Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

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.

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.

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

Forgejo was discussed here last year:

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

> 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.

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

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

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

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

[0] https://govbrowse.uk

Same tech as Codeberg ?

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.

Funny enough, GitLab, has a dutch founder.

I'm not clear on the actual use case how can this 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.

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

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....