With Openwob.nl (OpenFOIA) you can find and search Freedom of Information requests, decisions and documents. In the Netherlands, not all FOIA requests, decisions and documents are regularly or consistently published.

In 2001 a government commission (Commission Wallage) recommended that documents derived from FOIA requests should be put online. Since a couple of years, documents and decisions are irregularly published on the national government’s website but most city or regional authority websites do not publish FOIA requests online. You can find information how to submit a FOIA request (in most cases not electronically) but it’s hard to find the information that is made available.

Therefore, Open State Foundation developed Openwob.nl, a place where you can easily search through FOIA documents and decisions and download them. The documents are scraped from various government websites. It would be even better when authorities decide to provide active transparency on these decisions and documents online.

openwob