Open Raadsinformatie provides access to council information from Dutch municipalities, provinces and water authorities: agendas, meeting documents, lists of decisions, motions and related documents. The platform is managed by the Open State Foundation and can be found at zoek.openraadsinformatie.nl .
Within BesluitBron, this is the source with the longest track record and the only one that provides exact totals.
What’s inside
Recorded on 13 August 2026 by taking a measurement on the platform itself:
- 331 sources: 310 municipalities, 8 provinces and 13 water authorities, each with its own index;
- approximately 5.3 million documents;
- The text of each PDF document is stored on a page-by-page basis, so that a match can be pinpointed to the exact page.
How it’s structured
flowchart TD
subgraph LEV["Suppliers of<br/>council information systems"]
NB["Notubiz"]
IB["iBabs"]
GO["GemeenteOplossingen"]
PA["Parlaeus"]
end
LEV --> ETL["Processing<br/>text extraction from PDF,<br/>OCR in Dutch"]
ETL --> ES[("Search index<br/>331 indices,<br/>text per page")]
BB["BesluitBron"] --> PROXY["Public search service<br/>api.openraadsinformatie.nl"] --> ES
The municipalities do not supply the data themselves. The platform retrieves the data from the four suppliers of council information systems used by Dutch municipalities. Anything that a municipality does not enter into its council information system will therefore not appear here either.
Strengths
- The totals are exact. A reported figure of 47 hits is 47, not an approximation. That makes all the difference when it comes to accountability on Zoekprecisie;
- The text of the annexes is searchable, including in the case of scanned documents that have been processed using OCR;
- The breakdown of hits across the sources can be retrieved. This means that the question ‘in which municipalities does this occur?’ can be answered.
Restrictions
- The platform has been announced as reaching the end of its lifecycle. OpenBesluitvorming is its successor. The administrator will shut down the search service on 1 November 2026. This was announced on 21 August 2026. After that date, this connector will no longer respond. Up to and including version 1.4.5, it stated here that no date was known;
- The national parliament is not included. The platform’s source code does have a connection for this, but the active index contains only local sources. For the parliament, the source is Tweede Kamer or OpenTK;
- Coverage and timeliness vary from one municipality to another, as they depend on what that municipality’s supplier provides;
- No request limit has been observed. That does not mean there isn’t one; see Buffering en Doorlooptijd.
Address and tools
Address: https://besluitbron.nl/mcp/ori. This is the only connector without a version number in the address: the address is in use and will not be changed; see Connectorregister.
list_sources: a list of source organisations, including their type and size. The starting point for any enquiry that needs to be tailored to a specific municipality;list_committees: the committees within a source organisation;upcoming_meetings: the scheduled meetings, with dates and topics;get_meetings: one meeting with its agenda and the accompanying documents;search_documents: search within documents, either in a single source or across all sources at once;get_document: a single document containing its metadata and text;find_document_pages: the pages within a document on which a search term appears. This is possible because the platform stores the text on a page-by-page basis, and it saves the reader from having to read through a 200-page document;topic_timeline: how a subject evolves over time through the documents;nationwide_overview: which source organisations deal with a particular topic, along with the breakdown. This answers the question “Do other municipalities do this too?”;find_peoples: individuals featured in council information, such as councillors and executives;find_organisationss: organisations mentioned in the documents;export_documents: export a set of results in bulk as a CSV or NDJSON file, for further processing outside the assistant;list_platform_calls: the calls to the platform in this session.
In addition, ‘list_capabilities’, as on every connector.
Search by date
The tools search_documents, export_documents and nationwide_overview can filter by the date on which a piece was discussed. A date in date_from or date_to refers to a full calendar day in Dutch time. The date takes the form jjjj-mm-dd. Any other format, such as a date followed by a time, will be rejected. The response shows, below date_filter, which boundaries have been sent to the platform.
Up to and including version 1.4.5, BesluitBron interpreted such a date as a day in UTC. This caused a discrepancy. iBabs often dates copies of motions and amendments as midnight Dutch time, which in UTC is still the previous day. As a result, a filter based on the day of the meeting would miss those documents. In Aalten, a search for “motion” with a filter set to 5 November 2025 returned just 8 documents instead of 13. From version 1.4.6 onwards, these documents are correctly assigned to the correct day.
Not every document has a date. This applies in particular to lists from iBabs and their annexes, such as motions and amendments published via a list. A date filter cannot assign a date to such a document and therefore omits it. In Simpelveld, a filter set for 6 November 2025 did not find any of the 17 motions and amendments from the budget meeting. From version 1.4.6 onwards, search_documents counts how many undated documents match the search query. That number is shown in date_filter, and more_to_find lists it along with the reason scope_limited. With include_undated on true, these documents are included in the result. Their period is then unknown, so the title or text must indicate whether a document belongs to the period being searched for. export_documents has the same parameter. topic_timeline counts undated documents separately, under undated_documents, and categorises the rest by calendar periods in Dutch time.
Where to find this platform
These addresses belong to the organisation behind this source and not to BesluitBron. Anyone who finds an error in the data or in this source’s API should report it there:
- Report a bug: the Open Raadsinformatie issues on GitHub ;
- Read the API: API-docs.md ;
- Search for yourself on the source’s website: zoek.openraadsinformatie.nl .
These addresses were checked on 18 August 2026. No email address has been included deliberately: where a party publishes only an address, BesluitBron refers to the page on which that address appears.
What this source is suitable for
For questions about decision-making within a local authority, and for questions comparing different local authorities. Furthermore, the precise figures make this the ideal source when the answer needs to specify a number.
What it is not for
For the national parliament, which is not included here. For the question of whether something has been formally announced, for which Officiële Bekendmakingen is the source. And for the voting records of individual councillors, which are not recorded here but are available at OpenBesluitvorming.
Current situation, as of August 2026
A further check was carried out on 12 October 2026. The platform has not recorded any new items since 10 July 2026, not even from a single supplier. The number of documents has remained the same since July. The administrator is no longer restoring the retrieval function and refers to OpenBesluitvorming.
This platform is now publishing almost no new content. As measured on 16 August 2026, based on exact daily counts: 1,173 documents dated 9 July 2026, 22 on 10 July, and thereafter between zero and three per day. The summer recess can be ruled out as an explanation by comparing it with the corresponding calendar weeks of 2025, which totalled 75, 76 and 113 documents per week.
The current status varies greatly from one administrative body to another, and a national figure masks this. Of the eight provinces, Flevoland’s period ran until 22 December 2021 and Limburg’s until 10 July 2026: a difference of more than four years within the same source. The tool list_sources therefore provides the date of the most recent document for each body.
Ten local authorities have been permanently disbanded because the municipality has been abolished but the archives are being retained: Beemster, Binnenmaas, Boxmeer, Brielle, Cuijk, Grave, Mill and Sint Hubert, Sint Anthonis, Weesp and Westvoorne. These are not counted as ‘disbanded’ on the Laadstatus website.