How might we leverage existing communities of experts to contribute to DPG while incentivising individual contributors of these communities?
In 2016, the Office of Innovation launched The Venture Fund with $20 million to collaborate with innovators on the ground in UNICEF program countries to build and test new technology-driven solutions that tackle the difficulties confronting children. Working in the areas of: mobile, artificial intelligence, drones, blockchain and VR, among others, the Fund describes these as “digital public goods”. The goal of this project is to engage and incentivize developers to contribute code to Digital Public Goods.
Challenge
The insights gained from the research we conducted were the following:
-Developers don’t relate to the mission of Digital Public Goods because it is too broad
-Both contributors to DPG and non contributors had never heard of DPG
Our main challenge was to identify the target market of digital public goods based on the varied projects offered on the platform. We concluded that UNICEF had to acquire users from existing communities of developers that tackle projects along the lines of Sustainable Development Goals.
Outcome
Our research showed that we had to create a greater sense of community around Digital Public Goods. The outcome was an onboarding strategy for collaborators and a platform, which: fosters a sense of network/community among developers, tracks the contributions, progress or needs on existing projects, and provides an easy way to filter /identify projects with proposed incentives.