Municipalities in the Netherlands face a major digital challenge, as citizens expect reliable, fast, and accessible online services. The IT landscape of municipalities often consists of a collection of separate systems that do not communicate easily with each other. From this reality, the Common Ground movement emerged. What does this mean for Laravel developers, now that the open-source framework is increasingly involved in this movement? In this article, we explain more about it.
What is Common Ground?
Common Ground is a shared vision of Dutch municipalities. The movement is supported by the VNG and helps municipalities fundamentally redesign their IT architecture in order to create a shared information infrastructure.
In many municipalities, applications have grown into closed systems where data, logic, and presentation are intertwined. Data is stored, synchronized, and copied in multiple places. This makes systems expensive to maintain, but also vulnerable and difficult to adapt to societal changes or new legislation.
The Common Ground movement aims to break this situation by separating data from applications. Data remains at the source and is made available to different applications through standardized interfaces. Applications become users of the data rather than owners.
The goal of the Common Ground movement
The goal is to make municipal services easier, more transparent, and future-proof. By making data centrally available, municipalities can develop new applications faster and improve existing processes. Municipalities also want to be less dependent on individual vendors and have more control over their own information systems. Open standards and reusable components make it easier for municipalities to switch suppliers, and they also make it possible to develop shared solutions. This means that vendor solutions can be used more broadly within the municipal domain.
Common Ground in practice
In practice, this means that data and applications are separated. Applications retrieve data through APIs and do not store it locally for long periods. This creates a single source of truth per dataset and makes it easier to maintain data consistency.
In addition, there is a strong focus on uniform standards for data exchange. By agreeing on data models and APIs, different systems can communicate without custom integrations. An application only needs to know how to call a standard interface.
Finally, collaboration is an important principle. Municipalities, vendors, and developers work together on building blocks that can be used by multiple parties.
Opportunities for Laravel developers
For Laravel developers, there are clear opportunities because the Common Ground philosophy fits well with modern development practices. Laravel is widely used for API-driven applications and offers strong support for structured data access, authentication, and authorization.
Within a Common Ground context, you will less often build a monolithic application with its own database. Instead, services are developed that provide a specific function and retrieve data from external sources. For example, a Laravel application may act as a front-end or process layer that retrieves data through APIs from different registries. This requires different design choices: models will be less tied to local tables and more focused on external resources. Error handling, caching, and API versioning therefore become more important than ever.
Architectural choices for Common Ground and Laravel
Applications within Common Ground require a clear separation of responsibilities. Laravel works well with a modular structure where logic is placed in services, clients, and adapters that are independent from the rest of the application. Instead of large monoliths, a landscape of smaller, well-defined applications emerges. Laravel can function as an API provider, as an orchestrator between different data sources, or as a consumer of external services.
Reusability also plays an important role. Code that can be used by multiple municipalities has more value than a one-time solution. Composer packages, well-documented API clients, and configurable services fit well within this approach.
Collaboration between municipalities and vendors
Within Common Ground, choices are not fixed in advance but are formed through collaboration between municipalities and vendors. For developers, this means that technical knowledge alone is not enough. Contributing to standards, working on shared solutions, and actively participating in communication becomes increasingly important.
For digital agencies, this offers the opportunity to build expertise in a niche that will only become more important in the coming years. Those who understand how Common Ground works can translate it into concrete software solutions and gain an advantage.
Hosting is also an important part. Shock Media is involved as a supplier in providing infrastructure for municipalities. Within Common Ground, the HAVEN standard is used. This standard states that applications must run on a Kubernetes cluster built according to defined guidelines, in order to achieve flexibility and independence. The collaboration with the Open Webconcept is a good example of how cooperation between municipalities, web agencies, and Shock Media as hosting provider works in practice.
Points of attention & challenges
The vision is clear, but the reality is more complex. Not all municipalities are equally advanced in the transition, and it is not easy to separate all existing systems. As a developer, you will therefore encounter hybrid situations where old and new architectures exist side by side. In addition, not all standards are fully defined yet. This requires flexibility in design and the willingness to adapt applications as insights evolve. A robust and well-tested codebase is essential.
