In a World Full of Problems, We’ve Got to Fix This First...

We’d like to introduce you to DIGI – the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative. This effort encompasses our existing work creating decentralized technology solutions for social impact challenges. It will also provide a home for our rapidly expanding efforts to develop open source platforms to power the public sector. I’ll serve as DIGI’s founding director. The amazing DIGI team will be based at New America.

Some Background
Over the last four years, we’ve been working to address one of the preeminent challenges of our time: technology is evolving more quickly than humanity’s ability to harness it. The structures responsible for governing and improving our societies are faring particularly poorly. Madeleine Albright has observed that institutions designed in the nineteenth century are using technology from the twentieth century to try and solve the challenges of the twenty-first century. The results are predictable. Our politics, our economy, and the platforms we depend on are all, to varying degrees, broken.

Together with an extraordinary community of partners, we’ve been harnessing technology to address these challenges. We and others have had some encouraging successes in this work ranging from accountable land registries in the Republic of Georgia to mobile overseas voting in West Virginia. These projects have fostered greater trust in institutions across the public and private sectors. They’ve also created an opening to expand the scope of our efforts. We’re focusing DIGI on three opportunities:

1. Building open-source, interoperable digital platforms to power the public sector. This work is already underway via collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, New York City, New Jersey, the State Department, the World Bank and an array of other organizations worldwide.
2. Harnessing decentralized technology to address social impact and governance challenges through the ongoing work of our Blockchain Trust Accelerator, which will continue to operate under DIGI.
3. And, because this work is far too big for any one institution, we are building a community of aligned organizations that share a commitment to transparency and good governance to help scale these solutions.

Over the next five years, we hope this work will deliver concrete benefits to at least 100 million people -- and enable governments to better meet the needs of citizens.

To accomplish all of this, we’ll need your help.

How can you get involved?

We may be biased, but we believe this is some of the most important work in the world. First, we’ve assembled an all-star team to serve as our Advisory Council. If you want to help, we want to collaborate! In 2020, we’ll be launching an expanded community for DIGI innovators to help fix the world’s institutions.

Second, we’ll be sharing regular updates on our work, research, and events. Follow us at @DIGI_NewAmerica and subscribe to our newsletter. We’d also love to hear from you at DIGI@newamerica.org.

Finally, we’re hiring. If you know an individual with extraordinary talents and an irrepressible drive to solve big problems, send them our way. We’ll be posting opportunities with our organization regularly.

There is enough human potential, enough funding, and enough opportunity trapped in broken institutions to solve humanity’s biggest challenges. If we’re successful in fixing our institutions, fixing everything else -- climate change, human rights, education, poverty, security, development, democracy -- becomes much simpler. This is where the work starts. This is how we fix it.

We’re grateful to have you with us on this journey.