The UN Is Working To Open Source Your Government: For Better Or Worse
Embracing the opportunities of our time
We are in a difficult position when it comes to maintaining our digital liberties. Governments across the world are racing to seize more control over people’s private information and communications. People are beginning to recognize the downsides of moving the “public square” to controlled online platforms. In truth, we are only beginning to grapple with the problems caused by our technological landscape. A great deal can be done, but if we continue to let apathy and defeatism discourage real action, we will end up in very grim circumstances.
It’s certainly possible to withdraw oneself from the most blatant intrusions, but escaping entirely ends up being quite unsustainable. Various workplaces are introducing their own intrusions into people’s digital lives, and many public institutions evaluating “AI tools” with little care for the important details. The public is denied representation in the future of technology. For many, their only voice is to choose one intrusion over another.
With enough effort, collaboration, and time we could forge a better path. While many of the devices we use have become so entrenched in our lives, that doesn’t mean we no longer have the ability to set healthy boundaries. The devices themselves can be redesigned, changed, and improved based off lessons we have learned in recent decades. A healthier digital landscape is very much within reach, we just have to devote our focus and resources to it. If we aren’t proactive in shaping the future of our own technological experience, governments and corporations will speak for us.
Many super-national entities are working towards transforming our digital experience. The United Nations has a concerning initiative that may have far-reaching implications about the future of digital government and open source projects. This isn’t the first initiative of its kind, but a parallel initiative that could very well end up being quite impactful. During the Covid Crisis, The EU launched the Next Generation Internet plan to reshape cyberspace. The plan included leveraging open-source development to truly harness decentralized innovation. While there were many excellent advancements under this initiative, the positives were largely incidental. The EU NGI was motivated by a desire to help European governments protect their digital sovereignty from Big Tech, but not necessarily to protect the digital sovereignty of European citizens. In part, the goal was to transform not only Europe’s digital experience, but also that of the world. While the rhetoric against digital totalitarianism was laudable, in practice it seems that Europe’s stance was in degree and not in principle.
The UN & open source solutions
While it was great to see many great and excellent Free Software projects get funding, it certainly comes at a price. If the EU or any institution directs funds towards open source projects, they can effectively pick winners and losers. Various ‘soft’ mechanisms such as codes of conduct can enforce social and political behaviors. This means that the more investment made into Open Source by Big Tech, governments, or other institutions, the more the ecosystem is made in their image. The stakes of this are quite high. Not only does this mean particular projects can thrive or be broken by political incentives, but so to can individuals seeking to build their skills. To truly build a better digital future we must contend with these forces and find ways to make our own impact.
The greatest challenge posed by the UN’s involvement in Open Source is the mere fact that there are a lot of resources being tapped into. A world-wide network of people to collaborate with on particular projects, and a great deal of mentorship and support. It is quite possible that many communities will be entirely unable to retain technical talent that hasn’t gone to either UN initiatives or Big Tech projects. This is a non-trivial problem to overcome.
Recognizing the significant potential for Open Source to be deployed to accelerate progress on the SDGs, ECOSOC has called for the development of specific proposals for how its power can be best leveraged.
The OSPO for Good event hosted by the United Nations Office of Special Envoy on Technology and the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology answers directly to this call by focusing on how OSPOs, which have been instrumental for tapping the value of Open Source in the private sector, can be used also outside of industry, by governments, not for profits, and academia.
Such “OSPOs for Good” have the power to bring the world’s population closer together, both technically through an open and interoperable infrastructure, and socially through the open and culture-spanning communities that maintain the infrastructure through peer-production and collective action.
OSPOs for Good Building & Designing Cooperative Digital Infrastructure
The UN like the EU, recognizes the power of open source collaboration and bottom-up change. It’s highly likely that these initiatives will bear genuinely good fruit, but there will be smaller details to be concerned with. Putting our entire digital future in the hands of the UN, (or some compromise between governments & corporations) is sure to diminish any hopes of having meaningful digital autonomy in the future. It is important to recognize that decentralized innovation is the future, but many forces are competing to seize control of it.
This year at FOSDEM, a European open source conference sponsored by Google and other big companies, there was a presentation made by representatives from the Digital Public Goods Alliance. The presentation outlines how open source initiatives are driving various UN sustainable development goals. The DPGA has received funding from various governments, the Gates Foundation, and many more notable members like USAID. They even include an interesting registry mapping projects to particular SDGs.
Digital Public Goods & SDGs
Just as many great things came out of the EU NGI, it’s important not to take an all-or-nothing approach. Digital public goods can definitely be a fantastic mechanism to build a freer cyberspace, but the devil is always in the details. Recognizing the potential of actual digital public goods is not necessarily the same as elevating the DPGA’s definition. The Digital Public Goods Alliance has its own standard for what meets their definition of a digital public good. The standard includes 9 ‘indicators’ of something meeting the criteria. Indicators 4,5,8 are great things relating to what is worth striving for, but indicators 1 & 8 are where things get messy.
#1 is the primary concern. The DPGA has explicit political goals for open source projects that aim to meet the standard. While the goals themselves may seem desirable, the devil is often in the details. For example, what content preferences can we expect from a project aimed at advancing education? Given the UN’s preference for censorship of what is deemed misinformation, we can expect any ‘digital public good’ that meets the standard to be also hostile to unpopular or inconvenient (but possibly true) information. In #8 the standard also includes a requirement for the project to “Do No Harm by Design”. Knowing the UN’s heavy-handed approach to sensitive issues, there is no reason to expect this standard would be enforced fairly or consistently, especially world-wide.
Given that we know the UN is not the ideal steward for the future of open source, how should we react? Is the plan to merely avoid anything labeled a ‘digital public good’ and fall prey to corporate schemes instead? Big Tech is just as, if not more willing to take control over our digital future if we don’t reassert our own vision. Privacy, censorship resistance, elegance and efficiently can all be things we expect out of our own tools. A great deal can and should be done to help people reclaim their digital autonomy with a flexible but informed approach.
Notable Examples
The DPGA recognizes various projects and systems, some you may even be aware of already. When one browses the registry it’s clear that this is a large collection of tools for helping nations secure some form of digital sovereignty. While this can overlap with individuals and communities reclaiming their digital autonomy, it doesn’t always. Some genuinely useful (or otherwise harmless) projects are included within the registry, but others with more explicitly agenda-driven motivations are too. Browsing the software section reveals a variety of technical tools with health & climate monitoring dashboards.
Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater!
In discussions about digital tools, people are incredibly quick to take an all-or-nothing approach. Just because we understand influences in the open source community, doesn’t mean that “open source is compromised”. By its own definition open source is decentralized innovation. Institutions like the EU and the UN are correctly recognizing its potential to make radical and dramatic change quickly. It is crucial that we recognize the very same potential and actualize it ourselves.
One can expect many excellent and worthwhile software and systems being recognized by the DPGA. For the moment, those under threat of digital totalitarianism have to make the best with what is available, or they can produce themselves. Expecting perfection is a non-starter in an environment where people have to make difficult decisions with available resources. It’s quite possible that many UN sanctioned Digital Public Goods are worth considering for particular purposes.
In fact, those interested in forging a truly independent digital landscape should consider what has been done by the EU and the DPGA. Learning from not only the featured projects, but also the plan itself. There are many crucial details that those interested in building real “freedom tech” need to understand before even beginning to build their own solutions. Until such a time where we can expect independent communities and freedom-loving people world wide to build up their own technological innovation potential, there will always be catching up to do.
Digital Freedom Goods
A good place to start would be defining a set of objective and testable criteria for what real freedom tools would be like. We can expect them to align with Free Software & Hardware goals, but there are many other things worth considering. We are at such a critical point because there is still a great deal of time to make real changes. We can gain a lot from taking the time to peer back through existing experiments and lessons learned over the years. There are useful projects that show promise, and useful techniques worth replicating.
It is important to make the distinction between tools that give governments more digital sovereignty, as opposed to tools that can build a better digital landscape for all of us. There will be systems and tools with overlapping purposes, but others could be irrelevant or entirely at odds with personal digital sovereignty. It is critical that those liberty-minded individuals among us spend time putting together a vision of an efficient but ultimately healthy digital landscape. With enough people united under this vision, people would have something to flock to instead of Big Tech corporations or government-sponsored tech.
While many do build great things on their own, they’re often without much support. It is on us to discover, share, and support useful freedom tools so long as they are genuinely useful. It’s long past time to stop falling for marketing hype and start focusing on building up truly independent paths forward. Governments and corporations have very clear ideas about what direction we will be heading in, it’s time we work towards building our own vision.
Gosh Gabriel, you write so very eloquently! Who knew a computer “nerd” could speak so well! (Just joking mate, don’t take that the wrong way! Aussie at large here!)
I absolutely hate computers and don’t know much about them! I only use an iPad for internet, and my phone is a very old phone. That’s it-it’s a phone. I don’t want to use it for internet or as a camera or any damned dig ID or bitcoin or CBDCs or vax passport etc, etc.
I hadn’t even thought, about the UN being involved in all this, so thanks for telling me. I wish they’d just leave us alone, and let us get on with out OWN lives!
Another thing that bothers me a lot is AI of course. Who knows where we’ll end up with that! Maybe nothing really bad will happen, maybe it will! See what I know!
But thanks Gabriel, keep on with your great articles, and eventually I will learn something! I’m so non-tech I could change my user name to “zero tech by 2026”. I could possibly achieve that, whereas we all know that no country will be no carbon emissions by 2050. They lie!