I remember applying for a job (at some weird company) to be put up as an open-source contributor for the dutch government last year. The idea was that I was going to build on top of MuleSoft stuff. They ghosted me a day later, despite me having already done these things for the client they needed me for. I would advise anyone that is looking for OS contributors to not out-source them through companies, as the models don't really align.
Nowadays I'm communicating with people in Utrecht to get partijgedrag to a newer level (the current one is kind of weak). I would love to build some tooling on top of our government APIs, as well. I don't think people realize how much internal tooling is being built with the idea to release them to the public. It's really cool to see.
In the context of other commentary today with various people migrating off of github...
is there an event prompting this, or were you thinking of it more in the general vein of European governments trying to reduce dependency on American services?
I expected them to use GitLab because its older and dutch, but I'm glad they opted for forgejo.
So happy to see they're ingesting voting data again! They stopped a few years ago (which is also a few elections), which I thought was such a shame. Knowing what representatives actually do, and not just promise, is really the only thing that matters.
That's vastly different now, so I want to take a look at how we can properly do ingestion. Currently it's an ETL that is pretty flakey, even with tests. The backend-frontend is also a mess, wondering if we can just go vanillaJS without the mess that is pgtyped/prisma. I'm kind of wondering if we can use ATProto too, but I'm not too familiar with it.
Elwin is also looking at municipality-independent instances (this is less about code and more about communicating with municipalities). They all want money, which is fair, but we're not sponsored or funded anywhere. Supporting this is fruitful thinking on our side.
The code is still on my gh [0], but i might make an org on codeberg for this and mirror to this back to gh
On one hand, it makes representatives accountable to the public, which is good. On the other, it heavily encourages voting among party lines, and makes lobbying a lot easier (as the lobbyists know whether the representatives voted the way the lobbyists wanted). This effectively moves the heart of government from the representatives themselves to lobbyists and high-level party officials.
It's a bad idea in the same way letting you photograph your ballot and upload it to social media is a bad idea; there's a reason most democracies disallow that.
Kind of interesting how the perspective is so different from the inside! Maybe it's the typical "the grass is always greener..."?
Most notably the Labor and Welfare Administration with 3000+ open repos.
Another data point: I've visited public libraries around Friesland province. They all use catalog + internet facilities which look & feel the same across libraries: a browser (Mozilla) + office suite, PDF reader, files can be saved locally put don't persist between user sessions.
This would lend itself perfect for a Linux-based setup: netboot (from per-building local file server or NL-based cloud), read-only filesystem, LibreOffice etc.
But alas: the setup is Windows-based (running on Intel NUC or similar), office suite is Microsoft Excel/Word/PP. Completed by Acrobat PDF reader. No doubt it's at least able to leak telemetry and/or user data if Microsoft were to feel like it (or asked/forced to do by US gov).
And interestingly, code.overheid.nl runs from a residential ip address.
That’s not what I’m seeing.
IP address is currently 147.181.37.238, which is assigned to ODC-Noord via RIPE.
ODC-Noord is a data centre for national government organisations according to https://www.odc-noord.nl/
Checked with `host`, `dig` and hosting-checker.net
That's not a fair characterization. The company that runs it might be bought. That's not planning to put it in USA hands
The result is that the information needed to log in to all the important government systems becomes subject to American jurisdiction. Foreign agents will be able to authenticate themselves as any Dutch citizen and act on their behalf.
> Machine-readable Dutch law execution. regelrecht takes legal texts, encodes them as structured YAML, and runs them as deterministic decision logic. The engine takes a regulation and a set of inputs, evaluates the decision logic, and returns a result with a full explanation trail
Can someone explain this to me? Not the technical aspect, but rather a user story or use case, maybe with example. I can't really wrap my head around it. Thanks in advanced.
As for the use case, it seems to be an explorative exercise to see if something like that can help provide more transparency and consistency within systems of law, "whether machine-executable legislation can provide an answer" to complex and opaque cases. The websites linked earlier have more information + examples.
Bringing the boring old legal system closer to smart contracts.
But I don't have a clue if this is really the case.
I think that's the project.
"Modern calculation engine as a building block for the entire government. In collaboration with the Benefits Service (Dienst Toeslagen). Can we develop a general calculation engine for the government? This project explores how such a system could help in executing complex regulations for citizens and businesses, for example, when calculating benefits."
It's built on Gitlab and does everything you need your git to do.
They also provide hardened base container images at https://container.gov.de
I think that also includes the operating system and the app distribution channels, though. Right now it's just a fiefdom. Not sure how that's solvable. There's no world government — for better or worse!
And if something went wrong they would fully admit to them being wrong and fix it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753523 (269 comments)
I run a Forgejo instance too for my own use, but haven’t looked into how translation is set up as I haven’t had any need for changing any of the templates or texts that ship with Forgejo by default.
You know, they could just use their own language. The link to forgejo even states: "code.overheid.nl (Dutch)"
This, I fear, is just a materially wrong statement.
I love the idea of my city, region or nation (or planet) working to solve a problem and releasing the tool to the public. I just don't want every government to duplicate all the same work, some duplication and competition is fine. But the idea that different places have different specialities etc....
We have 342 municipalities, all buying the same apps (from 3 or 4 vendors) to deliver basic services to their citizens. Common Ground aims to replace all of those with open source solutions.
I see some communities, seems like each community has their own setup, some of them have github links.
If you are Dutch and looking to work on awesome gov-tech send me a DM.
There are things such as sharing best practices and other resources. An example is https://standard.publiccode.net/ and https://new.digitalpublicgoods.net/ .
And of course many efforts towards a shared funding infrastucture, see also https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/KES3TH-funding_europe...
Integral – A Federated, Post-Monetary, Cybernetic Cooperative Economic System
PS.: The earlier we try to encourage exploration and wider discussion of alternatives to "capitalism-vs-socialism-vs-nationalism" dogmas, the faster we might get to a healthier global living environment, IMHO.
So again, why keep spreading this project you aren't responsible for, and whose domain you aren't even familiar with?
I remember MECC was a big part of my childhood. That was a private/public company that made educational software. Most known for Oregon Trail, but they did a LOT of software for many types of computers.
Eventually capitalism caught up with it and it was bought out, pieced out, and destroyed.
Try running forgejo for your own projects, see what you think of it. Doing the research beforehand helps a ton for your DevOps team.
It is pretty common playbook.
We need technology to serve citizens instead of the other way around. We do not need European versions of big-tech because the resulting oligarchy will be as bad.
> "For now, this is a pilot using Forgejo, an open-source, European, and sovereign alternative to GitHub and GitLab. Not all government organisations can use the platform yet. Developers are invited to contribute, with the aim of eventually growing it into a shared Git platform for government bodies."
name a few? the infra seems relatively stable. the only api ive used so far doesn't even have rate limiting, so i can queue ~10 requests at once and they all return fine.
And also a very similar "was this page helpful?"
It's ok, we like the Dutch lol
We'll take the imitation as a form of flattery ;)
