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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Not sure. I think Germany and France are way ahead?
NLNet is funding open source projects to the tune of tens of millions of euros per year, and it is Dutch.
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.
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/
> 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?
[delayed]
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
UK government has a list[0] of over 17000 OSS projects it has created.
[0] https://govbrowse.uk
TIL CyberChef is developed by the UK gov
Given the URL contains GCHQ, it isn't really hidden.
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"?
Funny enough, GitLab, has a dutch founder.
Same tech as Codeberg ?
Yes
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.
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.