Citizens expect well-functioning digital services from their government. Until recently, municipalities in the Netherlands were held back in providing these services by fragmented systems that would not exchange data. If a citizen request would require data from two systems, a lack of interoperability meant this data had to be duplicated in multiple systems and could go out of date. Dutch municipalities came to together to change this.
Today, these municipalities start collecting the fruits of their labour initiated years ago. From 1 April 2021, Dutch municipalities are expected to start applying the new API (Application Programmable Interface) standard for case-oriented working. When applying these new APIs, a standardised link between citizen’s requests and the municipality’s systems is created. This means municipal systems can speak the same language and thus be queried with the same set of APIs for different requests and interoperability between systems is achieved. In effect, a single source of truth is created, as data does not have to be duplicated between systems anymore. The APIs also standardise the communication of decisions back to the citizen.
Yet, a standard is no good without an implementation and a number of Dutch used open source to collaboratively develop the Open Zaak data and services layer, which turns the standard from a specification into reality. The OSOR spoke with Lazo Bozarov, initiator of Open Zaak and Senior Supply Manager Digital Services, at Utrecht Municipality about why the municipalities chose to create a community around Open Zaak and what they have gained. “Before Open Zaak, we collaborated with big software companies, producing proprietary software. There was no transparency. [Open Zaak] solved a problem that existed for a long time. We [decided] we are going to implement new architectural principles to get back control over the data that we possess.”
Yet the private sector’s interest in developing a solution for the standard was limited, so Bozarov worked to create a community of municipalities that would collaborate on the development of a reference implementation. This would become Open Zaak. As an open standard, any compatible solution can use the APIs.
Open Zaak is developed in an open source environment under the EUPL license. The common development means municipalities have full control over the system and ensure it directly serves the needs of the municipalities.
The development consists of municipalities, vendors and software developers and is open to contributions. Creating a working public sector open source community is not necessarily easy, as for some it represents a change in working habits. To help the municipalities create a sustainable open source community, the Foundation for Public Code has been on board from the beginning, providing practical guidance and code stewardship to the project. The Foundation wrote an interesting article in July 2020 on how they are helping the project, for example with workshops.
Being open source, other municipalities are free to re-use the code in their own projects or adopt the system themselves. Bozarov and the Foundation for Public Code directly encourage this, as it could support the development of the code and help also non-Dutch municipalities with their digital transformation. Yet Bozarov also cautioned that while there are many opportunities in adopting Open Zaak, it requires a different mindset from the municipalities than a typical software project in the public sector, “it needs active involvement and responsibility to keep the ecosystem viable”. Yet altogether, Bozarov draws a positive conclusion: “We liberated our own data”.