[starefossen]

The Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV) of the Norwegian government is doing exactly that, we have been opening up our code since 2018 and are accepting pull requests across our 2000 public repositories from those who want to improve government services https://github.com/navikt this has also enabled a much more close collaboration between new and existing partners that was previously unheard of!

[EvanDotPro]

This seems so obvious, it's crazy this isn't being done everywhere.

[Kovah]

I think the main reason why this is not done actively in Germany, is missing people with expertise. Lots of old guys from the pre-internet era taking care of the technical systems. Unfortunately, the gov is not doing much to make at least official positions attractive to young programmers. And of course, if it's done by a contractor, they do not wat to share any code with the public.

Only somewhat positive example from the recent past is the Corona warning app: https://github.com/corona-warn-app