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by ever1 1579 days ago
As a french, I would like to see a governmental institution at national or European level which aims to develop open-source software for administrations, police, public hospitals, defence... This would reassure me more about technological sovereignty and the use of taxpayers' money, I am even convinced that it would be much more interesting economically. It could even help to catch up with our technological delay in terms of cloud infrastructure...
1 comments
PoignardAzur 1579 days ago
Well, then you'll be happy to learn about "state startups", ("startups d'État"), a government initiative dating from 2015, and managed by the DINUM (Direction Interministérielle du NUMérique), a cross-ministry state institution.

Administrative language aside, they're basically a public incubator, built from the ground up for starting software projects with a focus on user experience for individual citizens and civil servants. The projects have a very "tech startup" structure: agile development, lots of CI-CD, code is open-source and usually hosted on Github, etc.

From what little I've seen, they seem to be pretty competent. I've opened a few minor issues on Github (about typos and stuff) and they replied quickly. I've used one of their projects (the one for validating documents when looking for an apartment) and it worked fine. Some of the projects they're listing seem pretty exciting too.

More info there: https://beta.gouv.fr/en

Seriously, the French government hasn't always been great with IT, but it's getting there fast.

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ksec 1579 days ago
Are places I could find or idea what are the most popular ( I guess may be "used" would be a better word ) programming language that is being used in these government sector, and in Tech in France in general?
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PoignardAzur 1579 days ago
Re France in general: no idea. It's a big country. (The industrial sector uses a lot of C++, like everywhere else.)

Re the government: you can look at the Github pages of various projects. The article mentions this list:

https://code.gouv.fr/#/repos

From what I remember of the last time I browsed through state startup projects, there was a lot of Node.js and Python.

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