On February 13, during the annual demo day, 19 projects presented their achievements, fueled by creativity, hard work, collaborations, and the support of the Digital Government Innovation Budget. The Fokker Terminal in The Hague was vibrant with energy as visitors engaged and found inspiration in each other’s ideas and success stories. Attendees openly discussed their setbacks and failures, highlighting that “avoiding conversations about challenges hinders innovation.”
Brilliant failures
The 4th Innovative Demo Day, hosted by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, began with a speech by Paul Iske, an Innovation Professor and the founder of the Institute for Brilliant Failures. He emphasized that “innovation is more complex than it may seem; unexpected issues are always likely to arise. Failure is not a problem as long as you learn from your experiences and share them.” He further pointed out that “failing to discuss adversity or failure hinders innovation.” For this reason, Iske advocates for increasing FQ—Failure Intelligence—which is the ability to fail brilliantly, learn from those failures, and share those experiences.
Collaborating on one of the winning projects?
Is your organisation interested in collaborating on one of the winning projects? The Innovation Budget team would be happy to facilitate contact with the initiators. Please reach out to us via: innovatiebudget@ictu.nl.
Implementation of ID Wallet calls for redesign
The project titled “Study of the ID Wallet in the Social Domain” aims to find ways to prevent municipalities from introducing new technology into outdated systems. By 2026, Dutch citizens will have access to a Digital ID Wallet. A consortium led by the municipality of Nijmegen is exploring how to implement this wallet within its social domain procedures. Wendy van den Eeckhout from the City of Nijmegen and Roger Olivieira, co-founder of Ver.ID, showcased the wallet’s functionalities in an engaging demonstration. This includes identifying oneself as over 18 or retrieving income details from the UWV to apply for social benefits.
Wendy explains that implementing the wallet involves a thorough redesign of existing processes. “For this redesign, we must start by asking: what information do we need?” The Innovation Budget they received has allowed them to create these demonstrations, enabling them to involve employees in the development process and accelerating the adoption of the new technology. An important takeaway is that often-vulnerable groups of citizens can only be included if efforts are made to reach out to them. Many people do not spontaneously visit the town hall to participate in discussions. Therefore, in the second phase of the project, testing will take place at Digital Government Information Points established in libraries.
The importance of open source in innovation
One key criterion for application is that the innovation must be open source. We asked Boris van Hoytema from the Open-Source Program Office at the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations why this is crucial for innovation projects. He stated, “Innovation progresses much faster when using open source. After all, non-open source means it is, by default, non-reusable.”
However, adopting open source necessitates a shift in the relationship between the market and the government. Boris emphasized the importance of “innovating in collaboration with suppliers” and ensuring that the public value of these innovations does not end up benefiting private entities. Since the code is public, others can utilize it as well. The business model for suppliers should focus on the strategic advantages of the knowledge created rather than on ownership of the code.
Like using 1 system
Annemieke van Burg from the City of Gouda offers an excellent example of open-source collaboration. She explains, “One supplier reviews another supplier’s code.” Her project, the Federated Search query for the Dutch Open Government Act (WOO) platform, involves collaboration with various suppliers. The goal is to determine how citizens can search through all open government information as if it were presented in a single system.
It is the responsibility of each public authority to organize the publication of their information in the Woo-index. The municipalities of Gouda and Noordwijk utilize the Openwoo.App (Dutch) to gather data that needs to be published from various municipal databases. This app presents the data as if it comes from a single system. Currently, 29 municipalities and 6 private entities are using this app.
Public authorities can connect to this app through an API. Annemieke urges other public authorities: “Don’t make it difficult for residents by requiring them to search through multiple platforms. By using federated search queries, people can search across different domain-specific software as if it were one government entity. Therefore, from a service-oriented perspective, I encourage you to connect to an API entry!”
Law Guide for businesses
Many of the innovations being developed are leveraging the potential of AI. One such example is the Law Guide for Businesses (WetWijzer voor Bedrijven in Dutch), which is an experiment by Logius/Koop aimed at helping entrepreneurs understand the laws and regulations relevant to their specific situations.
This tool allows entrepreneurs to participate in interactive Q&A sessions, powered by a combination of search technology and generative AI. As developments in AI are advancing rapidly, it’s important to note that “what you invent today may be obsolete tomorrow.” The goal is to establish a framework that can swiftly adapt between different language models, ensuring the application benefits from the latest improvements.
The demo is fully open source, and while it will take additional steps to create a prototype capable of managing the complexities of Dutch legislation, initial feedback from users has been positive.
Collaborating on an issue
With the Innovation Budget, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations encourages collaboration and innovation between public authorities in the Netherlands. Since 2019, several projects have received funding. Would you like to know which projects? Please see this overview (in Dutch).
If your organisation is interested in collaborating on one of the winning projects, the Innovation Budget team would be happy to facilitate contact with the initiators. Please reach out to innovatiebudget@ictu.nl.
