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 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 literal 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.
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.
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.
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..."?
Yeah, also pretty dope! Sweden also basically spearheads the whole "open data" thing for a long time too :) Too many great stuff happening across the continent to just say one or two countries are doing everything, in that you're right.
Funny that its hosted on vercel. Probably because its employee driven rather than top down. Saves all the bureaucracy to get someone to sign a budget item to buy a domain.
Disclaimer: I made mxmap.be after seeing Swiss ant Dutch counterparts. I did not look at MX records only but also at EHLO replies, SPF and DMARC records and at fronting services.
"Purely based on the MX-records, we learn that 72% of Belgian municipalities run Microsoft mail servers and 60% of the Dutch municipalities. For Scandinavia, it’s 64% in Norway and 57% in Sweden. In Finland, it’s a whopping 77% if the cities that are being served by Microsoft."
Yeah, probably if you asked me for "Top 3 countries for FOSS in Europe" I'd pretty much say France, Germany and Netherlands, hence me saying "is one of the ones" :) Compared to the rest of the countries, those three probably do way more than all the rest together.
NLnet (the foundation) is Dutch, but as far as I know NLnet Labs (which does the work and spends the money) is at least partially funded by Germany (through the Sovereign Tech Fund).
I don't have the numbers at hand and cannot dig them up right now. If anyone knows the extent of participation of each country that'd be definitely interesting for others too.
I think NLnet Labs is indeed like 50% funded through German Sovereign Tech Fund, but most of NLnet + the rest of NLnet Labs is funded via EU project funds or other public programs. I don't think NLnet receives anything at all from the Dutch government AFAIK, and NLnet Labs gets tiny amount of funds via Dutch SIDN subsidy I guess, but that's pretty much it.
This is all (tried to) rememberings from meetings in 2024 sometime, so could be different today.
The sale could be stopped by government. The ID system might be moved to a different company. The government could by the part of the company that hosts the ID system. None of these measures are being taken.
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.
It is a fair characterisation. They can access the data, as their data protection officer warned about, it hereby falls under US law, they have to give data when requested, and can shut it down at any time.
None of those things make "The government still plans to place the authentication system of all Dutch citizens in USA hands" a fair characterization, it doesn't seem to be true by any measures, the government has no such plans, unless you can point me to some public session/document that shows that this is actually the plan?
> Their plan is to do nothing to stop the transfer of the system to a USA company
And you have concrete proof that this is indeed the plan, stated by the government as the official position, or this is based on your own extrapolation of rumors?
The amount of misinformation that any story related to any European country seems to pull in is crazy, seems to be something about the continent that makes some parts of HN feel blood in their mouth or something.
There has not been a single action or communication from government that indicates that they are preventing the ID system from ending up under USA jurisdiction.
Parliament has asked government with near unanimity to prevent this from happening. Government has not even acknowledged that this should be prevented.
Right, which I agree, sucks, they should be upfront about what they want to do, regardless of what that is. And ideally their plan should be to try to stop it, I'm with you on this.
But the lack of action is not proof that "their plan is to do nothing" nor "the government plans to hand authentication data over to US", those stronger claims require stronger proof, something you seem to be unable to provide.
Since a lot of this discussion is talking around the actual situation, let me try and explain it in more detail.
The dutch government has an authentication system called DigiD. It's effectively an OAuth protocol for government sites, and one of the few ways in which the Dutch government has centralized IT. Every dutch citizen can get access to it, and probably will need it at some point to deal with the government (paper options are meant to exist, but you can already guess on how easy the availability of that is.)
DigiD is currently hosted by a dutch company named Solvinity and developed by Logius (the governments in-house IT development organization). Solvinity is currently in the process of being bought out by another company, Kyndryl, which is based in the US. The government approved the takeover under the previous coalition (who are no longer in power.) The takeover currently is under extreme public scrutiny because of everything to do with the US - most people are at least vaguely aware of the deadly combination of the US CLOUD/PATRIOT laws, which would compel Kyndryl to hand over data on any dutch citizen to the US government for any reason[0]. The US government right now is not exactly behaving like a good steward with the powers it has, instead favoring maximum exploitation within (and outside, if the lawsuits are any indication) it's legal limitations, and is also verbally attacking it's own allies near constantly. Given DigiD is effectively a list of personal information on almost every dutch citizen, it's probably a bad idea to hand access to it over to a hostile foreign country.
On an employee level, the takeover is deeply unpopular - some government workers have actively reached out to the press to warn about the deal, something which very rarely happens as government workers aren't expected to publicly break with government policy. This has led to a motion in the second chamber (parliament) to change DigiDs hosting from Solvinity to another provider being passed... in 2028, for a deal set to go through in a much shorter timespan. At the same time, the government (this time: the elected politicians) is unwilling to reconsider it's stance on the Solvinity takeover, claiming that because it already said it was OK before, it can't change its mind now.
[0]: It's also, almost certainly illegal in a GDPR/AVG (local version of GDPR) sense. US/EU privacy laws are fundamentally incompatible with one another because of these two laws, and the courts keep shooting the international data transfer agreements to bits every time. Even on a basic level, having your government authentication systems legality tied to whether or not Max Schrems wins his court cases is a bad idea.
We have something similar in Spain too, and I'd be outraged if the government planned to sell it all to a US company as well, don't get me wrong.
But I still don't see the "inaction of blocking the sale" as proof that the government is planning or trying to push that sale through, regardless if I personally happen to disagree or I see the drawbacks from it.
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)
> 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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
Seems interesting.
But i have a feeling that you are after something else.
Why don't you take a better look and share if you have good ideas to add, not just brushing things off as "nothing to see here".
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
Everyone can post any website on HN, it's not like they have shared it widely and said that it's done. The website literally says "Soft Launch" in the title.
> "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."
I have been working on something like this but for all countries and elected officials. Project20x.com is the policy cycle as a service: AI-native governance with an elected officeholder as the human-in-the-loop at every step. Today the cycle — author policy, codify into bureaucratic process, deliver as a service, measure outcomes, feed back into policy — takes years end-to-end and the layers are owned by four different industries that don't talk to each other. project20x compresses it to minutes by running all four layers as one substrate.
Three layers, one substrate:
Hardison.co — policy authoring as software. Coalitions, elected officials, and domain experts design policy as machine-readable artifacts, not 900-page PDFs. The Heritage Foundation role, done as a service. - white label for usa = dnc.project20x.com and rnc.project20x.com
DPIaaS at project20x.com prev: codify.inc) — the policy operating system. Identity, payments, data exchange, the codification engine, agent orchestration. Where policy compiles into a running program. This is the answer to what DOGE was attempting: efficiency by compilation, not chainsaw.
DPGaaS — codified programs delivered as live services at {program-guid}.codify.{domain} e.g.: education or healthcare. EMR, EHR, LMS, HRM, finance, civic CRM — 44 domains. Project 2025 is a stack of policy artifacts; DPGaaS is the same stack executed.
Why network-by-default, not pilot-one-agency: government does not run on org charts, it runs on interagency dependencies that nobody owns. VA referring veterans to HUD for housing. HHS coordinating with all 50 state Medicaids. EPA negotiating permits with state DEPs. Tokyo studying Helsinki's home-visit program. Single-agency rollouts hit a wall the moment they try to hand off. The right unit of deployment is the network, not the node. There are ~2,000 subprojects on the substrate today — every country, every US state, every major city, every federal/state/city agency, with the sitting officeholder as the accountable principal at each. codify.amsterdam has Mayor Femke Halsema; nld.project20x.com has PM Rob Jetten; the US states sit under things like ny.usa.codify.inc with the sitting governor.
Agents cut deals on behalf of their elected principal.
Citizen handoff — a veteran's agent at the VA hands off a housing case to the local HUD agent, which hands off to the city's housing-authority agent. Terms
(eligibility, SLA, follow-up cadence) are codified, not faxed.
Best-practice diffusion — Nashville's homelessness program produces measurable outcomes; the mayor's agent publishes the codified program; Boston / LA / Cleveland / Phoenix agents fork it, adapt parameters to local context, and propose the local fork to their mayor for sign-off. What was a quarterly cross-jurisdiction conference becomes a continuous diffusion channel.
Cross-jurisdiction — Amsterdam's housing-priority rules are about 80% identical to Rotterdam's; the 20% delta is a YAML diff between two agents at codify.amsterdam and codify.rotterdam, not a 200-page document review.
Country tier — PM-level agents at nld.project20x.com and similar nodes negotiating bilateral terms (data sharing, refugee processing, climate commitments) where the deal is machine-readable and the human PM signs off on a clean diff instead of a 400-page annex.
The punchline — "let real politicians do more to help": an elected official today spends most of their time on coordination, escalation, and process — the
boring middle layer between "set policy" and "deliver to a citizen." If the agents handle the boring middle, the elected human spends their attention on the two parts that actually require an elected human: deciding the policy and being accountable for the outcome.
Not Project 2025 — the people who author policy on project20x are accountable for it: elected officials, civil servants, domain experts. No unelected think tank writing a mandate to be imposed from above.
Not DOGE — efficiency by codification, not destruction. Institutional memory is preserved by being compiled into the artifact, not chainsawed.
Bottom-up by design. Every subproject owns its own deployment, data, policy authoring, and outcomes. Platform is shared; power is not centralized.
Open to operators — elected officials, civil servants, domain experts, engineers who used to work in govtech and got tired of watching every reform die in procurement.
Accomplishments: I have had my lahsa[.ai] agent house 4 people with no involvement on my part and been able to handle about 500 medicare cases in the last 6 months. I know this is not much or huge by HN standards but just being able to help real people this way has really been cool.
Note: My dad was a social worker for 30 years so he really was able t help answer lots of questions in that regard.
Note: DPIaaS = Digital Public Infrastructure as a Service
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 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 literal 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.
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.
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.
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..."?
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.
Yeah, also pretty dope! Sweden also basically spearheads the whole "open data" thing for a long time too :) Too many great stuff happening across the continent to just say one or two countries are doing everything, in that you're right.
Funny that its hosted on vercel. Probably because its employee driven rather than top down. Saves all the bureaucracy to get someone to sign a budget item to buy a domain.
This map shows that the Dutch municipalities are nearly all in the Microsoft cloud.
https://mxmap.nl/
Love it! All European countries should have one
Heh, here you go: http://mxmap.be https://mxmap.ch/ https://kommune-epost-norge.netlify.app/ for Norway and https://swedish-mail-dependency.netlify.app/ for Sweden.
France even has an official map of this kind, with publicly visible recommendations: https://suiteterritoriale.anct.gouv.fr/conformite/cartograph...
Disclaimer: I made mxmap.be after seeing Swiss ant Dutch counterparts. I did not look at MX records only but also at EHLO replies, SPF and DMARC records and at fronting services.
In Belgium, 72% of the communes are on Microsoft 365:
https://jurgen.gaeremyn.be/2025/03/08/european-critical-depe...
"Purely based on the MX-records, we learn that 72% of Belgian municipalities run Microsoft mail servers and 60% of the Dutch municipalities. For Scandinavia, it’s 64% in Norway and 57% in Sweden. In Finland, it’s a whopping 77% if the cities that are being served by Microsoft."
Not sure. I think Germany and France are way ahead?
Yeah, probably if you asked me for "Top 3 countries for FOSS in Europe" I'd pretty much say France, Germany and Netherlands, hence me saying "is one of the ones" :) Compared to the rest of the countries, those three probably do way more than all the rest together.
NLNet is funding open source projects to the tune of tens of millions of euros per year, and it is Dutch.
NLnet (the foundation) is Dutch, but as far as I know NLnet Labs (which does the work and spends the money) is at least partially funded by Germany (through the Sovereign Tech Fund).
I don't have the numbers at hand and cannot dig them up right now. If anyone knows the extent of participation of each country that'd be definitely interesting for others too.
I think NLnet Labs is indeed like 50% funded through German Sovereign Tech Fund, but most of NLnet + the rest of NLnet Labs is funded via EU project funds or other public programs. I don't think NLnet receives anything at all from the Dutch government AFAIK, and NLnet Labs gets tiny amount of funds via Dutch SIDN subsidy I guess, but that's pretty much it.
This is all (tried to) rememberings from meetings in 2024 sometime, so could be different today.
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.
> 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/
code.overheid.nl points to 62.59.196.156 which is in the Odido ASN.
Checked with `host`, `dig` and hosting-checker.net
Darn, I’m on mobile and the tool I used decided to give me details for the base domain overheid.nl when I asked for details about code.overheid.nl :(
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.
> 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
The sale could be stopped by government. The ID system might be moved to a different company. The government could by the part of the company that hosts the ID system. None of these measures are being taken.
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.
It is a fair characterisation. They can access the data, as their data protection officer warned about, it hereby falls under US law, they have to give data when requested, and can shut it down at any time.
None of those things make "The government still plans to place the authentication system of all Dutch citizens in USA hands" a fair characterization, it doesn't seem to be true by any measures, the government has no such plans, unless you can point me to some public session/document that shows that this is actually the plan?
Their plan is to do nothing to stop the transfer of the system to a USA company. By doing nothing, they are making this happen.
> Their plan is to do nothing to stop the transfer of the system to a USA company
And you have concrete proof that this is indeed the plan, stated by the government as the official position, or this is based on your own extrapolation of rumors?
The amount of misinformation that any story related to any European country seems to pull in is crazy, seems to be something about the continent that makes some parts of HN feel blood in their mouth or something.
There has not been a single action or communication from government that indicates that they are preventing the ID system from ending up under USA jurisdiction.
Parliament has asked government with near unanimity to prevent this from happening. Government has not even acknowledged that this should be prevented.
Right, which I agree, sucks, they should be upfront about what they want to do, regardless of what that is. And ideally their plan should be to try to stop it, I'm with you on this.
But the lack of action is not proof that "their plan is to do nothing" nor "the government plans to hand authentication data over to US", those stronger claims require stronger proof, something you seem to be unable to provide.
C'mon, be nice, they read a Russian propaganda post and are repeating it as a fact they earnestly believe. We can't all see through their lies.
Since a lot of this discussion is talking around the actual situation, let me try and explain it in more detail.
The dutch government has an authentication system called DigiD. It's effectively an OAuth protocol for government sites, and one of the few ways in which the Dutch government has centralized IT. Every dutch citizen can get access to it, and probably will need it at some point to deal with the government (paper options are meant to exist, but you can already guess on how easy the availability of that is.)
DigiD is currently hosted by a dutch company named Solvinity and developed by Logius (the governments in-house IT development organization). Solvinity is currently in the process of being bought out by another company, Kyndryl, which is based in the US. The government approved the takeover under the previous coalition (who are no longer in power.) The takeover currently is under extreme public scrutiny because of everything to do with the US - most people are at least vaguely aware of the deadly combination of the US CLOUD/PATRIOT laws, which would compel Kyndryl to hand over data on any dutch citizen to the US government for any reason[0]. The US government right now is not exactly behaving like a good steward with the powers it has, instead favoring maximum exploitation within (and outside, if the lawsuits are any indication) it's legal limitations, and is also verbally attacking it's own allies near constantly. Given DigiD is effectively a list of personal information on almost every dutch citizen, it's probably a bad idea to hand access to it over to a hostile foreign country.
On an employee level, the takeover is deeply unpopular - some government workers have actively reached out to the press to warn about the deal, something which very rarely happens as government workers aren't expected to publicly break with government policy. This has led to a motion in the second chamber (parliament) to change DigiDs hosting from Solvinity to another provider being passed... in 2028, for a deal set to go through in a much shorter timespan. At the same time, the government (this time: the elected politicians) is unwilling to reconsider it's stance on the Solvinity takeover, claiming that because it already said it was OK before, it can't change its mind now.
[0]: It's also, almost certainly illegal in a GDPR/AVG (local version of GDPR) sense. US/EU privacy laws are fundamentally incompatible with one another because of these two laws, and the courts keep shooting the international data transfer agreements to bits every time. Even on a basic level, having your government authentication systems legality tied to whether or not Max Schrems wins his court cases is a bad idea.
We have something similar in Spain too, and I'd be outraged if the government planned to sell it all to a US company as well, don't get me wrong.
But I still don't see the "inaction of blocking the sale" as proof that the government is planning or trying to push that sale through, regardless if I personally happen to disagree or I see the drawbacks from it.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Github, Java, Python, Whatsapp, Gmail, SWIFT, DNS, Cloud infra, Appstore, Playstore - all can become tools in the hands of powers.
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.
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
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?
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.
> TBH, I'm not even closely versed in governance systems,
So again, why keep spreading this project you aren't responsible for, and whose domain you aren't even familiar with?
Seems interesting. But i have a feeling that you are after something else. Why don't you take a better look and share if you have good ideas to add, not just brushing things off as "nothing to see here".
How about you share a recipe for how to make a strawberry cake?
UK government has a list[0] of over 17000 OSS projects it has created.
[0] https://govbrowse.uk
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
TIL CyberChef is developed by the UK gov
Given the URL contains GCHQ, it isn't really hidden.
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.
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.
Same tech as Codeberg ?
Yes
I'm not clear on the actual use case how can this be leveraged?
It's for publishing and developing open-source software, I guess that's how it'll be "leveraged"?
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.
Funny enough, GitLab, has a dutch founder.
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.
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....
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.
There's not much here https://code.overheid.nl/explore/repos but good luck anyway.
I mean...it's a soft launch, not sure what you expect.
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.
Everyone can post any website on HN, it's not like they have shared it widely and said that it's done. The website literally says "Soft Launch" in the title.
> "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."
I have been working on something like this but for all countries and elected officials. Project20x.com is the policy cycle as a service: AI-native governance with an elected officeholder as the human-in-the-loop at every step. Today the cycle — author policy, codify into bureaucratic process, deliver as a service, measure outcomes, feed back into policy — takes years end-to-end and the layers are owned by four different industries that don't talk to each other. project20x compresses it to minutes by running all four layers as one substrate.
Three layers, one substrate:
Hardison.co — policy authoring as software. Coalitions, elected officials, and domain experts design policy as machine-readable artifacts, not 900-page PDFs. The Heritage Foundation role, done as a service. - white label for usa = dnc.project20x.com and rnc.project20x.com
DPIaaS at project20x.com prev: codify.inc) — the policy operating system. Identity, payments, data exchange, the codification engine, agent orchestration. Where policy compiles into a running program. This is the answer to what DOGE was attempting: efficiency by compilation, not chainsaw.
DPGaaS — codified programs delivered as live services at {program-guid}.codify.{domain} e.g.: education or healthcare. EMR, EHR, LMS, HRM, finance, civic CRM — 44 domains. Project 2025 is a stack of policy artifacts; DPGaaS is the same stack executed.
Why network-by-default, not pilot-one-agency: government does not run on org charts, it runs on interagency dependencies that nobody owns. VA referring veterans to HUD for housing. HHS coordinating with all 50 state Medicaids. EPA negotiating permits with state DEPs. Tokyo studying Helsinki's home-visit program. Single-agency rollouts hit a wall the moment they try to hand off. The right unit of deployment is the network, not the node. There are ~2,000 subprojects on the substrate today — every country, every US state, every major city, every federal/state/city agency, with the sitting officeholder as the accountable principal at each. codify.amsterdam has Mayor Femke Halsema; nld.project20x.com has PM Rob Jetten; the US states sit under things like ny.usa.codify.inc with the sitting governor.
Agents cut deals on behalf of their elected principal.
Citizen handoff — a veteran's agent at the VA hands off a housing case to the local HUD agent, which hands off to the city's housing-authority agent. Terms (eligibility, SLA, follow-up cadence) are codified, not faxed.
Best-practice diffusion — Nashville's homelessness program produces measurable outcomes; the mayor's agent publishes the codified program; Boston / LA / Cleveland / Phoenix agents fork it, adapt parameters to local context, and propose the local fork to their mayor for sign-off. What was a quarterly cross-jurisdiction conference becomes a continuous diffusion channel.
Cross-jurisdiction — Amsterdam's housing-priority rules are about 80% identical to Rotterdam's; the 20% delta is a YAML diff between two agents at codify.amsterdam and codify.rotterdam, not a 200-page document review.
Country tier — PM-level agents at nld.project20x.com and similar nodes negotiating bilateral terms (data sharing, refugee processing, climate commitments) where the deal is machine-readable and the human PM signs off on a clean diff instead of a 400-page annex.
The punchline — "let real politicians do more to help": an elected official today spends most of their time on coordination, escalation, and process — the boring middle layer between "set policy" and "deliver to a citizen." If the agents handle the boring middle, the elected human spends their attention on the two parts that actually require an elected human: deciding the policy and being accountable for the outcome.
Not Project 2025 — the people who author policy on project20x are accountable for it: elected officials, civil servants, domain experts. No unelected think tank writing a mandate to be imposed from above.
Not DOGE — efficiency by codification, not destruction. Institutional memory is preserved by being compiled into the artifact, not chainsawed.
Bottom-up by design. Every subproject owns its own deployment, data, policy authoring, and outcomes. Platform is shared; power is not centralized.
Open to operators — elected officials, civil servants, domain experts, engineers who used to work in govtech and got tired of watching every reform die in procurement.
Accomplishments: I have had my lahsa[.ai] agent house 4 people with no involvement on my part and been able to handle about 500 medicare cases in the last 6 months. I know this is not much or huge by HN standards but just being able to help real people this way has really been cool.
Note: My dad was a social worker for 30 years so he really was able t help answer lots of questions in that regard.
Note: DPIaaS = Digital Public Infrastructure as a Service
Note: DPGaaS = Digital Public Goods as a Service
(disclosure: I'm the founder)