About Public Rails

Public Rails is an independent English-language magazine about digital public infrastructure (DPI) and the open digital economy: the identity systems, payment rails, data exchange layers, registries and standards that governments and markets increasingly run on.

What it publishes

Three kinds of articles:

• Guides explain concepts and techniques in plain language: what open digital ecosystems are, how interoperability works, which privacy safeguards matter in digital identity.
• Case studies examine how specific systems were built and governed, such as Estonia's X-Road, Singapore's Singpass and Myinfo, the MOSIP identity platform, India's GST Network and UPI.
• Analysis takes on contested questions: who should govern DPI, when open source is the right choice, how to measure impact.

The intended readers are civil servants, policy and programme staff, students, journalists, researchers and engineers who need a reliable, sourced starting point.

How articles are sourced and checked

• Facts come from primary sources wherever possible: laws and regulations (for example on EUR-Lex), official statistics, central bank and ministry publications, technical specifications and documentation published by the projects themselves, and reports by international organisations. These sources are linked in the text and listed at the end of each article.
• Dates are given for facts that change, such as transaction volumes, adoption counts or legal deadlines. When press coverage of official data is used because the official page cannot be quoted directly, the article says so.
• When sources disagree, the article says which one it follows. When a figure cannot be confirmed, it is left out rather than estimated.
• Each article shows its publication date and, when substantially revised, the date of the update.

What Public Rails does not do

None of the governments, international bodies, foundations, standards groups or companies covered here has any affiliation with Public Rails, and their names and logos are never presented as ours. Reports published by other organisations are not hosted or redistributed on this site. There is nothing for sale either: no consulting, no sponsored pieces, no paid links. Bylines carry the publication's name instead of individual writers.

Publisher

Public Rails is an independent publication whose legal identity, registered office and host are set out in the legal notice. Corrections and questions: see contact and corrections.

About this domain

Around 2020, the domain opendigitalecosystems.net hosted a website about the "Open Digital Ecosystems" concept then being discussed in India, with a report, country case studies (including Estonia, Singapore, the GST Network and MOSIP), concept papers and blog posts. Public Rails has no connection with that website, the people or organisations who ran it, or the authors of its documents. None of its text, documents, images or logos is reused here, and its PDF files are not hosted on this site. Some former addresses now lead to new, original articles on the same broad subjects; those articles are not summaries of the earlier documents.

See also the photo credits and the privacy page.