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Comment by ramon156 | Hacker News Reader

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 for the dutch government 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 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.

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NLnet is also a great Dutch initiative. It's great to see that smaller, more nimble countries are leading the way in Open Source and digital independence.

One of the projects I work on, OWF, has great engagement with our open source efforts from Dutch companies and NGOs.

https://openwallet.foundation/staff/

Awesome! Did not know this was a thing. Will check it out

> I was wondering this morning whether they were going to migrate away from GH.

In the context of other commentary today with various people migrating off of github...

is there an event prompting this, or were you thinking of it more in the general vein of European governments trying to reduce dependency on American services?

You're on the money. They already were discussing moving away from america-dependent infra. We already had a Microsoft-involved power-move a few years ago that resulted in dutch government emails being blacklisted. I was just wondering why they would stay on GH.

I expected them to use GitLab because its older and dutch, but I'm glad they opted for forgejo.

Correction: Gitlab is not Dutch. It has a Dutch co-founder, and was a B.V. for about one year before moving to the US and become an Inc. The original founder is from Ukraine.

> partijgedrag

So happy to see they're ingesting voting data again! They stopped a few years ago (which is also a few elections), which I thought was such a shame. Knowing what representatives actually do, and not just promise, is really the only thing that matters.

Elwin had some trouble with getting the API going. I ended up helping out, but I was in a big time crunch at the company I was working for at the time.

That's vastly different now, so I want to take a look at how we can properly do ingestion. Currently it's an ETL that is pretty flakey, even with tests. The backend-frontend is also a mess, wondering if we can just go vanillaJS without the mess that is pgtyped/prisma. I'm kind of wondering if we can use ATProto too, but I'm not too familiar with it.

Elwin is also looking at municipality-independent instances (this is less about code and more about communicating with municipalities). They all want money, which is fair, but we're not sponsored or funded anywhere. Supporting this is fruitful thinking on our side.

The code is still on my gh [0], but i might make an org on codeberg for this and mirror to this back to gh

0: https://github.com/van-sprundel/partijgedrag

Public voting data isn't always a good thing.

On one hand, it makes representatives accountable to the public, which is good. On the other, it heavily encourages voting among party lines, and makes lobbying a lot easier (as the lobbyists know whether the representatives voted the way the lobbyists wanted). This effectively moves the heart of government from the representatives themselves to lobbyists and high-level party officials.

It's a bad idea in the same way letting you photograph your ballot and upload it to social media is a bad idea; there's a reason most democracies disallow that.

That just means the forms of lobbying being permitted are antithetical to democracy, and is just bribery in a different form. The problem is with the lobbying, not the accountability.

The public ballots are what makes the bribery possible. It also prevents representatives from voting for what they believe is right, due to internal pressure from their party or from broader society. Just look at US congress: it's hard to be believe that all Republican members want to support tearing down democracy. Yet they do.

Show HN timing matters more than people think. Monday-Thursday, 9-11am Pacific, is when the front page has the most engaged readers. Weekend posts get less competition but also less engagement.

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