A few more "stakes in the ground" assumptions that are wide-open to debate.

• These large scale challenges shouldn't be approached with a "pilot project" mindset. Like a "Google moonshot" approach, they should have access to adequate funding to attract the right talent and build to appropriate scale. That funding should be secure, and shouldn't be exposed to the political demands of annual budgeting. To date, government funded pilot-project approaches have not led to much meaningful change
• "Platforms for the People" requires that, if the projects are designed properly and fully funded, the best technology talent would choose to work on them. It assumes there is a strong supply of technology leaders who are either more interested in pursuing important problems than financial reward, or have already amassed sufficient wealth to make financial rewards less relevant.
• An international approach will often make sense. The rationale behind approaching it this way is several-fold. It would improve the ability to succeed given more access to data, greater prestige to attract better talent and easier to fund due to smaller commitments for each country. It would provide the scale to compete with global technology companies. And it would remove the effort from the day-to-day partisan debates in any one country. This isn't to say its impossible to successfully pursue these as nations. Singapore, Estonia, Finland and the UK, among others, are currently pursuing things that might qualify as "platforms for the people." The contention here is that, for areas of common interest, the result would be better with a collective approach. Selfishly, as a Canadian, I also know its our only path to being part of the best answers.
• Approaching our collective challenges with an independently governed, multi-national approach has been the chosen path before. CERN, the International Space Station and ITER are a few examples. In these areas the benefits of scale and independence were deemed more important than national control. These facts are also true for some of the challenges that digital infrastructure could address.
• "Platforms for the People" could be seen as a "tech will save humanity" approach, but it needs to be seen as an enabler for human action. This often comes up with digital technology ideas - we worry about them more than other technologies. Medical technology, combined with doctors, isn't something we object to. Airplanes are a technology that's been helpful, as is plumbing. Is the issue that we haven't yet mapped out the right partnership between humanity and technology when it comes to digital technology? Certainly as we thought about the employment and training system, one of our main considerations was how will this be used by employment advisors in the field, who will remain critical actors in helping people find work.
• We could develop a light-touch governance model that still ensures data security, interoperability and open standards. This is for discussion, but necessary if any of these are to be politically acceptable and also not weighed down by bureaucracy.