Newsletter: April 2021
Welcome to our April newsletter! April included two public holidays, so our month was a bit more relaxed than usual.
Our highlights this month were:
- the community version of Jitsi Meet is ready to use
- we’re very close to publishing our first annual report (our first financial year ran 2019-2020)
In May, join us for:
- 6 May: Podcast episode 5 livestream - we’ll talk to Amy van Someren about ‘s-Hertogenbosch’s experience as the first Signalen replicator
- 6 May: Standard for Public Code community call on vendor and platform independence
- 20 May: Foundation for Public Code community call - help pick the topic!
Codebase stewardship
Things are ticking along in the codebases we steward.
OpenZaak had a busy month:
- the codebase now meets the Standard for Public Code criterion ‘Document maturity’. Overall, OpenZaak meets 11 of the 15 Standard criteria
- the Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG) has strengthened their guidance that Dutch municipalities use the open data standards (APIs) underpinning OpenZaak, ahead of the APIs becoming mandatory in 2022
The Signalen community has been hard at work - we’ll have more to share next month. In the meantime, read an update on what’s next for Signalen from a Signalen community member (in Dutch).
The Omgevingsbeleid front end repository is now public!
The codebase stewards ran a governance workshop with the OpenStad community.
Running the Foundation for Public Code
We’ve been focused on:
- Our first annual report, including establishing templates for appropriate annual financial reporting. The report will be published shortly
- Creating a salary framework and implementing performance management; including meeting with experts for advice
- We’ve built a community Jitsi instance for which anyone can sign up to create an account. It includes a user interface we’ve built using the open source software we started out with. The repository to fork the software will be available soon
- Migrating from Travis to Github Actions for our own repos
- Opening up our Nextcloud instance for our community. They can use ONLYOFFICE to collaborate on office documents in real-time, or use it for secure file sharing
We expect some of these projects to launch later this month - keep an eye out!
Membership
We’ve had ongoing conversations this month with 4 cities, plus conversations about national-level support or membership with civil servants from 2 countries.
Outreach
Catch up with:
- Sivan Pätsch’s article Open enables public sector digital transformation in the Netherlands - an overview of OpenZaak’s development on the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR)
- our codebase steward Alba’s blogpost about how we supported the Signalen community day in March
- the notes from our April Standard for Public Code community call on backlog pruning
- our April Foundation for Public Code community call was about our search for new board members - watch the recording
See you next month! Or say hi in the meantime.