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Platform AI & Overheid is organising the third edition of the OneGov AI Hackathon Series on 9 and 10 December 2026. The event will take place at The Hague Tech, Waldorpstraat 5, The Hague, starting at 8:30 on both days. Participation is open to anyone with an interest in AI and the public sector, from developers and designers to policy officers, researchers and students.
The hackathon focuses on prototyping AI applications that concretely strengthen digital government. Teams of two to six people will spend two days working on solutions to challenges drawn from the Dutch public sector. The second edition attracted more than 200 participants from government, education, industry and the broader AI community.
Platform AI & Overheid falls under the Digitaal Doordacht programme, a collaboration between the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations and ECP | Platform for the Information Society. The hackathon series is co-funded by Hackathon for Good, an initiative of The Hague Tech, with GovTech NL acting as a partner.
At the previous edition, teams worked on questions around synthetic data, open government, spatial assistants, citizen-centred services and digital assistants. The organisation has not yet announced the themes for edition three, but the series' approach is that they flow directly from concrete needs identified by Dutch government organisations.
The format is explicitly multidisciplinary. The organisation welcomes participants without a technical background just as readily as programmers, on the premise that policy insight and domain knowledge are at least as important to producing usable prototypes as technical skill. Team composition plays a role: teams consist of a minimum of two and a maximum of six participants.
For the second edition, LINKIT, Qualogy and GreenPT were involved as sponsors and partners. Whether the same parties will join for edition three has not yet been confirmed.
The OneGov AI Hackathon Series is part of Hackathon for Good, the broader initiative of The Hague Tech. That programme has been running since 2018 and has now completed eight editions. More than a thousand participants have taken part in total, more than fifty challenges have been tackled, and over a hundred partners support the initiative.
This scale gives the organisation an established network to draw on when assembling challenges and engaging government services as commissioners or subject-matter guides. The public-sector focus distinguishes the OneGov series from broader or commercially oriented hackathons.
Participation in the previous edition was free of charge. Whether that will also apply to edition three has not yet been communicated by the organisation. Registration and further details are expected through the channels of Platform AI & Overheid and GovTech NL.
An event such as the OneGov AI Hackathon Series demonstrates that the connection between the Dutch AI community and the public sector is increasingly taking on structured forms. Where government innovation previously tended to happen internally, organisations such as Platform AI & Overheid and GovTech NL are deliberately seeking collaboration with external developers, researchers and startups.
For founders and investors active in GovTech or public-sector AI applications, hackathons of this kind offer a direct entry point to government challenges and potential partners. The presence of policymakers and domain specialists alongside technical participants increases the likelihood that prototypes progress to pilots, although that is not a guarantee any two-day event can provide. The third edition in December 2026 gives the ecosystem another concrete moment to forge that connection.
This article draws in part on the following sources.
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