What are open digital ecosystems? A plain-language guide

Guides · Published 2026-09-08

Aerial view of a multi-level motorway interchange with looping slip roads among green fields — A motorway interchange in Surrey, England: many routes, one set of shared rules. Photo: Mike McBey, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

"Open digital ecosystem" and "digital public infrastructure" are two names for overlapping ideas: shared digital systems, run under public oversight, on which many organisations can build services. This guide explains where the terms come from, what they include and exclude, and how to tell a real ecosystem from a government portal with a new label.

Two terms, one family of ideas

The phrase open digital ecosystem (ODE) gained currency in India around 2019 and 2020. In February 2020 the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) opened a public consultation on a whitepaper titled Strategy for National Open Digital Ecosystems (NODE); the comment period was later extended to 31 May 2020. The same year, Omidyar Network India and Boston Consulting Group published a report, Building India's Digital Highways: The Potential of Open Digital Ecosystems, which described ODEs as having three layers: platforms, a community of actors, and governance.

The phrase digital public infrastructure (DPI) became the dominant international term a few years later. Under India's G20 presidency, digital economy ministers agreed in August 2023 on a voluntary G20 Framework for Systems of Digital Public Infrastructure, which leaders welcomed in the New Delhi Declaration of September 2023. That framework describes DPI as a set of shared digital systems that should be secure and interoperable, built on open standards and specifications, and usable by the public and private sectors. It adds that "public" refers to public benefit and access, under appropriate governance and oversight by public authorities, not necessarily to state ownership of every component.

In everyday use, DPI tends to name the rails themselves (identity, payments, data exchange), while ODE puts the emphasis on everything that grows around those rails: the companies, civil society groups and public agencies that build on them, and the rules that keep the arrangement fair.

The three layers

1. Platforms

The technical core: registries, identity systems, payment switches, data exchange layers and the open application programming interfaces (APIs) that expose them. A good platform is deliberately minimal. It does a small number of things, such as confirming that an identity number exists or routing a payment between two accounts, and leaves the user-facing services to others.

2. Community

The people and organisations who build services on the platform, run them in the field, or rely on them: banks, start-ups, hospitals, farmer producer organisations, local governments, assisted-access agents and the end users themselves. Without a community, a platform is just an internal government database.

3. Governance

The legal basis, institutions and accountability mechanisms: who owns and runs the platform, how participants are admitted or excluded, how data is protected, how complaints are handled, and who can audit the system. Governance is the layer most often under-built, and the one that decides whether people can trust the rest.

What usually counts as DPI

Most international frameworks, including UNDP's work on the subject and the G20 framework, single out three "foundational" categories:

Digital identity: a way for people to prove who they are online and offline. Examples include Estonia's ID card and Smart-ID ecosystem, India's Aadhaar, and national ID systems built on the open-source MOSIP platform.
Digital payments: interoperable, often instant, payment systems open to many providers, such as India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) or Brazil's Pix. See our guide to UPI and instant payment systems.
Data exchange: secure, consent-based or law-based exchange of data between organisations, such as Estonia's X-Road or India's Account Aggregator framework for financial data. See data exchange layers explained.

Sector systems built on these foundations, such as a national tax network (GSTN in India), a digital health mission or an agricultural registry, are often described as sectoral ecosystems or, in the 2020 Indian vocabulary, "National Open Digital Ecosystems".

What "open" means, and does not mean

"Open" is the most stretched word in this field. It can refer to several different things, and a system can be open in one sense and closed in another:

Kind of openness	What it means	What it does not guarantee
Open standards	Interfaces and data formats are published and free to implement.	That the underlying software is open source.
Open source	The code is published under a licence that allows reuse and modification.	That the running system is transparent or well governed.
Open access	Any qualifying organisation can join as a participant under published rules.	That joining is cheap or simple in practice.
Open data	Non-personal data (statistics, registries of public bodies) is published for reuse.	Anything about personal data, which should not be "open" at all.

An ecosystem in the full sense usually combines open standards and open access, may or may not rely on open-source code, and keeps personal data protected rather than open. We look at the trade-offs in open source versus proprietary software in government.

Why governments pursue the approach

The arguments advanced by its proponents fall into four groups:

Reuse: a single identity check or payment switch can serve hundreds of services instead of each ministry building its own.
Competition: when the rails are neutral, banks, fintechs and public providers compete on the service rather than on access to the network.
Inclusion: low-cost, interoperable systems can reach people that commercial networks did not find profitable.
Sovereignty: a country keeps control of core systems rather than depending on a single vendor or foreign platform.

None of these benefits is automatic. Each depends on design choices and, above all, on governance. Exclusion errors in identity systems, surveillance risks in data exchange and market concentration on top of supposedly neutral rails are documented risks, discussed in our pieces on digital ID safeguards and DPI governance.

Five questions to ask about any "ecosystem"

Can an outside organisation build on it? Are the APIs documented publicly, and are the participation rules published?
Is it minimal? Does the platform restrict itself to shared functions, or does the operator also run the main consumer service in competition with participants?
What is the legal basis? Is there a law, a regulator and a route to redress, or only a project document?
Where does personal data go? Is it federated and minimised, or centralised by default?
Who checks? Are there independent audits, published statistics and a way for civil society to raise problems?

Our design toolkit turns these questions into a longer checklist for teams planning a new system.

Sources and further reading

Boston Consulting Group and Omidyar Network India, Building India's Digital Highways: The Potential of Open Digital Ecosystems (2020).
MyGov, Inviting suggestions on the Strategy for National Open Digital Ecosystems (NODE) (consultation opened February 2020).
G20 Digital Economy Ministers' Meeting, G20 Framework for Systems of Digital Public Infrastructure (August 2023).
UNDP, Digital public infrastructure (overview page).