Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

nldigitalgovernment.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 143 posts

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#91

Post by ramon156 »

brnt wrote: post #86
ramon156 wrote: post #67

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 need…

> 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.

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

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#92

Post by ramon156 »

pcoyne wrote: post #90

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

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

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#93

Post by jimnotgym »

zoobab wrote: post #47
touwer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love it! All European countries should have one

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."

Running a Microsoft mail server doesn't automatically mean you are on 365. You can still host Exchange onsite

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#94

Post by ramon156 »

Tangurena2 wrote: post #85
sschueller wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

My current company also uses GitLab, but the amount of projects we have would be hard to migrate. I don't think we'll be moving anytime soon.

Try running forgejo for your own projects, see what you think of it. Doing the research beforehand helps a ton for your DevOps team.

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#95

Post by thaumasiotes »

ramon156 wrote: post #67

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 need…

> 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?

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#97

Post by sschueller »

ramon156 wrote: post #94
Tangurena2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My current company also uses GitLab, but the amount of projects we have would be hard to migrate. I don't think we'll be moving anytime soon. Try running forgejo for your own projects, see what you think of it. Doing the research beforehand helps a ton for your DevOps team.

Biggest blocker with forgejo is that currently it isn't possible to create "projects" or "subfolders" like in gitlab.

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#98

Post by brianwmunz »

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?

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#99

Post by brnt »

Tangurena2 wrote: post #85
sschueller wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I don't think Gitlab have ever moved functionality from Community to any paid version, but you should understand carefully if the functions in the paid (and not open) versions of Gitlab would ever come on your radar. It's not unlikely as user numbers and user organisations increase. It'll be exactly at the point switching to eg Forgejo will be painful enough to pay. Switching when still small is easier.

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#100

Post by steinwinde »

newsclues wrote: post #8

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....

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