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Comment by hans1729 | Hacker News Reader

For what its worth, open source is en vogue in german government IT at the moment. "Dataport", a government-owned IT-company, has an open-source based project "Phoenix", as a first step in this shift of paradigm. This is interesting because Dataport used to be pretty much a windows-shop; despite old and established hierarchies and its special place in the public domain, change is happening.

(Source: I'm working in that project as a consultant)

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Please keep it that way! We need open source in government - it's the only way to hold people accountable and make sure that citizens aren't being shafted :)

Thanks for your work!

Independently of gematik's work, Phoenix also uses Matrix as its communication backplane (source: the Matrix team is also consulting on it :)

I've had the pleasure of working with Ben for a while, cheers from team mav! Wearing my matrix hoodie writing this :)

Can you get a Matrix hoodie without working on Matrix? :D

https://shop.matrix.org :D

(and yay for Ben - he gets everywhere!)

Thank you so much!

Isn't Phoenix merely rebranding already existing projects like Jitsi Meet and matrix.org?

If not, where can this project be publicly inspected?

This is why I made the distinction "open-source based". The project isn't simply rebranding though, it builds solutions for customers based on open source components (which is a step in the correct direction). I would like all the repositories to be public, too, but we're not there yet.

I saw on phoenix-werkstatt.de that there are actual contributions back upstream. Even if it appears to not be a Dataport employee, at least some of the funds of the government are going towards improving the projects for everyone. Good stuff.

Unfortunately, at the moment even code access for other public institutions is buried behind many layers of bureaucracy but I have been promised they will start to open up soon enough.

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