Here’s why we are going open source

Editor's note — April 2026

When this post was written in 2023, Go Vocal went open source. Over time, we found that maintaining an open-source community while continuing to innovate at the speed our clients needed was increasingly difficult to sustain. That experience led us to move to a source-available model: some core functionalities remain freely available under the AGPLv3 license, while our current platform version and its features are publicly visible but require a commercial license.

At the time of our OSP acquisition announcement, this page had not yet been updated to reflect that change — meaning it incorrectly described us as open source at a moment when many people were paying close attention. We apologize for the confusion this caused. You can read more on our updated page.

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Maybe you’ve already heard: we’re going open source!

In 2015 my co-founders and I launched Go Vocal with one goal in mind: to make decision-making more open, inclusive, and equitable. Over time, we have helped more than 275 local governments and organizations across 18 countries increase transparency and gain their communities’ trust. Today we’re going open source to further lower the threshold to participation and increase transparency along the way. After all, democracy belongs to all of us!  

Since the first project was launched on our platform, we’ve been driven by ideas. Ideas shared on our platforms by community members, ideas implemented by policy-makers around the world, and ideas from our team members on how to shape our product and the future of democracy. Ideas have the power to spark our imaginations, lead to deep discussions, and expose us to new perspectives – at Go Vocal we have witnessed first-hand the impact this can have on communities. Being that social impact is the compass that guides our company, we’re motivated by the fact that going open-source means more ideas can be shared and implemented to bring about positive change for more communities.  

When we started this work over five years ago, we initially built our product with local governments in mind because their decisions greatly affected the lives of so many people. While governments continue to represent around 70% of our clients, we’ve also found that community engagement on public interest decisions can happen outside of government structures. By making our platform accessible to all civic organizations – from universities and NGOs, to political parties and sports teams – we’re reinforcing the commitment we have to our social impact mission. Going open source means that we’re removing some barriers to participation by giving all of these smaller institutions a chance to launch consultation projects, create stronger links with their communities, and harness the power of collective intelligence.  

So, what happens next? Our core functionalities are open-source and available on GitHub under an AGPL license, so that anyone can view, reuse, and replicate our code. Our most advanced features are source-available, meaning that the code is viewable but requires a commercial license to be activated.  Comment end  

As a team of civic tech nerds, we hope this will lead to new and innovative uses of our platform. Don’t hesitate to experiment and share your projects – we’d love to see what you do with the code and platform, and how you get your community engaged.  For more information, check out our developers portal or get in touch with us directly.

Cheers to more transparency & collaboration,
Wietse Van Ransbeeck
Co-founder and CEO, Go Vocal

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