- Date
-
4:30 pm—4:50 pm · June 10, 2025
- Room
- Auditorium / Livestreamed
Discover three of Open State Foundation's most impactful pro-democracy projects in the Netherlands, including a search tool to make documents of all levels of government more findable; research on late responses to Access to Information requests; and open calendars of ministerial meetings that anyone can subscribe to.
Jan and Quinten will talk about these Open State pro-democracy projects:
- Bron makes more than 2 million documents of all levels of governments more findable by combining countless regional data sources into a single search engine. This allows anyone to stay up-to-date on the local developments that matter to them, by subscribing to alerts for specific search queries. Recently, Open State has collaborated with the Dutch Journalism Fund to incorporate powerful AI tools that allow for answering questions with precise references to documents in Bron.
- Access to Information (ATI) requests research: Open State report annually on Dutch ministries’ timescales for responding to ATI requests. Last year, it took on average 188 days instead of the legally mandated maximum of 42 days. This research is always widely shared in the news, resulting in questions asked by members of parliament; and recently the Dutch government released a first version of their own public dashboard to track the status of these requests. But how to get the government to answer more quickly? Together with journalists, Open State collected 11 pieces of advice for best practice.
- Open Lobby: Since 2017, ministers and secretaries in the Netherlands have published their meetings online, but Open State’s research has shown multiple times that it is very incomplete. This is often covered in the news. Open State plan to release iCalendar/.ics files based on these incomplete meetings so people can subscribe to them and see all the meetings in their own calendar app. A recently commissioned report advised the government to make use of a mandatory lobby register, but the government refused. More than three years of advocacy from Open State, using tech, research and a petition, has kept this issue alive in the minds of politicians and citizens.
Explore:
https://bron.live/
https://openstate.eu/nl/2024/02/afhandeling-informatieverzoeken-wet-open-overheid-door-ministeries-verder-vertraagd/
https://woo-witboek.openstate.eu/