About

This is a project build by the Decidim Free Software Association with the initial support of People Powered’s Digital Democracy Accelerator Programme.

This project aims to document best practices to help publish and mantain a Digital Public Good.

We believe Digital Public Goods are the way forward to building and re-using software for serving the people, and we believe Public Administrations should align their IT policy to both sustainably publish the software they build as a DPG, so that it can be re-used by other administrations, and have a formal policy to ethically adopt existing DPGs, so that they re-use first before building, and become contributors.

It is just through this path of sustainably publishing and ethically adopting how software for the public good can enter the virtuous cycle of open-source and avoid the Open Source Sustainability crisis.

However, in our experience as a DPG publisher, tasked with properly mantain a DPG, and as watching how different public administrations engage with our software, or how other administrations attempt and fail to publish a DPG, we have noticed there is a set of good practices to follow for DPG publishing and adoption to succeed. Which is why, through working with other administrations we came up with this toolkit. It serves as a compilation of good practices we have both built and observed worked.

We hope that by publishing and growing this resource, we help other teams such as Barcelona’s back in 2017 make the decisions necessary to build software that can be re-used worldwide and has a life of its own, beyond the public administration that birthed it.