Dominican Republic uses bootcamp to turn DPI foundations into citizen services

Over the last few years, the Dominican Republic's government was focusing on the less glamorous work of writing interoperability rules, setting up data governance frameworks, and envisioning what it wants to achieve with its digital public infrastructure (DPI). 

Now, it wants to turn these foundations into real public services that improve people's interactions with the state, says Ministry of Public Administration (MAP)'s Director of Digital Government, Ginsy Aguilera, to GovInsider. 

Last month, MAP and its technical partner, the Center for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI), ran a five-day bootcamp to bring together selected public agencies to identify, design and implement real-world use cases to issue verifiable credentials (VCs). 

VCs allow citizens to instantly share certain information with other institutions, without relying on central databases or slow manual verification. 

The bootcamp involved public agencies spanning tax, agriculture, environment, elections, social protection, education, and more. 

Unlike the traditional implementation, the bootcamp compresses the training and implementation into five days, involving both technical and programmatic teams into five days. 

The VC bootcamp model is something that CDPI has now run across the region, with Colombia using the same five-day sprint in May to build a rural ID prototype with its Ministry of Agriculture, cutting a three-day verification process to about 30 seconds. 

More than a tech sprint 

The bootcamp wasn't intended to just produce more one-off pilots, but create a shared way of working to translate the DPI strategy into impactful public services. 

Aguilera mentions that the government is now moving past the phase of simply digitising individual services, looking at a whole-of-government (WOG) digital transformation strategy. 

Instead of agencies building separate, disconnected systems, the WOG strategy refers to breaking down silos and collaborating on centralised digital platforms to deliver seamless, citizen-centric services. 

Instead of having agencies solving problems independently, they collaborate through shared digital capabilities that any agency can reuse, she notes. 

VCs sit at the centre of this, she says, by giving agencies a trusted way to issue, share and verify information with each other and with citizens, while keeping privacy, security and interoperability in place. 

According to Aguilera, the different public agencies were chosen based on three criteria: the public value of the credentials each agency issues and their role in high-demand services; institutional readiness; and diversity across policy domains which lets the government test how VCs perform across different policy domains and build reusable models for future rollouts. 

Alongside the technical teams, the week also deliberately pulled in policy leaders and institutional stakeholders, working through common standards and shared implementation practices, she notes. 

Aguilera frames the bootcamp as reinforcing the governance dimension of the DPI strategy, highlighting the collaborative design process as "one of the strongest outcomes" from the bootcamp. 

Beyond prototypes to one shared playbook 

By the end of the week, each agency left with credentials linked to actual government services and running on national servers. 

The tangible outputs included a functional infrastructure live in production, documented use cases, user experience (UX) prototypes, defined issuance and verification flows, and technical teams trained to operate, maintain and expand the credentials ecosystem on their own.  

Aguilera says that her team is now focused on transitioning the solutions developed during the bootcamp into operational services. 

"This work includes completing institutional integration, validating operational and legal requirements, strengthening governance arrangements, and expanding participation to additional public institutions," she explains. 

The government looks to incorporate the lessons from the bootcamp into a a national roadmap for VCs, while refining the technical standards and improving the UX continue to be a work-in-progress, she notes. 

These prototypes, she explains, "provide a strong foundation for expanding the national VCs ecosystem over the coming years."  

Aguilera adds that her team also aims to maintain the communities of practice (CoPs) established during the bootcamp to support knowledge sharing and strengthen national implementation capacity over time. 

The bigger bet: proactive government 

Aguilera frames the country's broader DPI strategy around a few objectives, including shared digital building blocks that any agency can reuse, cutting duplication and giving citizens a more consistent experience no matter which agency they're dealing with.  

VCs are one piece of that. Digital notifications, consent management, document exchange, and digital forms are next in line, she says.  

She shares the government's more ambitious, long-term vision to deliver proactive public services, citing the upcoming Proactive Services Decree. 

This is meant to push the government past a model where citizens have to hunt down which services apply to them and repeatedly hand over the same documents to different agencies. 

With interoperable systems and trusted data already flowing between agencies, government could instead determine eligibility automatically and deliver services "at the right moment with minimal administrative effort." 

Highlighting the potential of DPI to redefine the relation between the citizen and state, she frames the end goal for Dominican Republic to "build a government that is digital by design, connected by default and centered on people's life events."