In 2025, Europe is making significant strides in adopting and supporting Digital Public Goods (DPGs) – public interest technologies that are openly licensed, contribute to sustainable development, and are built to be reused.

Since 2019, DPGs have been defined by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a multi-stakeholder UN-endorsed initiative, as “... open source software, open standards, 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).” The DPGA also maintains the DPG Standard and a verified DPG Registry, helping to certify and ensure the continued relevance of these technologies for governments and other actors looking to adopt them.

The DPG paradigm has achieved the most liftoff in international development, promising collaborative and reusable software solutions with low barriers to entry and established communities of practice. What’s notable now, however, is the momentum they are achieving in the so-called Global North, including in the United States and increasingly now Europe.

What is behind the momentum for DPGs in Europe?

Globally, DPG communities are helping to facilitate the emergence of open, participatory infrastructures backed by better governance. The connection of DPGs to digital infrastructure opportunities has seen a noticeable uptick in DPGs activity in recent years, particularly in Europe, which previously did not engage with the DPG discourse as much as global development practitioners and government in the Global South.

In Europe, there is some evidence that this infrastructure – whether for participatory democracy, budgeting, public health, or anything else – is increasingly leveraging the participation of European public institutions and civic tech communities. Furthermore, a lot of homegrown open source innovation – like Decidim – is becoming recognised as DPGs.

Across Europe, many EU-funded projects and frameworks now explicitly reference or align with the DPG model, including the Next Generation Internet, and DPGs are increasingly referenced in European policy initiatives, such as EuroStack. National digital strategies (e.g., Germany’s Digital Strategy, France’s Tech.gouv) are increasingly referencing open source, interoperability, and public goods, and there has been a noticeable rise in European open source infrastructure efforts (e.g., OSPOs in governments, projects like X-Road and eIDAS 2.0), much of which is connected to DPG communities.

New Use Cases for Public Sector Adoption of DPGs in Europe

In the last months alone, many organisations representing DPGs have begun to consolidate their governance structures or begin exploring more at scale their applications as infrastructure in European public sector organisations (PSOs). From participatory democracy platforms and microsimulation engines to open data editors and AI assistants, Europe is no longer just a consumer of DPGs. It is becoming a vibrant producer and steward.

Here are just a few examples of where European-led DPGs are making strides in recent months.

The MultiPOD Project: Decidim and the European Public Space

One of the most emblematic developments is the MultiPOD project, led by the team behind Decidim, the open source participatory democracy platform born in Barcelona. MultiPOD – which is short for Multi-level Participatory and Deliberative Democracy – aims to create a European Public Space for Citizen Deliberation, one which integrates local, national, and EU-level participation into unified and transparent digital infrastructures. These discussions aim to involve citizens in political deliberation and improve transparency in public sector deliberation processes.

MultiPOD is perhaps not just just another civic tech experiment. It could be a model for a networked Digital Commons community which contributes to shared digital infrastructure priorities, one wherein code, governance, and deployment are co-developed by PSOs, research institutions, and European institutions alike. This might allow for more networked but federated decision-making, rooted in the EU’s history with open standards and participatory democracy initiatives at the local level.

OpenFisca Association: Institutionalising Digital Commons for Social Policy

In France, the emergence of the OpenFisca Association – a new organisational steward for OpenFisca, a widely-used open source engine to write rules for code – is another sign of DPG maturity. Recently announced, the Association formalises the governance of OpenFisca, which provides a microsimulation engine to model tax-benefit systems which is valuable to many European PSOs. Born inside the French government and now increasingly adopted by researchers and administrations across Europe, OpenFisca’s new structure brings clarity to its stewardship, enabling broader collaboration and long-term sustainability of the project.

This shift from project to association-based governance is emblematic of a broader trend: successful DPGs are evolving from ad-hoc codebases to institutionalised Digital Commons – supported not just by governments, but also by academia, civil society, and transnational networks. These resources have robust communities, open governance, and strong communities of practice. This helps strengthen their reliability and allows PSOs and other actors to more confidently deploy them at scale.

Open Data Editor 1.4.0: Enabling Transparency Through Tooling

The Open Knowledge Foundation – which stewards CKAN as a DPG and supports many DPG-relevant initiatives – continues to demonstrate how open tools support evidence-based governance. The release of the Open Data Editor 1.4.0, a tool for editing and finding errors in datasets, creates a new level of possibilities for many working on open data initiatives across Europe.

This is perhaps most relevant in local PSOs, where the time and resources to produce high-quality open data are few. The tool makes it radically easier to prepare, clean, and validate datasets for public use – an essential step in ensuring trust and transparency. It has been trialled by a number of actors all over the globe, including by  Observatoire des armements / CDRPC in France and the City of Zagreb in Croatia.

While not officially registered as a DPG yet, these use cases (particularly the one in France) show how the Open Data Editor functions as a public good in practice. It enables the integration of multiple datasets into a single, high-quality public spreadsheet, or the cleaning of infrastructure data. Such tooling offers huge advantages for journalists, watchdogs, and public administrators alike, particularly those working on open data in digital infrastructure projects.

AI with Values: Consul Democracy Foundation’s Open Source, LLM-Powered Civic Assistant Programme

AI and large language models are increasingly making their way into public sector applications, but with continued concerns around safety, bias, and transparency. The Consul Democracy Foundation is taking a different approach. Their new Civic Assistant is an open source, LLM-powered assistant designed specifically for public participation platforms. The platform builds off of Consul Democracy, a registered DPG, to pilot the use of AI tools in helping to deploy Consul and make it useful to local PSOs.

Unlike proprietary solutions, this AI aims to be grounded in public values: transparency, explainability, and inclusion. By embedding it in public consultation workflows, the Consul Democracy Foundation is hoping to offer an early look at how open AI infrastructure could become part of the DPG landscape, but only if governed carefully and with safeguards in place. The project will run from 2025-2027 and is currently supported by three technical providers supporting European PSOs, including the Slovenia non-profit service provider Danes je nov dan, the Scottish municipal association COSLA, and the German service provider Mehr Demokratie.

Evaluating Europe’s DPG Moment

All these projects demonstrate the increased activity around European DPG projects. Many of the most recent activities around those projects – which often position themselves as part of European enthusiasm around open source in digital infrastructure – are also strongly aligned with European values regarding digital public spaces and civic participation.

Europe’s commitment to human rights, data protection, and public interest technologies has undoubtedly played a significant role in spurring adoption of such technologies. The DPG Standard – which emphasises privacy, security, accessibility, and adaptability – maps closely to European values and regulatory norms like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This alignment makes DPGs an appealing option for governments and institutions seeking to modernise their services without compromising citizen rights.

At the same time, the global development landscape is evolving. As a major international donor, the EU is increasingly supporting digital cooperation and infrastructure initiatives in partner countries. This has opened new pathways for European actors and institutions to contribute DPGs to international platforms, participate in multilateral efforts around DPGs, and work together on global digital infrastructure initiatives.

While Europe’s engagement with DPGs is growing, it tends to be more distributed and policy-driven than in jurisdictions with more centralised digital infrastructure efforts. Nonetheless, the convergence of political will, institutional capacity, and international collaboration around open source and infrastructure suggest that Europe might become an important player in the global DPG ecosystem. Projects like these show how that might continue to happen going forward.