Digital public products need sustainable vehicles
https://www.publiccode.net/public-product-organizations
For almost 10 years, the Foundation for Public Code has been working with public administrations and their partners to better develop public digital infrastructure together. Through many collaborations between cities., states, and other public institutions, we have come to realize that all projects that hope to become sustainable implementations in the context of the public sector would benefit from a well formed nonprofit vehicle that has a strong governance model, financial model, community practice, open license, and continuous integration process. We have been working with multiple members state governments in the European Union, and with several in the European commission, on defining a legal form for a new type of NGO that we call the public product organization.
The PPO, a non-profit vehicle built specifically to develop and steward an open digital public asset [like a software product, dataset, content database, or machine learning model] would become the hub for collaborations among a constellation of public and private partners and establish a strong governance model, provide context and support for a community of practice, and maintain access to an array of developers who could take on specific work packages set out in a shared roadmap, or do bespoke implementations for specific local administrations.
We believe that building the policy infrastructure to enable the easy creation of vehicles that allow for this type of collaboration will unlock an economy that thrives based on the contribution of a huge network of small software development studios across Europe. By enabling the creation of an NGO subtype that is specifically qualified to serve as a steward of digital assets, we can de-risk institutional engagement with open source options in procurement, and begin to design sustainable funding mechanisms that support a newly flourishing ecosystem of digital public infrastructure.
The Foundation for Public Code have served in the process of the creation of products, born from the pioneering work of teams in public administrations and their vendors, who have created some of the most celebrated digital public infrastructure in Europe. In the past, we have called ourselves "codebase doulas", helping products move out of a development cycle funded by a single public institution, which leaves them vulnerable to political change and less capable of engaging with an array of partners at peer administrations. Now we are helping guide projects toward realization as fully collaborative nonprofit stewardship vehicles. Projects like Decidim [https://decidim.org/], X Road [https://x-road.global/], DIIA [https://expo.diia.gov.ua/], and Gov.UK Notify [https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/]