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Comment by tdhz77 | Hacker News Reader

I’m a software engineer that works for the federal government, specifically the United States District Court. I do believe in the mission of making justice for all. There is a myth perpetrated by those in the private sector that government is behind, slow, and not capable. I assure you we are using Rust, Clojure, and Next.jj’s in our projects too. We just aren’t as loud because of privacy concerns. Federal employees operate just like startups. The federal court software factory in the judiciary is the equivalent to 18F. I’m the co-founder of FCSF and we are just getting started. Open source and government are a match made in heaven and I look forward to your contributions to our projects. We code for the people.

https://github.com/federal-courts-software-factory/open-case...

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I’m discouraged that Next.js is being touted here. It’s an awesome technology. But it’s run by a for profit startup (Vercel) who are going to steer it into a walled garden managed hosting ecosystem.

The government needs long term thinking for its software and hip frameworks and trendy startups are not it.

Good point. Thank you for this comment. We will talk about this.

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421084

Happy to provide more clarity as needed and answer questions you have!

Lee from Vercel. This is not accurate – Next.js will be free and open-source, forever. OSS is a core part of Vercel's ethos.

"I look forward to your contributions to our projects"

Where can we find the code for those projects?

The repo you linked is empty. The GH profile says FCSF was founded in 2020, but none of the 5 visible repos contain any new code:

- brand-guidelines (not software)

- open-case-filing-system (empty, created 6 days ago, but in another comment you said this the main focus?)

- open-source-policy (not software)

- ef-cms (forked from another org)

- mousejiggler (forked from another org)

“We are just getting started.”

We have hundreds of projects that are ready for public consumption. We have over 200 developers that contribute code together in the federal judiciary. Watch this space. It’s coming.

In the meantime, take a look at: - Code.gov - data.gov

Sorry, I thought from what you wrote earlier that you were building in public like a regular open source project.

But from what you wrote it sounds like you're working in private repos, and will publish stuff at some point in the future.

Have I understood correctly?

Yes, you got it. This is new for the judiciary. We are moving and will be in the public space. Just have to do some housekeeping and we are organizing. We are making sure each project has the maintainers/developers and are properly supported like a true open source foundation. We took a lot from the Debian foundation and how it is setup. We really hope to contribute in meaningful ways.

What are some of the more interesting projects you are working on? I work at a Legal Tech startup, with a strong focus on eDiscovery and now Evidence Management - "Improve outcomes with products Legal loves." - https://www.csdisco.com/

Current focus is on the flag ship case management electronic filing system being revamped and modernized. US courts has one of the largest databases in the world. A fact maybe some don’t know. We are moving towards functional programming for many of our services. Making it easier for products like yours to see the day to day court business through our micro services architecture.

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