デジタル公共財アライアンス

Digital public goods are public goods in the form of software, data sets, AI models, standards or content. They often form the basis for society-wide digital public infrastructure (DPI) such as identity systems or data exchange. Digital public goods are generally open source or free cultural works that are intended to contribute to sustainable national and international digital development.

The term "digital public good" has been in use since at least April 2017, when Nicholas Gruen wrote Building the Public Goods of the Twenty-First Century. The concept has attracted attention as new technologies are increasingly seen as having the potential to benefit society, leading to the development of evaluation frameworks for competing projects. Some countries, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and private sector entities have identified digital technologies as a tool for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This application of public goods in digital platforms has led to the use of the term "digital public goods".

Various international agencies, including UNICEF and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), are investigating digital public goods as a possible approach to enhancing digital inclusion, particularly for children in emerging economies. Digital Public Goods are used by governments around the world.

The Digital Public Goods Alliance maintains a registry of digital public goods, recognized according to a nine-part standard, and advocates for their implementation. As of October 2025 there are 222 entries.

A digital public good is defined by the UN Secretary-General's Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, as: "open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the SDGs."

Public goods are generally understood as resources that are owned or provided for public use, such as a public clean water system. Digital Public Goods, however, differ from physical public goods in that they are not constrained by scarcity or resource depletion. Because they are digital, they can be stored, copied, and distributed indefinitely without being depleted, and often at minimal cost. Some proponents of digital public goods argue that abundance, rather than scarcity, is an inherent characteristic of digital resources within the digital commons.

Digital public goods are noted to share certain traits with traditional public goods including non-rivalry and non-excludability.

This 2019 Wikimania submission discusses how the concept of a public good has evolved into that of a digital public good:

A public good is a good that is both non-excludable (no one can be prevented from consuming this good) and non-rivalrous (the consumption of this good by anyone does not reduce the quantity available to others). Extending this definition to global public goods, they become goods with benefits that extend to all countries, people, and generations and are available across national borders everywhere. Knowledge and information goods embody global public goods when provided for free (otherwise the trait of non-excludability could not be met on the basis of excluding those who cannot pay for those goods). The online world provides a great medium for the provision of global public goods, where they become global digital public goods. Once produced in their digital form, global public goods are essentially costless to replicate and make available to all, under the assumption that users have Internet connectivity to access these goods.

In various sectors, including information science, education, finance, and healthcare, there are technologies that may be considered digital public goods as defined above.

Wikipedia has been cited as an example of a digital public good. Another example is DHIS2, an open-source health management system.

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is also frequently identified as a digital public good. Because FOSS is licensed to be shared freely, modified, and redistributed, it is available in a manner consistent with the principles of digital public goods.

Open educational resources, which are designed to be freely re-used, revised, and shared under their copyright terms, are another example often associated with digital public goods.

The original motivation of the free software movement was political, aiming to preserve the freedom for all to study, copy, modify, and re-distribute software and code. Given the negligible marginal c