I think my main message here is that we have to focus more on communication, on networking, on finding more points for cooperation between our countries and different institutions. Thank you.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Thank you, Valeriya.
I think all governments need to make drastic institutional changes, create positions like the digital transformation officers that Valeriya mentioned because these people can reach out to the citizens, build capacities, and also ensure that each citizen uses these digital services. Thank you, Valeriya.
I would next ask Adriana to respond.
>> ADRIANA GROH: Thanks. I agree with what has been said. I think it's important to stress that we need to be in a position where we can do the sharing and learning together. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes it's good to have similar tools running at the same time and test which one works better, then pluck and play a little bit. So it's necessary, I think, to stress that public money, public code, has been hurt before, I guess, but you need to be able to share, adapt, and change software that is around if you want to push it to the maximum this learning and sharing approach.
Coming back to the focus of Sovereign Tech Fund, those digital base technologies, it's a bit different because maybe you do want redundancy. You want to have two or three things that do the same job running at the same time because coming back to the road analogy, if you only have that one road that is then blocked that one day, what are you going to do? So it's maybe less about finding that one solution, share it, adapt it to your specific needs. It's maybe about deliberately seeing where we need redundancy and how to maintain it.
And coming back to the international corporation, this is a global digital common. There are no geographic boundaries around those parts of the software that we're talking about. They're used in all different kinds of contexts everywhere. So it is like particularly important to be well-coordinated here because what could happen with all the good intentions that we have is ripping this ecosystem off the very foundations that we all rely on a part because you're not coordinated. You're pushing and pulling in different directions.
You can also not fix it by just throwing money at it. There's needs to be a strategy. There needs to be community that advises you. There needs to be engagement from the private and public sector. So if we're not doing it together, it's not going to work.
So it's not a nice to have. It's a real must have to be well-coordinated and understand that, for this digital public common, we need to fix also the tragedy of the commons because I think right now, what we have is everyone relies on it, but nobody feels responsible for it.
This is our, I think, exercise for everyone to analyze this, to then come up with solutions, and then sit down together and really implement that. Not do it in all our little boxes, but very day one, do it together. Thanks.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: I will now request Pramod Varma to respond to the question.
>> PRAMOD VARMA: I think many of this best practices and learning have been actually shared quite widely and it's available in various papers, writings and talks. But I'll give you maybe three different parts of at least the learning we went through.
One, when you build DPIs, at least for us, we will look at just one component of that that allows a lot more innovation to happen. That's why I keep using the GPS analogy. It is not about thinking through the whole solutions. We are letting the market on society and other parts of government, and so on, to put together solutions later. For others to build, solutions, what do we need to build? That was really the question we were asking.
Hence, minimalism was a big principle that we kept playing out if you look at our identity project, or payment project, or credential sharing, like Ukraine, the paperless Diia. The paperless work flow.
We wouldn't build a work flow but build credentialing infrastructure that allows many, many workforce to build. So minimalism is very essential. Interoperability of course. Decentralization. India is very diverse and federal hierarchy between the center and the states, and quite a lot of autonomy spread across different parts of the system.
Centralizing as an architecture or design never works out. It never gets implemented well. It's also good for privacy. So decentralizing as a design principle is very key. And of course thinking to privacy and cybersecurity for any digitized system is very key. This is one of the technology principles. But on the governance, very good comments were made from the panel.
Policy interventions are necessary. Creating a participatory governance, this highway or this road is used by many, many people, how does the governance of the road work because many people are going to depend on it. Marketplace and others are going to depend on it, so participatory governance. Accountability, dispute grievance resolution. My colleague talked about that. Important there because something always goes wrong if things go wrong, what are the process of addressing that wrong is very, very key. And most importantly, resilience. The resilience topic was key. India, it's not one payment system. Three or four payment systems that seem to do similar things, but this is actually a good thing because depending on the entire system for one digital building block is key because if you get attacked or down for some reason, the entire system can come down. So resiliency and redundancy is very key.
One more learning we had nontechnical, nongovernance learning is also regulatory, political, and social, societal buy-in. Many of the DPIs got, for India, that's a billion people and that significant buy-in from society, political leadership, and regulatory leadership and, most importantly, market incentive alignment. Market, why should they use the DPI? Can the created a close loop or wall garden, monopoly, would all want to create those private solutions that are locking the users and locking the country. But what is their incentive in playing inoperability?
I think a lot more discussion needs to be done to get that buy-in especially when you're implementing at scale, whole countries scale, they it's very key to get that alignment.
On the global coordination, it's a no-brainer frankly. Global coordination, as somebody mentioned, there's no border to people's aspirations. People's aspirations are not limited to borders. Geographical borders. People want to go across the country, they want to work across economic opportunities, educational opportunities, health care needs. People travel and go across. Discussing interoperability and portability of my data and credentials so I continue to use, as a citizen, continue to use my data depending on large systems to coordinate is very key. We saw that with the vaccine certificate in the Covid time. It was essential that we allow people to move around with the vaccine certificate.
So interoperability, sharing of learning, and also add sharing of assets. I think most of the panel said our assets are now available as DPG, as public good. Open source is good. I think sharing of assets of what we are building with others also helps accelerate this journey. Thank you.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Thank you, Pramod.
Do we have any questions from the chat?
>> TORGE WOLTERS: Also looking into the room, if there are questions from the room, happy to take them as well. We have one microphone in the middle. Please line up. Thank you for lining up already.
As Mr. Achmiadez Achmed posed a question quite a while ago in the chat. I will read this out first. It goes towards Africa. I look to Mark. He might have a response on this.
The question goes, How can we increase trust of citizens with their governments especially when it comes to digital IDs in Africa?
>> MARK IRURA: So probably four things. Part of it has been mentioned by the last speaker. We have people. We have processes. We have the product that you want to sell. Then we have politics. Things that are taught when you're developing IT solutions in terms of maturity models and managing change. So I think one of the solutions is we, of course, talk about the citizen at the center of human-centered design. It might be challenging or difficult do it with very many people, but I think believe one of the things that can drive or stop these court cases, you implement a system and people go court to stop it, is just because anchored in the process is how do we treat with my individual rights as data rights. And the citizen is often left out of -- public participation is an academic exercise.
So I think having the regulations is good because it helps citizens to push back and use instruments of the laws and seeing how best to involve citizens in defining or designing the solutions. I think that might be part of the issue right now in just the low level of trust.
If I sign up today, how does it translate to a public service being delivered to me? That connection between data and water or electricity is not direct, but it's also because there is trust deficit in the politics of how everything is done.
>> TORGE WOLTERS: Thank you so much, Mark. I won't do what most moderators do and repeat the gist of what has been said because we only have a few minutes left and still many questions if the chat and in the room. We take the first question from the floor.
>> LEA GIMPEL: Thank you so much. My name is Lea Gimpel. I'm from the Digital Public Goods Alliance. I really like that we speak so much about sharing technologies and open source here in the session. However, we rep a lot of countries and I think we discussed it's not only about technology being available. It's also about the governance and, in general, the approach. DPI in an approach much more than technology. We hear a lot from countries that they's afraid of making the same mistakes again as they did in the past. I mean by that is that we find there are coordination problems within governments. There is too forced and people are not working together on the same thing. I'm wondering how we can instill this DPI mindset really in people.
I'm very much with Pramod with saying it's about minimalist, it's about starting with use case and building it in ways other can plug into it, but how do we instill this DPI mindset in people apart from champions such as Amado here in the room who is a champion in his country, building extra implementation, but we need more of those people.
How go we get message across policymakers and leadership?
Thank you.
>> TORGE WOLTERS: Thank you Lea.
I'm looking to the panel. Who wants to take the question up?
>> PRAMOD VARMA: Do you want though quickly answer? I can give some prospective on a few things that we are trying. One, I think the minister mentioned G20, coordinated discussion. Many countries came together on a shared definition understanding of what DPI is. It's just a vocabulary. Everybody has been doing this, but there's a common vocabulary that was created and common set of principles were laid out. This is important as the digital economy gets developed in many, many countries in the next 10, 15 years, and so on. So how did we help every country create their own digital rails that allow their own digital economy to get pushed and talk about other efforts that are going on.
From the people perspective, I think the journey has begun and many of those discussions are happening. One thing in addition we are also doing is there are now DPI funds now. DPG, of course, continues to support sharing of assets by DPG ecosystem. And we also started, I'm a co-chair at the Center for DPI. We just started a center for DPI as a pro bono effort to spread, create DPI fellows and DPI residents around the world. So we are creating proper training, certification, both certification for policymakers and certification for actual implementers. These are sort of boot-campish things that you go through to actually build.
We are Working with 21 countries at least for now, to create their own DPIs in their own country because contexts are very different and everybody needs to think through their own context and their own country.
So some efforts going on, but I think it needs to get accelerated. So maybe more panels like this, more efforts like this, more events like this, more training and support systems like this, can actually be useful to bring it together, bring a common understanding together. Thank you.
>> TORGE WOLTERS: Thank you so much.
I think, Mark, you also wanted to react to the question, right?
>> MARK IRURA: Quickly.
So the issue of total cost ownership, like during procurement, I was once, in one of my previous roles, I was once in Malawi and a system had put in place that was able to transmit some results to patients. So when it was time now to hand over to government, they were like, do we put in infrastructure like hospitals in beds, or we pay for SMSs?
So from the start, there was a lack of understanding of recruitment and what it implies to put tool, because how do you go back to the taxpayers and say, we bought SMSs?
I think it's important to consider what it means. So do we license a database at middleware at application level, and what does it mean over the long term?
I'll just add that to the response that was given. For governments to try out without burning their fingers, being locked in and having to go back to parliament and say, we bought a license and it costs X amount of dollars there's a problem with that.
>> TORGE WOLTERS: Thank you so much, Mark.
We have another question on the floor.
>> RAMAN JIT SINGH CHIMA: Thank you so much. My name is Raman Jit Singh Chima, I'm international council on Asia-Pacific policy data with Access Now. The international digital rights organization.
My first -- it's a two-part question. The first question and comment is to promote online, and then my second part is to the panel.
The first one is to promote discussion around digitalization and learning lessons from the past. For this group, would it also be used for global community engaged in this conversation to learn from the Indian experience and mistakes, for example, having digital identify project out that didn't have a legal framework, that did not account for data protection rights, that, in fact, disputed whether privacy was a fundamental right? But also most importantly, the very design concept. I know you in particular have extensive experience in this around the design of the system, namely, a centralized cloud-based, cloud-stored biometric database. Would that be something that's good for other countries to adapt and learn from?
Second question therefore, the second part of the question to this panel, given infrastructure has rights and governance concerns, what steps has the DPGA or this community around digital public goods taken to mitigate harms around digital identity, the misuse, exclusion. Specifically, have there been consultations with other human rights groups around lessons from this line of experiences in India, in Kenya, in the Philippines and elsewhere, and how do human rights groups be baked into this consultative process?
Thank you.
>> TORGE WOLTERS: Thank you so much. First look over to Pramod. Do you want to react?
>> PRAMOD VARMA: Much digital learnings have been, actually, again, documented. We don't have to -- it's, I believe, the identity story through 12 years, 13 years now into the system.
It was done with full executive support, parliament approval, budget, all the regulations. I agree. The law could have been done earlier so countries starting today should definitely look at a full legal support especially for identify.
Identity is a sensitive topic today. But on things like payment, or anything else like that will get laid about that. But every country has their own journey and those journeys are in the context of their own country. I think we did have existing laws that supported that effort and subsequently laid the special purpose law for the identity.
The cloud part is actually all wrong. You were wrong about the cloud. Any unique attestation, any unique identity attestation that necessitates the uniqueness part, the you part of the uniqueness, need to come and that requires most of the national ID project. Even in Germany or anywhere else have an identity database. Also or Social Security or anything else.
Maybe in the future, there be technologies I'm not aware of this time can actually uniqueness attestation without storing the previous data. So that means there is some storage of data, but minimum. It has to be minimalist, it has to be secure. Identity system never been breached, by the way. Central system never been breached so far. There were obviously on the edges incorrect usages and data leaks that has happened, unfortunately, but it is not the central storage that actually worries me. It's the governance around it. Security around it. But the purpose necessitates the storage of data, it needs to store minimum set of data. So think that fundamentally, it's not an architecture issue at all, it's not a design issue. It's how every identity system would play out.
Of course, the question can be, how is it protected, how is it used, or how do we make sure it's not misused, and so on, so these are important questions. Much of these learnings have been documented. So I think countries will have their own context. 2010, 2015, 2023 when you implement. 2030 when you implement, new technologies can be leveraged to created to relook at some of these design constructs. Thank you.
>> TORGE WOLTERS: Thank you Pramod. I've already seen the sign that our time is up unfortunately. There was a second part to the question, which was about which measures are being taken that digital public goods are actually secured and protect the data of citizens. Is there a very brief reaction from the panel on this question? Looking to Valeriya and Pramod. No? Mark, please.
>> MARK IRURA: So these preventative and these curative missions, of course, we run to the law when it's curative. I think preventative, the work that's being done by, say, the Digital Public Goods Alliance, and they are coming up with this practices, these are good practices that we kind can adopt and we take them as principles. When we do that, you are preempting an issue happening by just following this set of practices that have been done. I would offer that as a response, but I think Pramod really did talk about it.
>> ADRIANA GROH: I'm just going to say one sentence. I think it's going to make, in general, everyone safer if we understand that we need to support an open, available, and secure ecosystem of digital infrastructure components because that is where a lot of security issues also arise. So we should understand it as a public's job to invest with public money in that area as well. Thanks.
>> TORGE WOLTERS: Thank you for that statement. I know we are over time. I would still take one very short, very, very last question from the floor.
>> Hi. I was going to frame it as a question, but I think I will it as a comment and the panel can choose to react or not.
I was wondering if you think about taking a bottoms-up approach to the redressal mechanism to a lot of DPIs. We have seen in India the failure of identity system can be really high and that affects the public welfare delivery system to a lot, to a lot extent. So maybe thinking about providing the user a the choice if digitalization or digital aspect of verification mechanism does not work, they can go to a person who can help them out because we are dealing with a low level of digital literacy here in a lot of countries.
So thinking with those redressal mechanisms particularly, and also giving the user a particular level of choice where they can deal with these systems in terms of failures would be interesting.
I wanted to know what DPIs in your respective areas are doing around this. But you can just react. Thank you.
>> TORGE WOLTERS: Thank you so much. Any spontaneous very, short reactions? Yes, Valeriya, please.
>> VALERIYA IONAN: Thank you for the question. Obviously, when it comes to digital transformation, it's important to see everything as one system. In Ukraine, for example, we have projects which are working simultaneously. For example, we have a national program for the development of digital literacy, so everyone would like to increase their knowledge of digital literacy, they could do it either online or offline in special digital centers where there a gadget and internet connection and the facilitator would can facilitate the first contact between a person and the gadget or the platform. When it comes to, for example, digital identity Diia app, which is our state's super app, I would use this opportunity to remind that Ukraine is the first country in the world where digital passports are totally equivalent to a paper or plastic one.
For example, Diia does not store personal data. Diia uses the approach data in transit and connects directly to the high-secured state registers and shares, basically shows this data.
That's a really good question, but probably there is no short and easy answer to that. When it comes digital transformation in government or in country, to my mind, the most important thing is the vision.
In Ukraine, we are most convenient digital country in the world. That is why we are user-centric and human-centric services and products. When there is a need too create something new or service, product, whatever, we ask ourselves, whether this really brings us closer to our vision, to the most convenient digital country in the world.
it's Impossible to build it if you don't have a -- if you have a basic level of digital literacy in your country. It means you have to do a lot of measures in this regard.
It's impossible to build the most convenient digital country if you will not have digital services which are available for everyone and which are inclusive.
It's impossible build a digital country if you will not have digital economy which is working.
It's Impossible if government will not have a specific person would will be responsible for digital transformation in their own sphere and in their level, like national level or regional level.
So it's a really great question, but I think it's a topic for probably a separate discussion. Thank you.
>> AISHWARYA SALVI: Thank you so much. I will quickly summarize the entire discussion for our audience. Sorry to keep you waiting.
So in the discussion, largely, we need to understand what do we mean by DPI. And when we look at this concept, we need a holistic approach, not just include the hardware but also the software, because again, there are no boundaries.
We also need to look at the demand side. We need to see what the community needs and how they can participate in ensuring that these DPIs are built, that are safe and user-centric.
From the government side, we need to make drastic institutional changes, have data officers who are responsible for ensuring that the citizens are using these services and their grievance redressal is in place.
So just a quick summary and thank you so much to the audience and to our speakers especially to Pramod who woke up so early in the morning for us. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Regina, for joining us in this discussion.
[applause]