1. “Unix philosophy”, Wikipedia, [en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy)

2. Peter H. Salus, “A Quarter-Century of Unix”, 1994

3. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “VA API Platform”, https://developer.va.gov

4. Open311, http://www.open311.org

5. India Stack, describes itself as “a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups and developers to utilise an unique digital Infrastructure to solve India’s hard problems towards presence-less, paperless, and cashless service delivery.”, IndiaStack, “What is India Stack?”, https://indiastack.org/about/

6. U.S. General Services Administration, ‘’Products and Platforms”, https://handbook.18f.gov/products-and-platforms/

7. HM Government, “Design and build government services”, https://www.gov.uk/service-toolkit#gov-uk-services

8. Team Digitale, “Projects”, [teamdigitale.governo.it/en/projec...](https://teamdigitale.governo.it/en/projects.htm)

9. According to the 2019 Whitehall Monitor report, the UK’s messaging platform GOV.UK Notify was in use by 459 public-facing services across central and local government. GOV.UK Pay was in use by 51 services. Not all those would have replaced existing systems, but it illustrates the potential for removing duplication. Institute for Government, “Whitehall Monitor 2019", https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/whitehall-monitor-2019/digital

10. Jason Del Ray, “Amazon’s massive AWS outage was caused by human error”, 2nd March 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/3/2/14792636/amazon-aws-internet-outage-cause-human-error-incorrect-command

11. Amazon, “Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region”, https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

12. Google Cloud Platform, “Google Cloud Networking Incident #18012", https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18012

13. Government Digital Service, “Incident roundup – August 2018", Inside GOV.UK, 3rd April 2019, https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2019/04/03/incident-roundup-august-2018/

14. Cost recovery is not an ideal way to fund platform development because the cost per-transaction declines over time as more users use it. That means the cost is highest for early users. Cost recovery may also be too high a bar for low-frequency users. Because of central funding, the GOV.UK Notify messaging platform, for example, was able to serve more users, as they are able to offer the service free to the majority of users.

15. National Informatics Centre, “Frequently Asked Questions | National Cloud of NIC”, https://cloud.gov.in/faq.php

16. “GOV.UK Notify – Features”, https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/features

17. Mike Bracken, “Argentina just made driving licences digital”, Public Digital blog, 12th February 2019, https://public.digital/2019/02/12/argentina-just-made-driving-licences-digital/

18. “VA’s Benefits Intake API”, YouTube, https://developer.va.gov/explore/facilities

19. Bryan Glick, “GDS is ‘sidelined’ and government as a platform ‘is dead’, says Francis Maude”, Computer Weekly, 14th September 2017, [https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450426316/GDS-is-being-sidelined-and-government-as-a-platform-is-dead-says-Francis-Maude]

20. Goods and Services Tax Network, “About Us”, https://www.gstn.org/about-us/

21. Please do not read this as an argument that government platforms need to be operated by non-profits. It is, however, an example of a novel institutional response.

22. There are examples of international cooperation, which we’ll return to later.