Building population scale platforms

In the early 90’s, as the internet was taking the world by a storm and protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP for example) were being laid out for applications to leverage and build, a cool protocol took shape that allowed people to instantly message each other on the internet. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol. Built by Jarkko Oikarinen, it allowed for one-to-one communication, file sharing and discussion forums. ICQ was the one of the first widely adopted instant messenger to use IRC, and several followed suit post that. There were many other protocols built and an explosion of IMs took place, leveraging one of these protocols. The early 2000s also saw multi-protocol IMs, such as Trillian, that could connect to multiple IM services, allowing for one client across any IM service. Think of it as a Swiss knife for IMs, saddling across protocols, solving a nagging issue of proprietary protocols that allowed for communication only on their IMs, requiring people to install many clients.?

A large chunk of the internet, and by that definition, I mean mass adoption of open digital products, have been on back of interoperability and open platforms. Think of these as roads that allow enterprising folks and organizations to build a gas station, or a coffee shop, or run a bus service, or??maybe be a highway robber (!!) and make their fortunes on back of an infrastructure that is open, publicly accessible and interoperable. Open, because anyone could build a service for it as long as they did not break any rules or made part of the road, inaccessible and private. Publicly accessible because anyone could use the road and access the services, for a fee if they required a payment or for free. Interoperable because the road had specifications, that allowed for similar services to run on it for different users - for example you can have both a truck and a car use the same road to get from Point A to Point B, but catering to different users.

The internet got this far by this fundamental concept i.e. lay the highway and let the ecosystem flourish around it. While this has pushed innovation in the commercial space and organisations and startups have traditionally leaned more to solve for consumer and enterprise problems, the citizen services and governance space has tried to retrofit commercial solutions for their use cases. Citizen services and governance solutions come with a number of challenges - scale, privacy, ease of use, robustness and replicability. So while commercial grade solutions can be deployed, there is an increasing case for infrastructure that is purpose built for citizen services and governance. The term Digital Public infrastructure (DPI) and subsequently Building Blocks (BB) and Digital Public Goods (DPG), were coined to refer to digital products and services that were open by design and primarily for citizen services and governance. India’s Aadhaar was one of the first to really bring DPIs to life with an implementation across a billion plus citizens. Similarly, UPI brought ease of payments. But UPI also had a ripple effect of spawning an entire ecosystem leveraging it to build payment apps, marketplaces and more. In essence, it was the road around which shops sprung up. For example, Amazon Pay came up with a plethora of services leveraging UPI.?

And that is the essence of DPIs. We are now increasingly seeing a shift in solutions that are building on back of DPIs than on closed, proprietary platforms. Similarly we are seeing more open systems and DPIs being conceptualised and created, essentially resulting into a flywheel that is self sustaining. For instance, BECKN protocol that allows for peer to peer discoverability and essentially solves for supply and demand use cases, is today powering ONDC, Namma Yatri and several others across the globe in a classic example of a DPI powering private players. The beauty of these platforms is that they are also incremental in nature, much like Lego blocks. You can provide value added services on an existing implementation - for instance one could leverage a Namma Yatri-like solution, and extend to the logistics industry, allowing for intra/inter city delivery. Replicability of these platforms across domains and use cases is immense as long as the fundamental problem statement reminds the same - like in this case a supply-demand-discoverability problem.

As we build systems of population scale, mass adoption will come from leveraging common digital platforms and by extension, digital public infrastructure that allow for applications to talk to each other seamlessly, and if need be, across geographies. It no longer mattters which payment app you have on your phone - ?as long as it is on UPI, you can send/receive money in exactly the same fashion as everyone else. You don’t need a payments Swiss army app that has multiple payment apps because they cannot talk to each other. This unlocks greater innovation on solving the actual problem for your users rather than focusing on solving self created technology choke points.

#DigitalPublicGoods #DigitalPublicInfrastructure #Aadhaar #UPI #BECKN #NammaYatri