It’s been a couple of weeks since I was briefly in DC for the World Bank and IMF spring meetings, but not too late to share a few highlights.
- Center for Global Development’s session on European collaboration in the midst of aid cuts was frank and helpful, reflecting a renewed emphasis on addressing some of the systemic problems in global financing. There’s a constant discussion of the need for better coordination, but beyond coordination it’s clear there’s also a need for leaner, test+learn approaches to getting things done.
- Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure - CDPI and Digital Impact Alliance a group of us together to mark the launch of CDPI’s new vision paper on Verifiable Credentials - https://vc.cdpi.dev : simple and consistent ways for you to demonstrate your eligibility and qualifications. The focus on credentials is a really welcome addition to the Digital Public Infrastructure conversation with a real focus on user-centricity and clear options to start small and scale.
- ODI Global’s launch of a new report on emerging themes in digital-era public finance marks a next step in our joint work on the Digital Public Finance Hub, looking across the field for common challenges and opportunities. Needless to say there’s lots of interest in AI and lots of issues with procurement, but there’s more too. Ameya Ashok Naik’s got a great write-up of the event
- Co-Develop and Omidyar Network hosted a discussion between Nandan Nilekani and Michele Lawrence Jawando on digital public infrastructure and AI. It was a refreshingly pragmatic conversation, reflecting the rapidly changing nature of the technologies and many unknowns about their use, while noting the need to maintain situational awareness and be experimenting to work out how to ensure the technologies can be governed and harnessed for public good, not private capture.
As ever there was far more going on than it was possible to fit in. Many friends and events missed. But great to see positive movements amid the chaos.