For the T20 Working Group, we are asked to share three big ideas. I am sharing what I sent to the WG in my personal capacity.
Venky
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Three Big Ideas for TF-2: Our Common Digital Future: Affordable, Accessible and Inclusive Digital Public Infrastructure
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Focus on governance: The development and deployment of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has attracted millions of dollars because DPIs promise to accelerate the attainment of SDGs. Once deployed, DPIs almost become the “operating system” for a society as it mediates critical functions like identity, payments, data exchange, healthcare, logistics and others. Crucially, they also bring governments back into the digital infrastructure game, a role that they had abdicated to the private sector for more than a decade. This is a development that has the potential to reconfigure power dynamics in our society. Can we ensure that this reconfiguration protects individual rights, limits the unconstrained power of today’s digital platforms, while ensuring that governments acquire enough power to regulate effectively, but not so much power that they become another source of unconstrained power. This requires deep, interdisciplinary thinking therefore, a percentage of the funds being allocated to the development and deployment of DPIs should be allocated to think tanks and academic institutions to work on the governance of DPIs.
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Embrace full spectrum thinking: There is great optimism around the potential of DPIs. However, we have been here before. We have witnessed periods of tremendous advances in technology that were accompanied by great optimism only to end in despair. To avoid making the same mistakes, we must temper our techno-optimism with an evaluation of the full spectrum of possibilities – from best case scenarios to medium case scenarios to worst case scenarios – and evolve strategies that help us maximize the benefits of DPIs while minimizing the harms.
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Encourage transparency and participation at all levels of DPI: Broadly speaking, I see three layers of community around DPIs - Community of code, which consists of developers, technology architects, designers and others who build the technological underpinnings of DPIs; community of practitioners and stakeholders who are impacted by DPIs; and the community of governance, policy makers and influencers who set the rules of the game for others. We need to set up open, constructive dialogue at all levels of DPIs to ensure that DPIs deliver the best outcome for society.