An open-source movement shipping tech for the public good.
AI is handing humanity almost unimaginable power, but the speed and breadth of this shift are accelerating the wealth gapAnthropic CEO Dario Amodei on AI widening inequality — pledging 80% of his wealth to fight it. Fortune, Jan 2026. and concentrating power in the hands of a few.
Right now, most of the technology that dictates our lives is driven by private interest, designed to capture attention and maximize profit rather than serve the publicHow tech got captured by private interest, and what public tech looks like. Tap to explore.. We cannot rely on a few corporations to build everything our society needs from AI, and we cannot afford the risk that they won't.
If left entirely to commercial incentives, AI will widen social divides and leave the most critical societal problems under-resourced. We desperately need a parallel ecosystem — Public AIMozilla's call for open, non-commercial AI as a counterweight to Big Tech. Tap to explore. — that runs on non-commercial incentives, where technology is accessible, transparent, and built for everyone.
Our approach is simple but radical: we use open-source collaboration to turn changemakers into builders, and builders into changemakers. By bringing together developers who want to do good and domain experts who deeply understand the problems, we are removing the friction of building public-interest tech — and championing a culture that encourages keeping the tools we build public, free, and openWe recommend AGPL v3 over MIT to protect community members — especially those who don't know better — from having their work taken, closed off, and sold by companies. MIT allows that. AGPL doesn't.
MIT still makes sense for some projects — libraries and tools meant for broad reuse are a good example. That's completely fine. But for most public-interest apps and services, AGPL v3 is the right default.
NGOs that need to keep code private for operational or safety reasons are also welcome to — the goal is public benefit, not ideological purity..
Right now, AI is dissolving the traditional barriers to entry. The cost of software creation is collapsing, and the gap between knowing a problem deeply and shipping a solution has never been smaller. We are harnessing this shift to ship digital infrastructure that actually matters.
Devs, designers, students, self-taught hackers who want their work to matter beyond a paycheck.
Social workers, teachers, organizers, NGO staff. The people who know the problems and now, finally, can build the solutions.
Content creators, event hosts, writers, translators, illustrators. The work that turns scattered projects into a culture.
You don't have to code. You don't have to know what a Git branch is. You don't have to have ever called yourself technical. You need a problem worth solving and a few hours a week.
Build for Public — Co-building Meetup #1
Pick a public-interest project from the board, form a team, and build for a few hours. All skill levels welcome — designers, researchers, and non-coders too.
A few hours every week where we sit down, discuss problems, team up, and actually ship impactful open source projects solving local problems for the public.
We team up and partner with NGOs to properly maintain and develop projects that are actually useful to the communities they serve.
We post about the work, share what we're building, and try to make sure good projects don't just disappear into GitHub. Too many do.
We help fellow members and non-technical changemakers build, advocate for open and public tech, and create awareness content on the risks and potential of AI.
Three beliefs we keep coming back to. They shape what we build and who we build it with.
Every project is encouraged to be openWe recommend AGPL v3 over MIT to protect community members — especially those who don't know better — from having their work taken, closed off, and sold by companies. MIT allows that. AGPL doesn't.
MIT still makes sense for some projects — libraries and tools meant for broad reuse are a good example. That's completely fine. But for most public-interest apps and services, AGPL v3 is the right default.
NGOs that need to keep code private for operational or safety reasons are also welcome to — the goal is public benefit, not ideological purity. and built in public. The point isn't just sharing code. It's so the next person can pick it up, fork it, and ship something better. Public knowledge compounds when it's shared.
Not everything worth building gets funded. We build it anyway. Tools for NGOs, communities, and the people who serve them. Not the next startup. Not a side hustle. Tech as public infrastructure.
Changemakers become builders. Builders become changemakers. You don't need to be a developer to ship something useful. You need to be close to the problem and willing to figure the rest out.
A directory of Malaysia's NGOs, with an API anyone can build on.
Civil society shouldn't be hard to find. OpenNGO is a public directory of Malaysian NGOs with structured data, search, and an open API. Built for journalists, funders, and researchers.
Turn your reading library into a shareable poster.
Import from Goodreads or Hardcover, pick a visualization style, and download. Built on World Book Day to raise awareness for global literacy — 773 million adults cannot read.
Gender empowerment for young people through art and education.
Founded by Ain Husniza after her viral campaign against school rape culture, Pocket of Pink uses art, advocacy, and Comprehensive Sexuality Education to empower youth and challenge harmful gender norms. We helped them ship their site in a day using AI.
Open data tracking AI adoption across 16 countries.
Interactive visualization and open data API tracking AI adoption from UAE at 64% to Nigeria at 7%. Data sourced from Microsoft, Stanford HAI, OECD, and 11 other authoritative sources.
Malaysia's open data, one front door.
The country's public data platform. Dashboards, downloadable datasets, public APIs. No key required.
Tracking all 222 Members of Parliament.
A volunteer-built site that tracks Malaysia's MPs across attendance, motions, and service centres. Parliamentary data, made legible.
A QR directory for donating to mosques and suraus.
Crowdsourced and open-source. One developer saw the friction in giving to local institutions and shipped the directory the community needed.
Find a pasar malam, any night.
A directory of night markets across Malaysia. Days, hours, locations, directions. The kind of small civic tool the market won't build but a community will.
