Unlocking Open Source for Global Health

Enabling the Discovery of SDG-Aligned Projects

🌍 Inspiration

The United Nations recognizes that open-source projects hold immense potential to drive progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, with over 300 million repositories on GitHub, there is no standardized way to identify, track, or measure the impact of these projects against the SDGs.

This gap in discovery means that high-impact solutions addressing global health challenges remain hidden—underutilized by researchers, policymakers, and organizations that could benefit from them. We set out to bridge this gap, ensuring that open-source efforts don’t just exist, but drive real-world change.

🔍 What We Learned

Through our research, we discovered:

• A lack of standardization—no structured metadata exists to label projects based on SDGs.
  
• Missed opportunities—organizations, funders, and contributors struggle to find relevant projects.
  
• The UN’s active interest—efforts are underway to map open-source work to SDGs, but a practical implementation is missing.
  

This highlighted an urgent need for a universal discovery framework that allows maintainers to self-identify their projects’ alignment with SDGs.

🛠️ How We Built It

Our solution is a workflow that enables open-source maintainers to categorize their projects using simple, structured metadata formats like JSON, YAML, or Markdown. This ensures that projects can be:

• Easily searched and filtered based on SDG relevance.
  
• Used by the UN, researchers, and funders to track impact.
  
• Integrated into existing platforms to enhance visibility and support.
  

We explored existing metadata models, such as CMS’s codejson-generator, and adapted them to suit the needs of SDG 3 (Good Health & Well-Being), with the flexibility to scale across other SDGs.

🚧 Challenges We Faced

• Defining clear SDG mapping criteria—ensuring that maintainers can accurately categorize their work.
  
• Balancing simplicity and detail—creating a lightweight yet effective metadata format.
  
• Ensuring adoption—encouraging developers to tag their projects while making it easy for platforms to integrate our system.
  

🌎 The Future of SDG Discovery

Our project is a step toward unlocking the full potential of open-source for global good. If the United Nations is looking for a way to map SDGs to real-world projects, then this is the solution that can make it happen. With widespread adoption, we can empower funders, researchers, and innovators to find and support impactful work, accelerating progress toward a healthier, more equitable world.

🚀 Join us in making open-source work for global health!

Built With

• javascript
• node.js
• openai
• python