Building an Open Government with Open Code and Open Source - Hans Kristian Flaatten
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2023-10-04

Building an Open Government with Open Code and Open Source - Hans Kristian Flaatten, Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV)

The Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV) is the largest agency in the Norwegian government. With it's 19.000 employees it is responsible for a third of the state budget of Norway, administering programs such as unemployment benefits, pensions, child benefits and more. For a long time the agency did not employ any developers but rather relied on contractors and committees for all custom development. In 2015 all of this changed. Under new management the agency reorganized and started employing it's own developers. Attitude towards open source also changed. New systems should be based on open standards and preferably build with open source as much as possible. In 2018 the agency took another huge step forward and implemented an open source policy for it's own code, mandating that code funded by the public should be open to the public by default unless explicitly required otherwise. Today we have over 2000 open GitHub repositories. This has fundamentally changed how we interoperate and collaborate with other government agencies and partners, our ability to attract and retain talent, and how the agency fundamentally builds software. This is the story on how we built an open government where pull requests are welcome!