The Manifesto
Belgium deserves a government that builds.
Not a procurement office. Not a committee. Not an outsourcing machine. A motivated team with a mandate to investigate, fix, and build GOV OS — the open-source operating system for Belgian government. No bullshit.
The Problem
Belgian governments spend billions on technology every year. Most of it fails. Not because the problems are hard, but because the system is designed to fail.
A ministry needs software. They write a 47-page tender. A consulting firm wins the contract. They subcontract to another firm. Who subcontracts to another. Four layers deep, nobody owns the outcome. Three years later: over budget, under-delivered, and the citizens it was meant to serve are still using paper forms.
Critical government infrastructure runs on US big tech and consulting firms that have repeatedly failed to deliver. Belgian citizen data is governed by the US CLOUD Act. This isn't an accident. It's the system working as designed.
€95.8M
Wasted on 3 failed Belgian IT projects alone
6%
Average delivery rate of promised functionality
4+
Layers of subcontracting on average
The Vision: GOV OS
An open-source, sovereign operating system for Belgian government. Not another failed IT project — a permanent, shared software layer that every level of government can use.
Open Source
Every line of code is public. Citizens pay for it — citizens own it. No vendor lock-in. No black boxes. Transparency by design.
Decentralised
No single point of failure. Each agency owns its data. Exchange happens peer-to-peer. Small, independent modules — not monoliths.
Sovereign
Belgian data on European infrastructure. Governed by Belgian law. No dependency on foreign tech monopolies. Digital sovereignty is non-negotiable.
What We Demand
A government tech department with a real mandate. Not advisory. Not consultative. Operational.
No tenders for building software
You don't tender for your engineering team. You hire them, give them ownership, and let them build. Government should do the same.
No subcontracting chains
The people who write the code should own the outcome. One team, full accountability. Not 4 layers of contractors where nobody is responsible.
Builders who own what they ship
Not contractors who disappear after the contract ends. Permanent builders who maintain, iterate, and improve. Your name is on the code.
100% transparency
Every euro spent, public. Every line of code, open source. Every decision, documented. Citizens should see exactly where their money goes.
The Approach
Build the Team
Recruit the best young builders, investigators, and fixers. Prove that a small, motivated team can out-deliver entire consulting firms. Investigate the biggest failures, build prototypes, ship.
Get the Mandate
Build public support. Show what's possible. Get the political mandate to build government software — not advise on it, not outsource it, build it.
Build GOV OS
The endgame: an open-source, sovereign operating system for all Belgian government. Identity, payments, documents, communication — all on open standards, decentralised architecture, and European infrastructure.
The Principles
The people who build it should own it. No more "it's the vendor's problem."
Ship in weeks, not years. Iterate based on real usage, not committee feedback.
Open source by default. Public budgets. Citizens can see what they're paying for.
European infrastructure. Belgian law. No foreign government can compel access to citizen data.
Hire people who make things. Not people who advise people who manage people who might eventually make things.
The Core Bet
Open source beats proprietary at government scale — because transparency, auditability, and community contribution matter more than vendor support contracts.
Small teams beat big consultancies — because 5 engineers who own a service will always outperform 50 consultants who don't.
Belgium can build — Estonia did it with 1.3 million people. India did it with 1.4 billion. Belgium, with 11 million people and one of the highest GDP-per-capita in the world, has no excuse not to.
This is the future of government technology.
No more tenders. No more subcontracting. No more wasted billions. Sovereign, open-source, built by Belgians for Belgians.