Liv Marte Nordhaug, Secretariat CEO, Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), Norway

1. How do you use technology/policy to improve citizens’ lives? Tell us about your role or organisation. 

I lead the Secretariat of the Digital Public Goods Alliance – or the DPGA.

The Alliance is a multi-stakeholder initiative where our goal is to accelerate the attainment of the sustainable development goals by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods.

According to the UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, Digital public goods are open-source software, open standards, open data, open AI systems, and open content collections that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm while helping to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We have defined strategic target areas where we think there is particular impact potential for DPGs, and these are around 1) scaling safe, inclusive and interoperable digital public infrastructure; 2) advancing climate action, 3) fighting information pollution, and 4) preparing and responding to urgent global challenges.

The DPGA currently has 46 members, spanning governments, UN entities and international development banks, philanthropic and government funders, technology companies and think tanks.

Our role as the Secretariat is to do core tasks that maximises joint impact driven by DPGA members, DPG product owners and other stakeholders.

These core functions include maintaining the DPG Standard and the DPG Registry which lists all digital public goods for greater discoverability and the coordination and convening of advocacy activities that bring stakeholders together and provide visibility for how DPGs are key for addressing development needs and urgent global challenges.

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2. What was the most impactful project you worked on this year? 

There are so many impactful activities driven by our members and the DPG-community that it is very hard to pinpoint one project - so I encourage everyone to visit the DPGA’s roadmap to learn more about the many activities members are doing to support DPGs.

With that said,  I will pinpoint one major achievement: the DPGA Secretariat and a number of DPGA members and other stakeholders helped achieve, which I believe will drive significant future impact: The Global Digital Compact.

The Compact was adopted by UN member countries on 22 September 2024 as part of the Pact for the Future and will help guide how countries and organisations alike advance digital transformation.

It includes substantial references to digital public goods as an important part of global digital cooperation. I think this will be important for creation, adoption, and financing of digital public goods over the coming years. 

3. What was one unexpected learning from 2024? 

I feel there are learnings almost every day. It wasn’t really unexpected, but every time I meet my team (the rest of the 12-person DPGA Secretariat) in person, I realise how important it is to spend some time together.

While working distributed across time zones can allow us to have global reach and sometimes be very efficient in ways that being in one timezone you can’t, it can also be kind of lonely - so it is important to recognise the importance of being together as well.

4. What’s a tool or technique you’re excited to explore in 2025? 

At our Annual Members Meeting in Singapore in November we soft-launched a concept called Calls for Collaborative Action. They will be formally launched in February 2025.

The idea is to define actionable objectives that we think can have particularly high impact for the DPGA strategic target areas, and then to rally DPGA members, product owners and other stakeholders to deliver on them without too much direct involvement from the Secretariat.

I am super-excited to see what type of impact can be orchestrated through this approach. I am sure there will be some trial and error as we move forward, but we have so many inspiring members who have shown great enthusiasm around the idea that I am optimistic.

Ask me again in a year, and I can hopefully point to some very tangible results!

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5. Everybody’s talking about AI today – give us your hot take on AI and what it means for the public sector.

My hot take is that we need to ensure that AI serves the public interest and that it doesn’t exacerbate existing inequalities.

The most important role the DPGA and the DPG Standard can play in advancing more equitable, public interest AI right now, is to help evolve a future state where there are more fully open source AI systems and more high-quality and high-relevance open training data available.

I recently wrote this blog to explain our stance for the DPG Standard.

6. What are your priorities for 2025? 

Our priority is to help DPGA members and the broader DPG community maximise impact. We are continuously trying to strengthen and evolve how we can do that.

The Calls for Collaborative Action will be an important new tool, and we will also actively use the Global Digital Compact to move the needle on priority areas such as digital public infrastructure and climate action.

7. What advice do you have for public sector innovators? 

You are not alone! There are many fellow agents of change in other organisations.

Adopting digital public goods and joining the digital public goods community can be a really good way to find other highly dedicated innovators to collaborate with.

8. Who inspires you today? 

I am inspired by so many in the DPG community, but it is a particular source of inspiration for me to see examples of low income or other resource-constrained countries sharing their own technologies as DPGs, helping other countries address their societal challenges.

It demonstrates how the concept of DPGs challenges old fashioned ideas of givers and takers.

This feature was made possible in partnership with the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).