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Officiële Bekendmakingen Open Raadsinformatie OpenBesluitvorming OpenTK Rechtspraak Tweede Kamer Not connected Documentation
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Open Raadsinformatie

Last changed on .

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 having reached the end of its life cycle. OpenBesluitvorming is its successor. No date has been announced for its decommissioning, but the search language may change once the successor goes live;
  • 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.

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:

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

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.