2025-11-19 –, Main Room
How can we measure the total benefit that open technological solutions afford a society? As part of a larger study into countries’ adoption of Digital Public Goods (DPGs) in their digital public infrastructure, we are developing a framework that seeks to capture the total value of DPGs relative to proprietary solutions. Drawing on existing approaches to conceptualize the economic impact of Open, the framework would combine Total Cost of Ownership, which captures the direct and indirect monetary costs of a technology, with an analysis of Broader Ecosystem Value, the harder-to-quantify gains in innovation, strategic autonomy, and social benefit that come from open technological solutions. The goal is to create a comprehensive, rigorous, and sound way to assess how open technologies benefit a society. We would present the components of this framework, along with emerging evidence gathered from empirical work, and then discuss open questions and ways to develop and test our framework further.
How can we measure the total benefit that open technological solutions afford a society? As part of a larger study into countries’ adoption of Digital Public Goods (DPGs) in their digital public infrastructure, this ongoing research puts forth a framework that seeks to capture the total value of DPGs relative to proprietary solutions. The paper draws on existing approaches to conceptualize the economic impact of 'open'. The framework combines Total Cost of Ownership, which captures the direct and indirect monetary costs of a technology, with an analysis of Broader Ecosystem Value, the harder-to-quantify gains in innovation, strategic autonomy, and social benefit that come from open technological solutions. The goal is to create a comprehensive, rigorous, and sound way to assess how open technologies benefit a society. The paper discusses the components of this framework, along with emerging evidence gathered from empirical work, and then discusses open questions and ways to develop and test the framework further.
Gordon LaForge is a senior policy analyst at New America working on the geopolitics and governance of emerging technologies like AI, international institutions, and the future of democracy. He is also a visiting faculty member at Stanford University's Leadership Academy for Development and at Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management.
LaForge was previously senior researcher at Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies program, where he wrote on institution-building in fragile states. He has been a freelance journalist in Southeast Asia, a researcher with the predictive analytics and geopolitical risk firm Predata Inc., and a graduate intern at the US Mission to NATO in Brussels working on nuclear policy planning in the Office of the Defense Advisor.
LaForge's analysis and reporting have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Washington Quarterly, The Daily Beast, The Diplomat, and other publications. He is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was awarded two Fulbright fellowships to Indonesia. He holds an MPA in international relations from Princeton University and a BA in literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder.