I have the most exciting update to share with you! Per October 1st 2026, I will start as the new Head of GovTech for OpenProject!!! 🥳🥳🥳
What is OpenProject#
OpenProject is an open source company that has built a great project/program/portfolio management tool. I’ve been using their software off and on for the past 7 years, ever since I was a sysadmin building a fully FOSS environment. I have been increasingly impressed with OP’s product.
OP is investing heavily in their feature set. They support Agile, Waterfall, and all sorts of hybrid ways of working. Their roadmap includes Scaled Agile development, IT service mgmt integration and AI workflows. They also recently added resource management. OpenProject allows for effective project management, without the bloat of ..certain.. other solutions. And did you know they come with a Jira migrator? 👀
Lol I know this sounds a bit like a sales pitch. But as an experienced project/program manager in the public sector, I’d genuinely recommend OpenProject. It’s the digitally sovereign, open source, and European solution for project management.
Head of GovTech#
Governments have big ambitions and all sorts of projects: software development, infrastructure, policy programmes, organisational change. While teams want to get things done, the steering committees above them have the responsibility to account for every euro spent. A good project management tool facilitates both while hindering neither. Teams should be able to work productively together, with a program/portfolio management view for effective steering. Making sure that this fits is a big part of my role.
By now I’m very familiar with all sort of procurement rules, security requirements, accessibility standards, vendor lock-in policies etc, that make it classically difficult for governments to adopt new software. My job is to make it easier for them to choose open source. I’m here to support governments in their choice for OpenProject, and to make sure it delivers on what they need it to do.
The rest is outward facing. I still get to go to conferences, hold policy conversations, and work with the governments and open source communities I already know. I’m excited to keep making the case that public money = public code.
Best of all, THIS ROLE IS 100% REMOTE. If you’ve known me for a while you’ll know how much I’d like to move me and my two cats somewhere sunnier than The Netherlands. I’ve been dreaming of moving to the south of Europe for years. Now I can FINALLY move abroad!!! ðŸ˜
What about the OSPO#
I’ll admit, this is a bittersweet announcement. For the past year, I’ve had the honor of working for the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) with the Dutch Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK). I had a lot of fun being the interim lead, representing the OSPO at conferences, and helping the government choose open source alternatives. It’s been oddly satisfying getting things done through bureaucracy. And I got to work with incredibly smart people. I can honestly say that this has been my favorite job so far.
The past year I helped coordinate MijnBureau, an open source alternative to Microsoft 365, which is now being further developed by our government IT service provider. There it will become the new workspace for the national goverment, in collaboration with the association for municipalities (VNG) and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC). Speaking of the EDIC, I was very honored to help coordinate the launch of this European initiative. It been really cool being a part of the German/French/NL collaboration through the 100 day challenges, building workspace software together. Besides piloting a European Sovereign Tech Fund, the EDIC might expand its 100 day challenges to topics such as linux OS’s, decentralized social media and codeplatforms (and maybe even the mobile ecosystem?).
Lastly I’m very proud of the national codeplatform that the OSPO launched with our friends from the Ministry of Health (VWS), developer.overheid.nl, Logius, VNG, DAWO, Kadaster, and many more. The national codeplatform is a Forgejo based code forge. This provides a digitally sovereign alternative to Github and Gitlab. It is a community led project, that has recently won the Innovation Budget. These funds will be used to contribute to features related to accessibility, federation, and security - all of which will be upstreamed to Forgejo.
The OSPO plays an important role in the Dutch government’s ambtion for more digital sovereignty. Owning and sharing our source code allows for more transparancy and re-usability. The OSPO is the knowledge partner on open source policy, community and practices. It is part of a Europe-wide OSPO network that is integral to the EU’s technological autonomy.
All the thanks#
I owe a big thank you to my coworker Boris and manager Peter for the trust they gave me in my role at the OSPO. I really appreciated the kind and supportive collaboration. I’d also like to thank our colleagues from CIO Rijk for the collaboration around the EDIC launch and other digital sovereignty topics. And credits to team MijnBureau and team DAWO for their awesome work.
The same of course goes to all the great people at DINUM and ZenDiS, who I loved working with. And special thanks to my friends in Schleswig-Holstein who have given us the warmest welcome when we visited them in the dead of winter. And to everyone else in the EU open source policy ecosystem; from the OFE, the FSFE, the EC OSPO network, Linux Foundation Europe, to our colleagues in Spain, Luxembourg, Denmark, Switzerland and the UN. I’m happy to still see you all at open source conferences, albeit from another side.
I also really enjoyed working with the open source ecosystem. I was always warmly welcomed by the good people from Nextcloud, SUSE, DOSBA, APELL, RedHat, FOSDEM, NLnet, Matrix, Mastodon, XWiki, Procolix, Conduction, Mosa, EuroCommons etc. I’m excited to keep working with you all!
Then a huge thank you to my friends Marlena, Johan, Eva, Maurice, Tom, Mitch, Victor, Martijn, my heroes Daan and Jan, Oscar, Tilian, Thomas, Sander, Eelco and the rest of team Digilab and DigiGilde, RWS, VNG, Kadaster, the good people from Codeberg/Forgejo, and the many others involved in the national codeplatform community. Keep up the good work. 💪
Lastly, of course a big thank you to everyone at OpenProject for the warm welcome. I look forward to this new adventure!
If you’d like to know more about my new role or where I’ll end up living, feel free to follow me on Mastodon or Linkedin. Thanks for reading.