Digital Public Goods and Common Purpose: Part 1

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it wasn't really a report.

It was...

So I've been, uh, as anyone who's sort of read my stuff knows, I've been kind of mulling on the question of public goods and how broad the category of public goods is and how much broader it is than economists would have you believe, or at least a simple economic textbook, since maybe 2005 or earlier.

And then in 2009, I chaired the Government 2.0 Task Force, which was about the use of what was then called Web 2 in government, the use of the internet as a collaborative tool, and I really started thinking about it then.

I wrote a paper in 2014 on digital public-private partnerships.

Maybe we'll get into that.

But in 2017, I wrote a piece for The Mandarin, and it was called "The Public Goods of the 21st Century." And it wasn't that I was saying anything very new there.

I mean, I don't know whether it's the first time I'd used the term digital public goods, but it was saying that the public goods of the 21st century are, many of them, digital public goods.

And somehow this went into a, you know, the, the public good du jour, which is Google or somewhere, and someone does a search of who or tries to figure out from Ingram who's the first person to use the term digital public goods, and it's me.

And I had been theorizing digital public goods for quite a while.

So I'm happy to take a bow and speak to you now, having been invested-

Yeah

... as the intellectual godfather of digital public goods.

But anyway, I thought, "Oh, well, that's a UN report.

It's gonna be full of lots of words and a sort of gray literature report," and I didn't give it a lot more thought.

But having looked at it a bit later in preparation for this podcast, I'm quite intrigued about it, and it seems to me to provide a rather a good, rather an interesting way to s- to start talking about some of the issues.

Yeah.

Do you think it was that, it was ha- having worked on Government 2.0 and your, your work with Taxi, was it, this is what set you up to start thinking about digital public goods? Yeah, it looks to me, I mean, I hadn't, I haven't heard anyone else use that term until I heard it off you, so you, you probably, you've got as good a right to claim-

Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right.

No, I think that's-

You'd be better of it as anyone.

Yeah.

I think that's right.

The game of getting noticed is, to some extent, about language and coining expressions.