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 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

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.

Same tech as Codeberg ?

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.

Funny enough, GitLab, has a dutch founder.

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....

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

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)