Primer series
The SDG 9 primer series documents open-source health technology infrastructure and digital public goods, including contributions through Open Source Harbor.
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Primers
Draft for author review
Accountable by Design: AI Infrastructure in the Public Interest
Sigfried Gold, PhD · 2026
Artificial intelligence is moving from novelty to infrastructure, taking on roles in how public services are delivered, how decisions are made, and how resources are directed. When an AI system helps decide who gets a benefit, how a case is prioritized, or what a clinician sees, it has become infrastructure, and infrastructure that makes consequential decisions about people carries a special obligation: it must be…
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Built to Last: Stewardship and the Digital Commons
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
We know how to think about a bridge. Someone builds it, someone owns it, and someone is responsible for inspecting and repairing it for the decades it carries traffic. We are far worse at thinking this way about digital infrastructure, the shared software, data, and platforms that increasingly carry public life. We celebrate the launch and forget the upkeep, and then act surprised when a critical system decays, ge…
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Innovation That Serves: How Public-Interest Innovation Differs From the Commercial Kind
Shawn Swanson, PhD · 2026
Innovation is treated as an unqualified good, a word that ends arguments rather than starts them. But innovation always serves some goal, and the goal shapes everything: what gets built, who it is built for, and what happens to it once it works. Commercial innovation is organized to capture value for an owner. Public-interest innovation is organized to create value that stays available to the public. These are dif…
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Speaking to Each Other: Open Standards and the Case Against Lock-In
Alex Zhu, MS · 2026
When two systems need to share information, something has to define how. That something is a standard, and whether it is open or proprietary turns out to shape the entire future of the systems built on it. Open standards let anyone build compatible systems and move data freely between them. Proprietary ones quietly hand control to whoever owns the format. This primer is about open standards and interoperability, t…
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The Code Beneath Everything: Open Source as Public Infrastructure
Samuel Washington, MS · 2026
Most of the digital services people rely on, government portals, health record systems, payment rails, the everyday web, run on open-source software somewhere in the stack. It is genuine infrastructure, as foundational to modern public life as the electrical grid, and like the grid it is largely invisible until it fails. This primer is about taking open source seriously as public infrastructure: understanding why …
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The Fine Print Decides: Governance and Procurement as Infrastructure Policy
Adil Eastwood · 2026
The most consequential choices about public digital infrastructure are often made not by engineers but in contracts, procurement rules, and governance charters, the documents almost no one reads. Whether a public system will be open or locked in, whether the public will own its own data, whether a vendor can be replaced or holds the institution captive: these are decided in the fine print, long before the first li…
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