Backside of Government Think Tank
The Backside of Government Think Tank (Denktank Achterkant van de Overheid) is an initiative of Stichting Kafkabrigade that investigates how citizens gain grip on their legal position and how governments gain grip on their own data streams in the digital government of the future. I have been a member since 2023.
The backside of government is the invisible world of thousands of data streams between government layers and organisations — algorithms, decision rules, registries. That world determines who can know, oversee and decide what. And that world constrains both citizens and government bodies in what they can do.
The think tank
The think tank consists of people from inside and outside government, with diverse backgrounds: legal, technical, administrative. Together we work towards a coherent vision of how government’s information infrastructure can be better organised — not as a technical project, but as a constitutional imperative.
Members (2025): Arjan Widlak, Timen Olthof, Marc van Andel, Mariette Lokin, Daan de Koning, Ronald Damhof.
My contribution as solution architect and tech researcher focuses on the architectural principles behind reliable registration — event sourcing, separation of facts and interpretations, and distributed information infrastructure.
Publications
Two publications have emerged from the think tank so far:
- Nieuwland — a design for the digital constitutional state — a positive ideal for the digital constitutional state, presented to Members of Parliament on 11 February 2026
- Position Paper Chronolexography — a conceptual model for adequately recording legal state over time