Three months ago the Dutch Open Source Program Office (OSPO) BZK, developer.overheid and a broad collective of government organisations launched code.overheid.nl: a government-wide Forgejo instance. A few weeks ago we had our second community meet-up, so it’s time for updates! 🚀
About#
The goal of the Codeplatform is to offer a digitally sovereign place to a) publish government source code, b) collaborate between government agencies and c) build applications effectively. Through the wet open overheid (woo) en wet hergebruik overheidsinformatie (who), the Dutch government committed itself to publishing information transparantely and securely, including its source code. Per the advice of developer.overheid, we chose to use a proven, open source, EU community based solution called Forgejo, which is also used by Codeberg.org and OpenCommit.eu.
We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the unanimously positive response and the amount of organisations that were excited to join immediately from the start. We’re still adding new organisations weekly. This is at times a slow process, because onboarding government agencies such as municipalities and ministeries has to be done carefully. It requires appointing admins, agreeing on expectations (no CI/CD for now) and a certain level of community engagement.
Our first community meeting was a check-in to review how things were going for the first few pioneers. And I’m happy to say that things were going well! Members had mostly set up mirrors, a few brave organisations had migrated their repositories altogether. We still had a few things to work out, such as how to structure support requests and who does what when. Members also commented on how Forgejo feels surprisingly fast.
The second community meet-up started with welcoming our new member organisations. We focused on going through existing issues, creating new feature requests and adding these to the Codeplatform repo. Next, we prioritized the issues by giving them thumbs up and plotting them on our Leaderboard (thanks Johan Groenen for building this!). This will be the basis of our roadmap:
Challenges#
The top 5 issues currently are:
- Connect SSO. Unfortunately there is no government-wide SSO yet in the Netherlands. Ideally we would have a similar setup like France with ProConnect. We’ve solved this through a combination of IDP’s, but it’s admittedly not ideal. This is more a symptom of a lack of government-wide collaboration than a technical issue.
- Collaborate externally. This is a major issue. Ideally we’d like to build software together with companies and citizens. Unfortunately, from a policy perspective we can only manage accounts for government organisations and employees at the moment. It’s very important to us to enable external collaboration. We’re allocating funding to support the development of federation within Forgejo, but on a short term we might have to exclude external contributors or create exceptions. We’re considering short term solutions.
- Adding a mailserver. Ez pz.
- Add CI/CD pipelines. Not so ez pz. This requires us to set up and connect a tenant based service on preferably government infrastructure that automatically calculates resource usage. This is a setup that one of our members, Kadaster, has already built within their own organisation. Alternatively, we allow orgs to bring their own CI/CD. Both fine options that require a few guardrails.
- Generate Pages. Basically adding a static website generator, like Github Pages has. We could use Jekyll for this or some other generator and add it as a service.
Of course there are still more challenges left. Most have a technical nature, like the feature requests for accessibility and federation, but some issues have to do with the frustrating ways in which government works. Finding funds within a government that’s permanently dealing with budget cuts is already a fun enough challenge. Even more challenging than that is then spending those funds. We have money, and we have a list of competent people that could get started yesterday, but our own procurement and hiring rules make things difficult.
Ambitions#
In the meantime, the Codeplatform won the Innovation Budget 🥳 A huge honor, which affirms that code.overheid.nl provides a necessary service. The money will be used to fund features around federation, accessibility, security and CI/CD. In this way, we can give back to the Forgejo community. We’ve recently done a similar thing for Mastodon, where we host social.overheid.nl, which was a great way of giving back. This approach shows once again that it’s better to take an open source solution that is 80% complete and add the remaining 20%, than risking vendor lock-in with an expensive big tech solution.
Team Codeplatform is also in talks to become a launching customer on the new sovereign government cloud. Considering the updated National Cloud Policy Framework that calls for more sovereign cloud infrastructure, we’re honored to be one of the first on the Fundament platform.🔥
Finally, we’re starting to collaborate Europe-wide. 🇪🇺 We’ve seen interest from several EU member states such as France, Denmark, and our neighbor Switzerland. We have a working group that fits perfectly within the new European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC), and give regular presentations in the European OSPO network. The ambition is to create a federated EU network of Forgejo servers.
We’re very grateful to all the community members that actively work to make the Codeplatform better. And of course to Forgejo’s devs for the excellent engineering and stewardship. We’re also happy that the European Commission calls for more recognition for OSPO’s, precisely because the OSPO initiates innovative open source projects such as the government-wide codeplatform.
Would you like to stay informed on how code.overheid.nl is progressing and what cool projects are being worked on? Follow the Codeplatform community on Mastodon! Thanks for reading.