DPI Podcast: Market and DPG Players in the DPI Ecosystem
In this episode, Venky and I unpack the role of markets and DPGs in the digital public infrastructure ecosystem, we talk about these market players, their challenges, and how can they be governed.
Some of my key takeaways from the conversation -
- Demand side challenges of the DPI ecosystem are — the DPI approach isn’t still fully understood and has less awareness among governments, and there are multiple procurement bottlenecks for governments to leverage DPG solutions for their DPIs.
- Supply side challenges of the DPI ecosystem are — Systems Integrators (SI) are key market players in helping countries implement DPIs. But they aren’t involved much yet. Another problem is the mismatch of funding and software development cycles — current funding is focused only on the build and deploy stages and not so much on the evolve and deploy stages. There’s also a lack of focused investments in the capacity building and other key areas for the uptake of DPIs.
- DPI ecosystem should pay attention to the sustainability of DPGs, and learn from the RedHat-Linux story.
- There’s an urgent need to pay attention to governance of the DPI ecosystem, and not ignore it right now. It’s important for governments to define their role before other players take up the space.
Venkatesh Hariharan - Venky, as we call him is the Public Policy Director for FOSS United, an organization that aims to grow the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem in India, and is the India Representative of the Open Invention Network (OIN). He is also a researcher in Digital Public Goods for CoDevelop Fund and the Digital Impact Alliance, and the co-chair of the Think Tank 20 task force on Digital Public Infrastructure. The recommendations of this task force will support India’s G20 agenda during its presidency in 2023.
Venky has 32 years of experience in journalism and public policy with organizations like Indian Express, Red Hat, Google, iSPIRT, and the Data Governance Network at IDFC Institute.
Venky’s writings on DPIs/DPGs
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this episode are Venky’s and not representative of the organizations he represents.
