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by starefossen 1136 days ago
The largest branch of the Norwegian government, Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV), have adopted this this policy since 2018 and now we have over 2000 public repositories on https://github.com/navikt and https://github.com/nais (last one is our platform organization)
4 comments

What if we, and hear me out, just stole Norway’s code?

/a

Just comment out healthcare and a couple of other things and you’re good to go!

In reality though it would be possible to share code between cities, regions and even countries. Some use cases are fairly generic.

It’s an application for a CMS, but they probably already have them.

Local newspapers, for instance, use CMSes too but there’s still a lot of random bespoke work that goes into them.

I think we also celebrate with cake if someone have a pull request from someone else that get approved?
Yes, we definitely do that! Talking about cake, can someone form HN make a pull request, please?!
Way to go Norway
I work for a nonprofit. Most of git repos are public but nobody cares. It's all pretty uninteresting.
For us it is a matter of building trust and allowing others to help if they choose so. We don’t expect many outside contributions.
is it uninteresting or just not scalable for a human to dig through; content vs index/search problem?
I read uninteresting as not very very useful for an external party in general. It was likely developed for an organization's fairly unique needs, is probably not very well documented, and there's no community in the sense that most genuinely useful open source projects have. Dumping a big one-off repo of code is fine but probably no one's going to put the work into seeing if this project that was never intended to be general-purpose is worth trying to adapt for something else.
Exactly this. It's like our websites and some other tools for our particular needs. We have, on rare occasion, gotten PRs from earnest supporters but they have no idea what our product needs are and we can't just merge in stuff that nobody asked for and hasn't been tested.