Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

https://www.nldigitalgovernment.nl/news/soft-launch-for-government-open-source-code-platform/

by e12e • 3 months ago

560 127 3 months ago

nldigitalgovernment.nl

sam_lowry_4• 3 months ago

There's not much here https://code.overheid.nl/explore/repos but good luck anyway.

dewey2• 3 months ago

I mean...it's a soft launch, not sure what you expect.

sam_lowry_4• 3 months ago

It's a public website, and it's advertised on HN, and after all the failures of the Dutch government to run independent IT infrastructure, we hoped for a better launch.

ivolimmen• 3 months ago

I am Dutch and I am glad they finally started to do some open sourcing. I have worked at different governmental bodies and have been promoting open source for some time now. But as a simple 'added hands for hire' I never got any response to my pleas. I guess it's typical Dutch that we are one of the last to do so.

oever7• 3 months ago

The government still plans to place the authentication system of all Dutch citizens in USA hands.

And interestingly, code.overheid.nl runs from a residential ip address.

hvb2• 3 months ago

The government still plans to place the authentication system of all Dutch citizens in USA hands.

That's not a fair characterization. The company that runs it might be bought. That's not planning to put it in USA hands

QuantumNomad_3• 3 months ago

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/

sigio2• 3 months ago

It's an ODIDO ip, but from the old versatel block. I'm assuming it's a business netblock, not the typical ftth/dsl range.

embedding-shape14• 3 months ago

I am living in Spain, and from my point of view, Netherlands is one of the ones doing the most for FOSS in Europe today! It sees much faster real-world adoption of FOSS in ministries and municipalities than other countries, the government seems eager to fund FOSS (again, compared to other countries) and generally be welcoming to the ecosystem. Browsing around, there seems to be lots of FOSS projects funded by money coming from the Dutch state.

Kind of interesting how the perspective is so different from the inside! Maybe it's the typical "the grass is always greener..."?

michelb• 3 months ago

Not sure. I think Germany and France are way ahead?

starefossen• 3 months ago

Norwegian Government has a couple of thousand open repos for their code https://norwegian-public-organizations.vercel.app/

Most notably the Labor and Welfare Administration with 3000+ open repos.

oever7• 3 months ago

This map shows that the Dutch municipalities are nearly all in the Microsoft cloud.

https://mxmap.nl/

sigio2• 3 months ago

Also worked for the dutch government for the last 5 years. All or most of the projects we did have been open-sourced on github over the years. Currently there are plans to move them to code.overheid.nl I think, though I no longer work there currently. (I was the github org-admin for the department)

newsclues• 3 months ago

Is there a network or organization for the coordination of government open source projects?

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....

jibbirish2• 3 months ago

In the Netherlands municipalities have been collaborating for years already to build an open source ecosystem: https://commonground.nl/

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.

ramon1568• 3 months ago

Hey, I would love to contribute to this project. Is there a list of repo's I can take a look at and contribute?

I see some communities, seems like each community has their own setup, some of them have github links.

steinwinde• 3 months ago

https://govstack.global/ is trying to find common grounds, but it doesn't coordinate any government work

Nemo_bis• 3 months ago

If by "coordination" you mean central planning, not.

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...

Frieren• 3 months ago

I hope it succeeds and helps to grow open software alternatives in Europe.

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.

robertlagrant• 3 months ago

UK government has a list[0] of over 17000 OSS projects it has created.

[0] https://govbrowse.uk

femtozer• 3 months ago

TIL CyberChef is developed by the UK gov

saltmate• 3 months ago

Given the URL contains GCHQ, it isn't really hidden.

tomudding• 3 months ago

The Dutch government has a similar list[0] though less extensive and does not (yet) include repos from the new platform

[0] https://oss.developer.overheid.nl/repositories

Mashimo• 3 months ago

https://code.overheid.nl/RegelRecht/regelrecht
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.

embedding-shape14• 3 months ago

Probably better entry point is https://regelrecht.rijks.app/ and you can see an example of the YAML and outputs here: https://editor.regelrecht.rijks.app/library/afstemmingsveror...

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.

Bewelge• 3 months ago

https://regelrecht.rijks.app/

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."

fenykep• 3 months ago

I read (with much hope in my heart) it as: all the combined rent laws say that the max rent in X district is 5€/mo/sqm but you can charge 20€ for windowcleaning services and 1€/mo/sqm extra if the flat has an ikea bedframe and a bathtub. You enter the parameters of your rental agreement and the magic box spits out wether your situation is legal or not, then you just have to press a button to sue your landlord.

Bringing the boring old legal system closer to smart contracts.

But I don't have a clue if this is really the case.

vasco2• 3 months ago

I imagine if a new law is introduced or a change to an existing law is proposed it can auto-check for consistency, collisions with other laws, auto-flag laws that need to be amended together or things like that.

Tangurena22• 3 months ago

If such a thing exists (or could exist), I'm certain that my state government agency would benefit greatly from it.

maelito• 3 months ago

Same tech as Codeberg ?

t0mas88• 3 months ago

Yes

Pay08• 3 months ago

Doesn't Codeberg use their own fork of Forgejo?

debarshri3• 3 months ago

Funny enough, GitLab, has a dutch founder.

sschueller2• 3 months ago

Gitlab has become quite hostile and I would not be surprise if they stop supporting their open source version. Even if you want to pay, the starting price is quite high and there is only one price now and for everything else you need to make a "deal" with them.

Tangurena22• 3 months ago

Hmm. I work at a state government agency that uses GitLab. Should we be looking for a different source control supplier? I know we host it internally (our agency has a rather strict anti-cloud policy), and do pay some for support, so we might not be in the same situation as the clients/customers using the free version.

debarshri3• 3 months ago

It is an enterprise product. Enterprise products are not cheap. Also, you should have certain scale to buy an enterprise platform. By setting certain price, they expect you as a business to have scale as there are support and service level agreements the org wants to adhere to, it is also an investment from the org side.

It is pretty common playbook.

jillesvangurp• 3 months ago

Enshittification is well on its way to being completed there.

souravroy78• 3 months ago

I'm not clear on the actual use case how can this be leveraged?

embedding-shape14• 3 months ago

It's for publishing and developing open-source software, I guess that's how it'll be "leveraged"?

alexfromapex2• 3 months ago

They're going to have to work on the i18n. It defaulted to English but the entire page except like 3 words are in some other language.

QuantumNomad_3• 3 months ago

They are running Forgejo. The text being Dutch on the main page of https://code.overheid.nl/ is probably either because they haven’t provided any translations for the text, or maybe they even put the Dutch version in the template itself directly instead of storing it in whatever DB table Forgejo normally uses for the text.

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.

Tepix• 3 months ago

They're going to have to work on the i18n.

You know, they could just use their own language. The link to forgejo even states: "code.overheid.nl (Dutch)"

alexfromapex2• 3 months ago

Most government sites, especially open-source ones that want international contributors, do a decent job at internationalization. It doesn't seem like much of a reach to have that working.

embedding-shape14• 3 months ago

Interesting that they apparently deployed a development version of pre-release v16 of Forgejo, rather than the stable v15, wonder why that is? Don't get me wrong, I love bleeding-edge software as much as the next hacker, but seems wild for something like a central hub for publishing software.

gib4442• 3 months ago

The Dutch have a very different approach to risk than many other cultures. Eg I was watching a TV programme about lots of works at the central railway station in Amsterdam and barely anyone was wearing a hard hat. In the UK that would be unheard of, especially on a TV programme

And if something went wrong they would fully admit to them being wrong and fix it

makeitcount3• 3 months ago

Related to governance, check this project (not mine), would be great to have more (thoughtful) feedback:

Integral – A Federated, Post-Monetary, Cybernetic Cooperative Economic System

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877819

embedding-shape14• 3 months ago

Doesn't even seem to mention any prior art, there are tons of systems like that deployed and used today already, Decidim is one of them. Why do you keep trying to push someone else's project btw? Is it related to having a code platform meant for open-source in some way?

makeitcount3• 3 months ago

TBH, I'm not even closely versed in governance systems, but somehow would love to learn from this critical community. I'm open to variety of opinions backed by thorough thinking, and believe that we as a global society can and will go beyond "just" selfish interest prioritization, towards healthier balance for common good.

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.

ramon1568• 3 months ago

Proud dutchie here! I was wondering this morning whether they were going to migrate away from GH. Really glad that they did.

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.

brodo• 3 months ago

NLnet is also a great Dutch initiative. It's great to see that smaller, more nimble countries are leading the way in Open Source and digital independence.

RyJones• 3 months ago

One of the projects I work on, OWF, has great engagement with our open source efforts from Dutch companies and NGOs.

https://openwallet.foundation/staff/

ramon1568• 3 months ago

Awesome! Did not know this was a thing. Will check it out

brnt2• 3 months ago

partijgedrag

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.

ramon1568• 3 months ago

Elwin had some trouble with getting the API going. I ended up helping out, but I was in a big time crunch at the company I was working for at the time.

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

0: https://github.com/van-sprundel/partijgedrag

miki123211• 3 months ago

Public voting data isn't always a good thing.

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.

thaumasiotes• 3 months ago

I was wondering this morning whether they were going to migrate away from GH.

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?

ramon1568• 3 months ago

You're on the money. They already were discussing moving away from america-dependent infra. We already had a Microsoft-involved power-move a few years ago that resulted in dutch government emails being blacklisted. I was just wondering why they would stay on GH.

I expected them to use GitLab because its older and dutch, but I'm glad they opted for forgejo.

youwangd• 3 months ago

Show HN timing matters more than people think. Monday-Thursday, 9-11am Pacific, is when the front page has the most engaged readers. Weekend posts get less competition but also less engagement.

zkmon• 3 months ago

Github, Java, Python, Whatsapp, Gmail, SWIFT, DNS, Cloud infra, Appstore, Playstore - all can become tools in the hands of powers.

luplex• 3 months ago

In Germany, we have the similar portal https://opencode.de (no relation to the coding agent)

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

smrtfckrr• 3 months ago

The day government moves away from proprietary software and extyernal services (especially cloud storage holy god) must come. I'll be here for it

helsinkiandrew• 3 months ago

Forgejo was discussed here last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753523 (269 comments)

tgv• 3 months ago

Some cleaning up is probably required. I opened the "regelrecht" repo, and it contains a bunch of links and references to github.

pcoyne• 3 months ago

Is it common for government to use open source software? Here even just trying to hire someone to manage that would be hard so you almost have to outsource

ramon1568• 3 months ago

I cannot speak for other countries, but Germany, NL and Belgium have been pretty supportive of open-source

gl0wa• 3 months ago

gov.uk have been pretty big on open source https://github.com/alphagov

theNailz• 3 months ago

Dark mode is a straight up nightmare with dark purple text on a dark background.

Gina020• 3 months ago

It's being worked on, will be improved soon: https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/Codeplatform/issues/15.

brianwmunz• 3 months ago

This is interesting. Reminds me of the W3C traceability work a few years back that I was briefly involved with... main focus was defining agreed upon vocab for interoperability across supply chains. Never thought of the same approach being used for public policy, but it's an interesting idea... politics is an area where clear communication and definition is important. That said, vocab tends to change way less than public policy does, so amendments and revisions seem like they'd be tough to manage?

regexorcist• 3 months ago

Great project, seems off to a good start with its first HN hug of death. Meanwhile GitHub greets me this morning with the banner "Don't worry if you have missing PRs at the moment, data isn't lost".

gib4442• 3 months ago

Is that an identical blue to gov.uk ? ;)

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 ;)

thomasfl• 3 months ago

Next step is to use this for laws and legislations. Do you have a proposal for new law? Make a pull request!

sylware• 3 months ago

Hopefully, they won't fall into the "Whatng cartel" web engine trap, and be clean classic web (noscript/basic (x)html) with lean web/network APIs. And that includes the SDK, namely the computer languages (excluding de facto ultra complex syntax languages like c++, microsoft rust, java, etc).

miih0w• 3 months ago

most governments are still in the meeting about whether to OS their code // the Dutch shipped it and went home for dinner

andai• 3 months ago

Maybe the government should be in charge of critical infrastructure. That seems like a very sensible idea to me.

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!

ra• 3 months ago

Maybe governments should be in charge of their own critical infra; I'm happy with as much non-government controlled software as possible.

andsoitis• 3 months ago

Does this mean they’ve removed their repos from GitHub?

arjunthazhath• 3 months ago

Its pretty hard to build and provide a service or product to government. The adoption rates are low imo!

evereverever• 3 months ago

Fantastic!

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.

Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

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