In 2019, the governments of Sierra Leone and Norway, alongside UNICEF and iSPIRT, launched the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA). Its mission is to accelerate the attainment of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) sustainable development goals (SDGs) by leveraging digital public goods.
Since then, the DPGA has welcomed over 25 members, and has added 150 digital public goods to the DPG Registry including open-source software, open data, open content collections and open AI systems across the 17 sustainable development goals.
Projects leveraging digital public goods cover multiple industries — health information systems, accessible technology Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), platforms for financial services inclusion and more.
Partnering with DPGA
As the collaboration and contributions grew in number and scope, the DPGA needed a clear and transparent way to meaningfully engage with its stakeholders like governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), tech organizations, researchers, think tanks and independent technologists. As a result of the rapid pace of growth, the alliance’s website was not adequately serving this purpose. An upgrade was needed.
In this blog, we share our approach to working with the DPGA team to overcome their business challenge.
The DPGA partnered with Thoughtworks to revitalize its website, improve user experience and strengthen development capabilities. The predominant guiding principles for the redesign were:
To clearly define digital public goods and evangelize them into everyday language
To be transparent about conversations, collaboration, projects and updates of the alliance and its members
To share progress on ongoing activities across the digital public goods ecosystem
To invite nominations for, evaluate and share new digital public goods at a regular cadence
To consolidate all the recognized digital public goods and make them easily accessible
To share knowledge and thought leadership around standards, strategy, best practices and more
To allow interested individuals to connect with the alliance or join the DPG community
Our approach
Today, the DPGA website offers an intuitive interface that helps visitors easily navigate, discover and engage with digital public goods. This creates a powerful avenue for the DPGA to build meaningful and impactful relationships with our stakeholders worldwide.
User-centric design
The first step in any revamp project is to figure out ‘the why.’ The Thoughtworks team conducted in-depth interviews and conversations to understand the alliance’s goals. We spoke to various stakeholders and defined their needs. This was followed by an outline of how the DPGA website could leverage user-centric design practices to effectively serve all stakeholders.
Tech stack
In line with the DPGA’s strategy, Thoughtworks worked with an open-source tech stack for the entire software development lifecycle. Here’s an overview of the tech stack used:
JFrog for CI/CD and pipeline management
WordPress for content management
React.js for front-end development
GitHub Pages for hosting and the website’s build process
GitHub Actions for workflow automation
Selenium for UI testing automation
TestNG for unit, functional and integration testing
Data curation and insights
To meet the primary goal of making all digital public goods easily discoverable and accessible across the world, Thoughtworks enhanced the DPG Registry’s UX. Today, the registry lists all 150 digital public goods with their description, license and past year of activity, updated in real-time from GitHub. The website also showcases information about SDG relevance, ownership, documentation, privacy and security, scale, application log and more.
On-demand CI/CD pipeline
To ensure scale and ease of development, Thoughtworks designed and implemented a customized CI/CD pipeline that was perfectly aligned with the DPGA’s requirements. This implementation empowers the alliance to sustainably and swiftly deliver website updates, automate testing, and perform rapid iteration and effective collaboration towards accelerated dissemination of digital public goods. The recommended CI/CD pipeline also reduces manual effort by automating the software change process, enabling faster and more reliable software releases for the alliance.
The website is an important milestone in the DPGA’s journey. Together, the DPGA and Thoughtworks can drive global progress and bridge the digital divide to create a positive societal impact.
The collaborative work that both Thoughtworks and DPGA have put in towards upgrading the latter's web presence is in line with what DPGA wants to achieve: unlock the potential of open-source technologies for a more equitable world. Additionally, if you'd like to learn more about how Thoughtworks has partnered with the DPGA, you can find out more in this news post.
Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Thoughtworks.
