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8. Open Standards & Best Practices

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Ricardo Mirón edited this page Mar 16, 2024 · 34 revisions

Digital public goods must be designed and developed to align with relevant standards, best practices, and/or principles. For example, the Principles for Digital Development.

A good way to provide evidence of this is to state all relevant data, technology, or related best practices / open standards.

Open Source Software

📌 For best practices regarding open source software solutions, particularly for organizations involved in developing and maintaining software and policy together, please refer to The Standard For Public Code.

Open Standards

Open standards are protocols and building blocks that make digital public goods work better and connect easier. They help developers create products faster and let data files be read or written by anyone.

Here are some common open standards by category:

Accessibility

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

Authentication & Authorization

  • OAuth 2
  • OIDC (OpenID Connect)
  • JWT (JSON Web Tokens)
  • SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)
  • XACML 3.0 (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language)

Computer Communications Protocols

Data Exchange/ Configuration formats

Internationalization (i18n)

  • UTF-8
  • ISO-8859-1
  • ASCII

Multimedia

  • SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
  • PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
  • JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
  • Ogg MP3 (Moving Picture Experts Group: Audio Layer III)
  • FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
  • H.264 (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC)
  • AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)
  • MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14)

Sector-specific standards

Security

Software Testing

  • IEEE829
  • ISO/IEC/IEEE29119
  • Business Process Modelling
  • BPMN 2.0
  • Credentialing
  • W3C VC

Standard Content formats

  • PDF
  • H5P
  • ePub
  • WebM

Virtual Reality/ Augmented Reality (VR /AR)

Web standards

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • ECMAScript (ES 5/6/7)
  • Latex

Whistleblowing management systems

Best Practices

Below are some of the common best practices and principles implemented by several digital public goods:

Architectural Design

Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning (AI/ ML)

Best practices to help secure your IT resources:

  • Create strong passwords for username/ password authentication
  • Enable Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
  • Enable resource access authorization i.e. access control rights/ permissions
  • Leverage IT auditing
  • Protect data at rest (data encryption, using a firewall, antivirus protection, schedule backups)
  • Protect data in transit (encrypt data in transit using TLS/SSL, authenticate data integrity using TLS/SSL, use X.509 certificates to authenticate the remote end)

Cloud Computing

Coding Styles & Standards

Data Principles:

ICT4D

Open Source

Software Architectural Styles

  • Multitier architecture
  • Model–view–controller
  • Representational state transfer (REST)
  • Publish-subscribe
  • Client-server (multitier architecture exhibits this style)
  • Monolithic application
  • Service-oriented
  • Component-based
  • Peer-to-peer
  • Asynchronous messaging
  • Event-driven
  • Database-centric
  • Sensor-controller-actuator
  • Cloud computing patterns

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

User Interface/ User Experience (UI /UX)

Virtual Reality/ Augmented Reality (VR /AR)

Open AI Systems

Open Standards

Best Practices

Open Data

Open Standards

Open Data should be available in a usable form, free from reproduction costs, and reused without restrictions. This universal participation ensures that the data can be used, modified, and shared without discrimination, promoting universal access and reuse without any restrictions on reproduction costs.

Below are links to more information regarding Open Data Standards:

Best Practices

📌 Open Data practices are closely tied with data ethics and the Open Data Institute has developed "The Data Ethics Canvas" which helps to identify and manage ethical issues.

Below are links to more information regarding Open Data Best Practices:

Open Content

Open Standards

Access to information can be made easier, cooperation and innovation can be fostered, and the quality and diversity of content can be improved thanks to open content. Not all open content, though, is created equal. To ensure that open content is useful, reliable, and engaging, it is important to follow some well-known standards for producing and sharing it.

A good open content standard should contain the following elements:

  • A clear and explicit license that grants everyone free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities: retain, revise, remix, reuse, and redistribute the content.
  • A specification of the format, structure, and metadata of the content that enables interoperability, accessibility, and discoverability across different platforms and devices.
  • A description of the process and criteria for developing, maintaining, and updating the content that ensures quality, relevance, and diversity of perspectives.

Here are some sites that contain resources about well-known standards for open content:

Best Practices

To ensure that open content is useful, reliable, and engaging, it is important to follow some best practices for producing and sharing it. Here are some sites that contain resources about best practices for open content:

Digital Public Goods (DPGs) are open-source software, open data, open AI systems, and open content collections that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). If you have any questions regarding the DPG application process or anything else, you can ask directly to the DPG Community for guidance or send us an email; we're available to help you.


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