Insights
Articles
Engineering, policy, and product perspectives from the team building 888.
Thought Leadership7 min readTrust is the bottleneck for public-sector AI
Models are good enough. Procurement is ready. The gap is governance — and most agencies are solving it the wrong way.
Dr. Amani Al-Rashid
Engineering8 min readEdge inference for public safety — when latency is liability
City-scale video analytics can't tolerate cloud roundtrip. We unpack the architecture choices that make sub-150ms inference reliable.
Tewodros Bekele
Thought Leadership9 min readThe economics of sovereign cloud — when does in-country make sense?
Sovereign cloud isn't a religious choice. The math depends on data sensitivity, latency, and regulator posture. Here's the model we use to advise clients.
Dr. Amani Al-Rashid
Policy7 min readCompliance-as-code — turning UAE PDPL into platform primitives
Most enterprise compliance lives in PDFs. We treat it as code: enforced at the platform layer, audited continuously.
Leyla Haddad
Thought Leadership7 min readRFP readiness — five things every government IT vendor gets wrong
We've responded to enough sovereign IT RFPs to know which vendors win. Hint: it's almost never the lowest bid or the flashiest demo.
Sara Al-Mahri
Thought Leadership9 min readCentral bank payment rails — UPI lessons for sovereigns
What India's UPI, Brazil's PIX, and the US's FedNow teach the next wave of central banks building national payment systems.
Dr. Amani Al-Rashid- Engineering9 min read
Designing identity for population scale
Six lessons from rolling out a sovereign identity stack to 25 million people — what we got right, and what we'd do differently.
Tewodros Bekele 
Engineering6 min readAR/RTL is an engineering discipline, not a copy task
Most multi-language sites add Arabic as a translation pass and ship a broken layout. Real RTL takes engineering decisions in your CSS, your typography, and your icons.
Tewodros Bekele- Policy6 min read
Sovereign LLM procurement — what to ask vendors
A regulator-friendly procurement checklist for evaluating LLM vendors on a sovereign-IT engagement.
Leyla Haddad - Policy8 min read
Policy-as-code — the missing layer for government AI
Compliance frameworks shouldn't live in Word documents. They should be enforced at the platform layer, with the same discipline as IaC.
Leyla Haddad - Engineering7 min read
Server components + multilingual — what we learned shipping EN/AR/AM
Server-rendered Arabic with proper Naskh display typography is harder than it looks. Lessons from production.
Tewodros Bekele - Engineering8 min read
Five habits for shipping big database migrations
Big migrations don't yield to ordinary discipline. They reward specific habits — additive change, written rollbacks, feature-flagged reads.
888 Editorial 
Engineering10 min readPlatform engineering for the public sector — six lessons
Stand up a developer platform for a government agency without alienating the operator team. Lessons from three deployments.
Tewodros Bekele
Thought Leadership8 min readIncident response when your customer is a regulator
Government incidents have different stakeholders, different timelines, and different consequences. Here's our runbook.
Sara Al-Mahri
Policy7 min readWhy trust — not technology — is the bottleneck for population identity
Identity systems fail at adoption, not infrastructure. Here's the operating model we use to earn citizen trust before we earn enrollment.
Leyla Haddad- Engineering5 min read
Design systems for 3 scripts — Latin, Arabic, Ethiopic
What changes about a design system when it needs to hold up across right-to-left and a third script?
Dawit Mengistu - Engineering6 min read
Building multilingual AI for Ethiopia and the UAE
What it takes to ship Amharic + Arabic + English from day one — typography, models, and policy.
Dawit Mengistu - Thought Leadership6 min read
Open source as a sovereign-IT moat
Why our preferred procurement default is OSS — and how regulators learned to love GPL/AGPL.
Dr. Amani Al-Rashid
