I have an exciting update to share! As of today, I’ll start as the Interim Lead of the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations in The Netherlands. 🥳
In Dutch this translates to ‘Kwartiermaker’ at the OSPO BZK. This post is about why this is such a cool assignment, even if temporary.
My experience #
As I’ve written in a previous post, I was once allowed to build a fully free and open source IT environment for an international non-profit. That experience shaped how I see tech, autonomy, and public infrastructure. Since then, I’ve stuck around in the FOSS world. I’ve mostly been a user and advocate of open source projects. I’d love to contribute in code, but unfortunately I’m not a very good developer. So I’m happy to be able to help out in other ways – by making space for it in public institutions.
The bigger picture #
This role comes at an interesting time. Across Europe, there’s a growing realization that relying on proprietary Big Tech for our core digital infrastructure isn’t sustainable. Governments are starting to see that critical processes such as email, documents, communication, identity management, etc, are deeply entangled with proprietary platforms they neither control nor fully understand.
We’ve already seen what happens when public institutions lose control over their digital foundations. In the Netherlands alone we have examples like when the ICC’s Chief Prosecuters’ email was blocked by Microsoft, or how the CLOUD Act gives US authorities access to data stored in Europe by US companies, or Broadcom trying to extort the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management with an 85% price increase on VMware licensing, or the most recent Citrix hack that has forced the Public Prosecutor’s office to work offline for weeks. These aren’t abstract risks anymore. Even the Dutch Court of Audit has reported that our government is becoming too dependent on a few foreign cloud providers, posing serious risks to digital sovereignty, security, and control.
Open source went from being novel apps built by devs in their free time, to something that might save orgs money, to now being integral to protecting digital sovereignty on a national level. It’s about time that EU governments are becoming aware of the capture of their IT and start looking towards alternatives. There needs to be a shift toward digital autonomy.
What I’ll be working on #
There’s a lot happening already. I’m super excited to be involved with projects like:
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Open source office apps for gov: I’ll be working with the MijnBureau team, who are building a national open source alternative to Microsoft Office 365. Think Nextcloud for Sharepoint, and Matrix for Teams etc. This is especially dear to me, since it’s basically the national version of what I implemented at the fully FOSS non-profit years ago. We’re collaborating across Europe on this through the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC), in particular with Germany (OpenDesk) and France (LaSuite).
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A gov code platform: Currently, a lot of open source code is trapped in proprietary platforms – which is not ideal when we consider public code as public infrastructure. As part of the OSPO I get to support the implementation of code.overheid.nl, a national platform for hosting, sharing and reusing government-developed code and repositories. This will likely be something similar to Codeberg, using Forgejo. There are already some initiatives on this front, so it’ll be good to bring those together.
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Federated sovereign cloud infrastructure: How can we build a cloud stack that is secure, easily scalable, and based on open standards? A small, but good example of using open standards is Haven+, a generic layer developed for Dutch municipalities to easily share software. While the Dutch gov is figuring out its national sovereign cloud, European initiatives like ECOFED, Gaia-X, IPCEI-CIS and the Eurostack are exploring how to replace our dependency on hyperscalers with open, federated cloud infrastructure. The point is to create a provider-agnostic ecosystem with built-in decentralized control, data sovereignty and interoperability. This is more of a personal interest, but still relevant.
Advocacy #
An important part of this role is advocacy. Within government, I’ll be advising on the implementation of the “open, unless” policy, which means that software and data should be open by default unless there’s a reason not to. The OSPO also works on embedding open source thinking into broader policies and strategies, like the newly published National Digitalization Strategy (NDS). Even though it isn’t explicitly named in the NDS, almost every pillar can be linked to open source.
Beyond policy advice, I want to keep pushing for structural support (aka funding). If we rely on open source tools in our public infrastructure, then we should be investing in building and maintaining them. Germany is already doing this with its Sovereign Tech Fund, and I think The Netherlands should follow suit. We can’t build digital autonomy on volunteer labor alone. I’m looking forward to conversations with policymakers and civil servants to help shift the narrative around FOSS from niche to necessary.
Connect #
I’ll be working closely with some great people from the opensource community, and I’m looking forward to seeing familiar fediverse faces at events like Public Spaces and the upcoming Open Source Summit 2025 in Amsterdam.
If you’re in the same space or just curious, feel free to follow me on Mastodon for updates. I’m always happy to chat about FOSS in government or cool things being developed. 🙂
Thanks for reading.