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Open soucing the code of NAV

NAV (The Norwegian Work and Welfare agency) is a central part of the Norwegian Government, being responsible for paying out a third of the national budget. With 20,000 employees and 400 locations, its responsible for the Norwegian Welfare System. NAV has several benefits and services, and multiple systems backing these. NAV has been undergoing modernisation for 10 years and is open sourcing most of the code written in this process. There us over 2,000 open repos on GitHub, and this is still growing. We think that source code implementing the laws should be open and accessible for everyone. 

NAV has open sourced as much as possible of the code written to implement these new services, in addition to open sourcing the application platform nais.io. The reasons for this initiative are multiple:

  • Gaining the trust of the Norwegian people. Openness is an important factory in trust.
  • To increase the collaboration between different public agencies. Some of the open sourced code can be reused.
  • To increase the quality of out code and services.
  • To increase our brand, and help us hire more developers.
  • To match the openness of the legislation.
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Type

Initiative

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Organisation
NAV. Norwegian Work and Welfare Administration

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Country
Norway