Our Priorities

Principle

Explanation

Design with the user

  -Develop context appropriate solutions informed by user needs.

  -Include all user groups in planning, development, implementation and assessment.

  -Develop projects in an incremental and iterative manner.

  -Design solutions that learn from and enhance existing workflows and plan for organizational adaptation.

  -Ensure solutions are sensitive to, and useful for, the most marginalized populations:
women, children, those with disabilities, and those affected by conflict and disaster.

Understand the
existing ecosystem

  -Participate in networks and communities of like-minded practitioners.

  -Align to existing technological, legal, and regulatory policies.

Design for scale

  -Design for scale from the start, and assess and mitigate dependencies that might limit ability to scale.

  -Employ a “systems” approach to design, considering implications of design beyond an immediate project.

  -Be replicable and customizable in other countries and contexts.

  -Demonstrate impact before scaling a solution.

  -Analyse all technology choices through the lens of national and regional scale.

  -Factor in partnerships from the beginning and start early negotiations.

Build for
sustainability

  -Plan for sustainability from the start, including planning for long-term financial health, i.e. assessing
total cost of ownership.

  -Utilize and invest in local communities and developers by default and help catalyze their growth.

  -Engage with local governments to ensure integration into national strategy and identify high-level
government advocates.

Be data driven

  -Design projects so that impact can be measured at discrete milestones with a focus on outcomes rather
than outputs.

  -Evaluate innovative solutions and areas where there are gaps in data and evidence.

  -Use real-time information to monitor and inform management decisions at all levels.

  -When possible, leverage data as a by-product of user actions and transactions for assessments.

Use open standards,
open data, open source, and open innovation

  -Adopt and expand existing open standards.

  -Use open data and functionalities and expose them in documented APIs (Application Programming
Interfaces) where use by a larger community is possible.

  -Invest in software as a public good.

  -Develop software to be open source by default with the code made available in public repositories and
supported through developer communities.

Reuse and improve

  -Use, modify and extend existing tools, platforms, and frameworks when possible.

  -Develop in modular ways, favoring approaches that are interoperable over those that are monolithic by design.

Do no harm

  -Assess and mitigate risks to the security of users and their data.

  -Consider the context and needs for privacy of personally identifiable information when designing
solutions and mitigate accordingly.

  -Ensure equity and fairness in co-creation, and protect the best interests of the end-users.

Be collaborative

  -Engage diverse expertise across disciplines and industries at all stages.

  -Work across sector silos to create coordinated and more holistic approaches.

  -Document work, results, processes and best practices and share them widely.

  -Publish materials under a Creative Commons license by default, with strong rationale if another licensing approach is taken.