2025-08-12 –, Brachium
Language: English
The Dutch Electoral Council builds its new software-to-be, with a small in-house team, open source and in public. We call her Abacus. In this talk we'll go in depth on the technical and management side of our project. We invite you to join and check out our work! Our talk contains actual code written in Rust.
"The software used in elections is developed open source", according to the Dutch law on elections. As we are working on this software at the Dutch Electoral Council, we want to share our experience and invite you to check out our progress so far. We'll go into our development process and technical choices, show some of the cool contributions we received, some of our own code and show what happens when a small government organisation decides to take software development into its own hands. At the talk both the lead developer and teamlead are present, to be able to elaborate on the actual development and on the management of such a project.
Niels is a freelancer by day, idealist by night. Currently, he works for the Dutch Electoral Council as teamlead of the Abacus development team. He collects hobbies which require a licence or permit and loves to build and do actual things. Ask him anything about desert racing, for instance.
Self-employed, currently lead developer and software architect for Abacus at the Dutch Electoral Council (Kiesraad).