For investigative journalists: hold power to account at document level
Why you want this
Local power is held to account through documents: council proposals, executive letters, attachments, motions and minutes. Those records are public but scattered across hundreds of council information systems such as iBabs, Notubiz, GO and Parlaeus. The Besluitbron unlocks them — freshly supplied through Open Raadsinformatie — in a single conversation with Claude, across 310 municipalities, 8 provinces and 13 water authorities at once. Free of charge.
The difference with a search engine: instead of ten blue links you get answers with source references down to the page. Claude searches, reads and compares the underlying records and returns page numbers and literal fragments, so every claim you publish traces straight back to the source document — original URL at the source organisation included.
And because the whole country sits in one index of well over 5 million documents, you can lift any local story to the national level: what plays in your municipality usually plays in dozens of others. That pattern is the story.
From practice
1. The alderman says A, the dossier says B
Ask: "What has the executive promised about traffic safety around schools since 2023, and what was actually decided?" Claude builds the history with the dossier timeline, pulls the relevant records and puts promises next to decisions — including page-precise quotes where the two contradict each other.
2. From local incident to national pattern
Ask: "Which governments struggle with financing heat networks and what did they decide?" The nationwide overview counts documents per municipality, province and water authority and per year; then you zoom in on the most striking sources. One afternoon of work for what used to take weeks of phone calls.
3. Bulk research with your own tools
For data journalism you export thousands of document references (id, source, type, title, date, original URL) as CSV or NDJSON in one command — with a download link that loads straight into your spreadsheet or pipeline. The export is reproducible: same question, same scope, a verifiable methods paragraph for your publication.
4. Who was in the room?
People, parties and committees can be retrieved per municipality, memberships included. Useful to reconstruct who sat where when a decision fell.