The Netherlands builds a Microsoft alternative on NixOS

The Netherlands is working on its own digital workplace for government bodies — an alternative to offerings such as Microsoft's. The effort is led by DAWO, an open community in which government, industry and society jointly build what its authors call a "digitally autonomous workplace" for the Dutch government.

Five goals

The community frames its mission as bringing public values and technology together, and sets itself five goals: strengthen the Netherlands' digital autonomy; improve collaboration and knowledge sharing between governments and society; safeguard security and data protection; encourage innovation and more efficient ways of working; and make government IT systems easier to inspect and verify.

Not one product, but replaceable blocks

A central idea is to avoid a single monolithic product in favour of separate "building blocks" that work together. Every part can be inspected and replaced. The blocks include open and verifiable AI components, an operating system, cloud infrastructure and tools for working together — communication, documents and collaboration.

The operating system is built on NixOS: the project uses a DAWO-NixOS build along with installation building blocks to produce a reproducible workplace. The emphasis on reproducibility and replaceable components ties directly to the goal of verifiability — the ability to check what the government's IT infrastructure is made of.

Openness as a principle

DAWO stresses that it is being built not "for" the community but "with" it: public and private sectors work on the same blueprint. You can take part through conversations, code, documentation, pilots and events. The calendar, news, blog and forum live on a public member portal — anyone can read, while posting requires an account. That is also where you sign up.

Source: Hacker News