New Paper - Advancing Digital Government through Open Source Indicators

New paper out where Sachiko Muto and I argue that if we want to enable the many opportunities Open Source Software (OSS) offers for digital government, we need to start measuring how governments actually use and support OSS, and enable knowledge-sharing and benchmarking by baking those measures into global digital maturity indexes.

In the paper, we analyse policies and support actions around software reuse through OSS across 16 digitally mature countries, combining desk research with interviews to build country reports. We look at both how governments frame OSS in policy and how they operationalise it in practice, including actors, structures, and support mechanisms. The paper is based on an underpinning report, commissioned by the Danish Agency for Digital Government (DIGIST) and Local Government Denmark (KL) - see earlier blog post for deep dive.

We find that most countries (of those sampled) now have policies that explicitly use OSS as an instrument for software reuse, covering both inbound acquisition and outbound release of software. These policies are typically anchored in central public sector organisations and tie OSS to goals like interoperability, digital sovereignty, transparency, cost efficiency, and security – with security framed as both risk and strength.

Support structures are also apparent across the countries, with Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), acquisition and release guidelines, and software catalogues showing up as critical enablers for turning policy into practice. Successful cases of public sector OSS often start as single-entity initiatives that mature into jointly governed projects with shared stewardship and collaborative maintenance.

We show that existing digital government indexes (OECD, WIPO, DIAL, etc.) mention OSS but only in narrow ways that don’t capture real adoption, reuse, or collaborative development. We therefore propose a set of empirically grounded indicator areas across policy design, incentives, implementation, and support – essentially a toolbox for measuring how governments leverage OSS as a strategic asset rather than a tactical detail.

For policymakers, our work is a call to treat OSS as part of the core machinery of digital government, not an optional add-on. For digital maturity indexes, it offers a concrete starting point for integrating OSS enablement indicators so that rankings reflect actual capacity for interoperability, sovereignty, and sustainable collaboration – not just surface-level digitalisation. Concretely, the indicators also feed into our ongoing work on the UN Open Source Enablement Compass (OSEC), providing dimensions and questions that can help governments assess where they stand today and where to focus next.