Encouraging Cross-Sector Collaboration and Incentive Alignment for DPI Development

By

Allison Price

,

Silvana Rodriguez

, and

Alberto Rodríguez

In this fourth article of the research collection, Infrastructure for the Digital Age, experts weigh in on questions exploring the potential for digital public infrastructure (DPI) to support a healthier digital environment in the United States through essential services and frameworks that are open, inclusive, and adaptable. Each article summarizes major themes from experts' responses to a prompt, followed by a curated collection of expert insights.

Prompt: What can be done to encourage and incentivize cross-sector collaboration in developing DPI solutions that work for the public interest?

Effective DPI development will require open collaboration across government, private companies, and civil society. The challenge lies in how to incentivize U.S. entities and companies to break through the hurdles and blockers preventing them from collaborating to help shape digital systems designed in the public interest. These hurdles and blockers include vested interests, the desire to maintain competitive advantages, and legal liability concerns, as well as trust, safety, privacy, and security issues.

Compounding these challenges, there is insufficient funding for cross-sector collaboration and a dearth of institutions designed to convene meaningful cross-sector engagement. Often these roles fall to philanthropic organizations or academia, but their resources to support such efforts are short term or unsustainable. Governments or multilateral organizations could fill this gap on sustaining longer-term funding models.

In the climate space, cross-sector expertise bands together slightly better with the driving mission of saving the planet; likewise, in public health challenges for finding a vaccine. But the go-it-alone approach hasn't worked with tech development, where the stakes and outcomes feel more nebulous - even as tech increasingly affects nearly all facets of our daily lives.

Key Findings

Despite the known challenges, there is consensus among experts that pursuing effective cross-sector collaboration is an area with growth potential that is worth the effort to achieve. The following are the key findings from the participating experts:

• Interoperability standards and frameworks can help facilitate cooperation, while multistakeholder governance frameworks can strengthen transparency and accountability measures. They are interrelated and complementary efforts that could help break down blockers to effective collaboration.
• Similar to physical infrastructure projects, current DPI initiatives underscore the importance of recognizing and aligning incentives across stakeholder groups. The U.S. government needs to create an environment that incentivizes collaboration among all participants by including measures to encourage private sector innovation and reward entrepreneurs for supporting underserved markets. This will require careful consideration of potential market and other effects.
• The U.S. government can take a more active leadership role by establishing clear priorities and policy approaches that drive DPI development. This could involve not only investing public funds to secure critical digital infrastructure, but also promoting open data and ensuring that interoperability standards are set in place.
• To foster collaboration and innovation, governments at all levels can create coordinating bodies and cross-sector partnerships and innovation hubs that bring together public and private stakeholders.
• Financial tools such as tax credits, grants, civic tech challenges, and innovation prizes can play a key role in spurring innovation and aligning interests across sectors.
• The creation of impact funds that invest in promising cross-sector DPI collaborations and new investment vehicles could also help coordinate financing across public and private sectors and create more sustainable financial models.
• Support of civic and noncommercial actors is also important to help maintain focus on the public value of DPI. This includes scaling public funds toward the creation and sustainability of DPI efforts; public AI will likely be an important area of focus.
• Cross-sector participation may benefit from having the right so-called anchor tenant from any sector that can drive initial use cases and capital deployment but remain open to multistakeholder governance.

Whatever path the U.S. chooses, finding a balance between harnessing private sector innovation, aligning incentives across sectors, maintaining public accountability, and establishing common standards will be critical for DPI systems to scale and be economically viable.

Building on the collective insights provided by experts, the next and final article in this collection will propose recommendations for U.S. leadership and actions for DPI development.

Go to the next article in the research collection: RECOMMENDING AREAS FOR U.S. LEADERSHIP AND ACTION TO ADVANCE DPI DEVELOPMENT

A Curated Collection of Expert Insights

Prompt: What can be done to encourage and incentivize cross-sector collaboration in developing DPI solutions that work for the public interest?

Overcoming Initial Hurdles through Solutions and Frameworks

Lacey Strahm, Policy Lead at OpenMined

Many blockers currently exist that hinder cross-sector collaborations. Organizations are concerned about legal liability, maintaining competitive advantages, trust and safety issues, compromising system security, and invading user privacy, among other reasons. Often, these concerns present difficult trade-offs for organizations wishing to engage in cross-sector collaborations, ultimately leading to decisions against engaging for fear the costs outweigh the benefits. Removing these blockers is an essential first step toward encouraging and incentivizing more cross-sector collaborations.

Daniel Castro, Director at the Center for Data Innovation

DPI initiatives should consider equities from diverse stakeholders to avoid creating sector-specific solutions that are incompatible with broader economy wide needs. Generally, the solution to this problem is to create extensible, interoperable digital frameworks. Indeed, the point of DPI is to provide the digital systems on which additional applications can be built.

Creating a proper governance framework for DPI can help address this problem as well. One risk is that there is a free-riding problem where nobody wants to pay for the DPI, which may result if there is too little stakeholder involvement. Another risk is that there is a race to the bottom because many stakeholders effectively hold a veto on decisions, which may result if stakeholders have too much involvement. Instead, DPI should be governed by an independent body whose mission is to see the successful implementation and adoption of the relevant digital systems.

Aligning Incentives Key to Encourage Cross-Sector Collaboration

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Distinguished Technologist of Strong Internet at the Internet Society

It's important to focus on aligning incentives. For example, businesses often overlook the resources required to develop new software or hardware using open standards and open source software when considering the procurement bid/price. This presents real challenges because it's easier to invest a large sum of money in creating something proprietary with the hope of future returns, rather than putting in the extensive and lengthy effort to develop open standards and software that would ensure government procurement supports the true downstream generative potential of software and services procured by the public sector.

Diana Zamora, Director of Global Public Policy at Mastercard

To encourage and incentivize cross-sector collaboration in developing DPI solutions that serve the public interest, it is crucial to establish context-specific measures of success (i.e., what is the problem we are trying to solve?). The Business 20 (B20) Engagement group of the G20 has agreed on six key principles:

• Targeted scoping: DPI should only be implemented to address clear market failures and not replace existing solutions.
• Transparent governance: Governance of DPI operating entities should be transparent and open to all stakeholders, including the private sector.
• Privacy and trust: Strong privacy protections must be incorporated to safeguard citizen data from both private actors and the state as an operator of digital platforms.
• Equal Access: Equal access is essential, ensuring that all players can build and operate digital services atop DPI without precluding fair competition. Participation in DPI should always be voluntary.
• Commercial Sustainability: DPI should enable commercially sustainable operations and business models that minimize reliance on public subsidies, promoting long-term growth.
• Multi-stakeholder standard setting: Technical standards and protocols for DPI should be developed through an open, multi-stakeholder process that encourages private sector participation and interoperability with global standards.

By creating arrangements that provide every participant with an incentive to participate, DPI can foster innovation, growth, and engagement.

Yolanda Martínez, Practice Manager for Digital Development in Latin America and the Caribbean at The World Bank

Encouraging cross-sector collaboration in developing DPI solutions requires government leadership to establish clear government policies and a vision emphasizing the importance of DPI and cross-sector collaboration:

• Create dedicated government bodies or task forces to coordinate DPI efforts across sectors with a mission-oriented approach.
• Design financial incentives such as grants and innovation prizes.
• Establish public-private partnerships, consortiums, and innovation hubs to facilitate resource and expertise pooling.
• Promote open data, service design and interoperability standards and offer training programs to build stakeholder capacity.
• Engage communities, ensure continuous feedback, and showcase successful DPI projects that foster public trust and demonstrate the benefits of collaborative efforts.

Together, these strategies can create an environment that supports the development of inclusive, secure, and effective DPI solutions-enabling the design and delivery of digital government services based on user needs, journeys, and life events.

Susan Aaronson, Professor and Director of the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub at George Washington University

Begin by mandating transparency of corporations (all types) that hold data. They should be transparent to their stakeholders as to what data they collect, how they store it and for how long, how they use it and for how long. The CREATE AI Act offers a start with language incentivizing data provenance and transparency. I'd use corporate governance rules, which only apply to publicly held corporations, as an incentive.

Lauri Goldkind, Professor at Fordham University and Editor in Chief at the Journal of Technology in Human Services

Many of the raw materials to incentivize cross-sector collaboration for DPI solution building already exist. But engaging the public and movement building strategies could be leveraged to bring these pieces together to create a more comprehensive ecosystem for building DPI solutions.

Tax incentives have the potential to create powerful incentives for the corporate sector to meaningfully engage in the digital public infrastructure conversation. Technology companies, telecoms and the financial sector all are holders of vast amounts of individual data. Industry could be incentivized to responsibly share data required for DPI with tax credits for participating in data trusts or data repositories to be used by local government or data donations in the public interest. Incentives could also be created for corporations willing to engage in responsible data practices and ethical data handling.

Supporting the Role of Civic Actors, Including through Public Funds

Alek Tarkowski, Co-Founder and Director of Strategy at the Open Future Foundation

In terms of cross-sector collaboration, I would like to stress the need for a greater focus on civic and non-commercial actors with a strong history of building public interest digital solutions to focus the debate about DPIs on the public values that they serve. To name just a few, I would point to Wikimedia (a knowledge-focused DPI-for example providing through the Wikidata service key semantic data used today for all major developers of generative AI models) and to the field of open data where many of the leading solutions have been developed by civic actors (starting with the famous Ushahidi platform).

An important policy measure in this regard is scaling the public funds that support the creation of DPIs and digital public goods-most prominently the Sovereign Tech Fund in Germany and the NGI program of the European Union. In the coming year, public AI will be a key space. While AI is not yet conceptualized as a DPI, there is increasing talk of the need for a "public AI stack." There is also growing interest in public AI funds that could be deployed either by states or possibly also at global scale. These should have broad cross-sector collaboration as a key principle, combined with a commitment to securing public values.

Collaboration with civic and non-commercial actors will also require public support to scale and make their efforts sustainable, such as in the areas of open source development, alternative social networks (Fediverse), and data sharing DPIs to further support alternative data governance mechanisms.

Striking a Balance between Innovation and Accountability

Audrey Tang, Senior Research Fellow at the Collective Intelligence Project and Beth Simone Noveck, Professor and Director of The Burnes Center for Social Change, and The GovLab at Northeastern University

We believe the key lies in striking a balance between harnessing private sector innovation and maintaining public accountability. Here are some strategies we propose:

• Use open source tools governed and managed through public processes to ensure transparency and allow for community adaptation.
• Fund civic tech challenges with prizes for innovative Digital Participation Infrastructure (DPI) solutions that meet specific public needs in order to incentivize private sector participation.
• Collaboratively create standards for DPI that ensure interoperability, accessibility, and security.
• Establish DPI Innovation Hubs where public officials, private sector innovators, and community members can co-create and test DPI solutions.
• Organize regular DPI Summits to share best practices, showcase successful collaborations, and address emerging challenges, focusing both on technology but also on the processes for how to use the platforms to strengthen deliberation and decision making.
• Incorporate DPI-related criteria in government funding processes, encouraging private sector companies to develop public interest-oriented solutions.
• Create DPI Impact Funds that invest in promising cross-sector collaborations, with returns tied to measurable improvements in civic engagement and governance outcomes.
• Develop training programs for public professionals and private sector professionals on the principles and best practices of DPI. Include DPI-related coursework in relevant university programs to cultivate a workforce skilled in cross-sector collaboration for civic tech.

Just as we invest in building physical infrastructure, we need to continuously invest in DPI that are transparent, accountable, and adaptable to community needs.

David Eaves, Professor and Deputy Director in Digital Government at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

If you want to encourage and incentivize cross-sector collaboration you may, paradoxically, need an "anchor tenant" who can drive the initial use case and capital deployment but who is open and aware enough to recognize that they can't dominate the governance. In America, since the Second World War, for good or for ill, military applications have often been the driver of, and initial client for, infrastructure that has gone on to serve many ends.

The federal U.S. highways are a good example of solving for an initial specific problem but architecting to solve for many. Initially the principal client was the military - who wanted to move military equipment quickly and flexibly across the United States in the event of a national emergency (or... war). The genius of highways was that they created a rule set and governance structure that enabled them to be used by anyone, for any purpose, so long as they met a narrow set of rules (licensed vehicle and car). This is what transformed it from a "service" to "infrastructure." But without that initial use case it might have been hard to marshal the resources and buy-in that brought other public and private entities to the table.GPS and the internet are other good examples.

While the U.S. military has shown surprising adeptness at being such an actor, another lesson from abroad has been ways in which people have built DPI by relying on non-military reasons and actors. In India, economic development and inclusion has been a major driver of DPI, with key social programs that serve hundreds of millions serving as the "anchor tenants."

Go to the next article in the research collection: Recommending Areas for U.S. Leadership and Action to Advance DPI Development

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