10 Principles for Building a Digital Government Stack
Throughout the research process, our team uncovered an important finding: there is no single formula for building a digital government platform. Governments have taken different approaches to building digital public services from organizing different types of stakeholders to managing varying degrees of digital accessibility. However, through our research for the Digital Government Mapping Project and related reports like Building and Reusing Open Source Tools for Government, a set of common principles arose that seem to help digital government platforms become success stories.
1. Modularity
While a handful of countries have built impressive, tightly integrated digital stacks, these outliers are the exception rather than the rule. Both technically and politically, it is usually easier and less expensive to create smaller solutions that can be easily reconfigured and optimized as circumstances change. Just like a set of Legos, modular platforms can be reassembled to address needs and opportunities that may not have been anticipated when they were first created.
UK Notify demonstrates these benefits. After the solution was initially deployed in the UK, it was adapted to meet new challenges by the Australian Digital Transformation Agency, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, and the Canadian Digital Service. Along the way, the system developed new capabilities. For example, Canadian engineers added French language support to the original tool. Doing so not only fulfilled a national mandate to make the software available in French and English, but also provided new functionality that the UK and French-speaking communities might be able to draw on in the future. The flexibility of modular solutions is a huge advantage at a time when technology and public needs are both evolving rapidly.
2. Open Source
Most of the work performed by governments is similar regardless of whether it is in New York, New Delhi, or Freetown. Almost all governments have to provide public benefits and services, collect taxes, maintain registries, and carry out a pretty well-defined set of other responsibilities that could be streamlined using technology. As the example above illustrates, governments are slowly waking up to the opportunity to develop and share open source solutions to power the public sector rather than building duplicative solutions of varying quality. Along with modular design, open source development can help governments cooperate to develop best-in-class solutions, adapt them to meet their own needs, and quickly scale them across borders to benefit other communities at minimal extra cost.
One of the benefits of open source development is that it allows civil society to examine the systems governments implement and point out design flaws, security risks, and threats to privacy and civil rights. A contact tracing app deployed in India was found to have numerous security bugs and led public authorities to open source the code for additional review by the global security community. Since then, hundreds of security flaws have been identified and fixed thanks to the power of crowdsourced engineering talent made possible by open source. DIGI’s Building and Reusing Open Source Tools in Government report provides a guide for how open source solutions can foster innovation in the public sector.
3. Ethical Design
Far more than companies and customers, governments have a responsibility to look after the interests of their citizens. That includes prioritizing privacy when deploying digital government platforms. In the same way nuclear power can light up a city or destroy it, and steel can build hospitals or machetes, digital platforms can advance human dignity or undermine human rights. Regional models for data governance have solidified in the United States, EU, and China, but almost every week brings new reports highlighting the failings of these frameworks.
In the same way responsible governments use checks and balances to prevent the abuse of power in carrying out policy, public sector technology systems must guard against bad actors using well-intentioned systems to exploit those who use them.
4. Multi-stakeholder Governance
The task of protecting citizens’ interests on digital platforms is too important to be left to government alone. Communities should rely on multi-stakeholder oversight when developing and deploying new technologies.
Multi-stakeholder bodies can inspect technology systems before they are deployed to check for algorithmic biases, dangerous governance models, or other unintended consequences. Decentralizing control of technology systems adds a layer of complexity to governance, but also offers crucial safeguards against potential abuse.
5. User Ownership of Data
Individuals often cede control of personal information to private firms or government bodies that exploit it for financial or political purposes. Centralized data models create opportunities for those with access to private information to not only surveil individual activities, but also manipulate user behavior. As governments begin to leverage digital platforms to power their institutions, they should help citizens’ own and control their personal data. Societies may need to rethink data ownership and data protection rules to realize this goal.
Placing users at the center of public data architecture could give individuals more autonomy over how private firms, governments, and researchers use sensitive personal information. Some emerging models, such as the “Data for Common Purpose” initiative developed by the World Economic Forum, are laying the groundwork for public-interest data frameworks that will enable societies to harness the power of big data while still granting individuals more control. Data trusts can also help negotiate on consumers’ behalf to rectify information asymmetries and help individuals monetize the value of their data or maintain higher degrees of privacy. Governments should look to the World Economic Forum’s recently released Presidio Principles for an innovative new values framework on how to reassert individuals’ rights and build more decentralized, resilient data models.
6. Interoperability
Individual digital platforms are proving how digital solutions can revolutionize the delivery of public value. But digital systems will be much more powerful if they are combined into an integrated set of systems that create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If governments embrace common standards and data portability protocols they could facilitate the development of a broader range of interoperable platforms for the delivery of public value.
The Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) addressed this challenge by building APEX, a centralized API exchange designed to enable government agencies to share information between their data silos and externally with private entities. APIs make it easier and more secure to share data. A project named MyInfo uses APIs to share data between government agencies and banks when new customers open an account. MyInfo not only provides a better, faster experience for the user but also reduces costs for banks and deters data theft. MyInfo has been integrated into Singapore's National Digital Identity platform, which accelerates business-to-business transactions through use of government-verified data and equips citizens with a secure login interface for private and public digital services. Tools that bolster interoperability can eliminate inefficiencies and create safer data ecosystems for users, businesses, and governments.
7. User-centered Design
Policymakers should include users in the process of designing, testing, and improving digital platforms for the public sector. User-centric design principles draw expertise and opinions from the communities affected by digital tools, and bring them into the design effort to ensure that all groups, particularly marginalized communities, have a voice in how tools are developed and deployed. Collaborative human-centric design processes lead to more inclusive digital tools and reduce the risk of unintentional harm.
The State of New Jersey, the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, and DIGI’s team at New America sought to create a platform to help residents experiencing joblessness find their way back to employment. User research revealed that re-entering the workforce can feel overwhelming, so the designers developed features to break up the job application process into manageable tasks and guide the user through the stress of job searching. The State's Office of Innovation led multiple rounds of testing with small groups of job seekers to incorporate their feedback into the final design of the platform. By leveraging user-centric design principles, we developed a tool that caters specifically to the needs of the citizens it was designed to serve.
8. Digital Equity
As governments build digital platforms, they should explicitly plan to meet the needs of people with limited access to the internet or digital technology. Digital transformation has the potential to increase inequities with digitally-marginalized populations.
Governments should build public utilities such as APIs and adoption training that not only increase access to services, but ensure that all communities can benefit from innovation. The Indian Government pursued this path when they created the NUUP, a banking protocol that enables mobile phone users to transmit banking information over GSM networks. The NUUP provides banking services to users of cell phones who otherwise would have been excluded from the access to financial services made possible by the smartphone-native BHIM app. Governments worldwide should explore methods to layer analog and digital systems to ensure that communities with varying access to digital tools will not be left behind by digital transformation.
9. Building for Resilience
The speed with which the coronavirus pandemic crippled the global economy, buckled healthcare systems, and crushed national pandemic response plans has created a resilience crisis that is engulfing public institutions. Unemployment insurance in many U.S. states is a case in point. Citizens filing for benefits in the middle of the pandemic were asked to find fax machines to submit forms that were then processed using COBOL, a programming language that has been obsolete for decades. This archaic process made it difficult for anyone to access benefits and excluded many marginalized populations completely.
One of the advantages of using digital services is that they can foster resilience by providing multiple, redundant pathways to access public services. From low-cost telemedicine as a fallback when in-person care is unavailable to digital and mail-in balloting to supplement in-person voting, the principle of optionality should apply to all essential services. Providing citizens with multiple paths to access vital services creates safeguards when things go wrong. Digital platforms not only expedite inefficient analog service delivery processes but also create intentional redundancies to reduce risk when analog systems fail.
10. Design for High and Low Digital Capacity
The pandemic has illustrated that digital capacity does not necessarily follow traditional indexes of development. While the United States mailed paper stimulus checks to 70 million Americans, governments in Pakistan, Argentina, and Peru leveraged digital payments systems that support more than one third of their populations. Modular, open source digital public infrastructure can allow emerging markets to adopt next-generation systems that allow them to leapfrog a generation of development and also help countries with antiquated legacy systems catch up.
As coalitions and innovators begin to produce digital public goods to build more effective institutions, they should try to ensure that their solutions can be adapted to work in different contexts with varying levels of digital capacity.