NEWS

Open State opens blackbox of common government arrangements


Common arrangements, partnerships between governments, there are many types and sizes in the Netherlands. These legal arangements are used to organise waste treatment, employment or safety. Local representatives complain about the lack of transparency and accountability in these schemes. With OpenGR we want to open this black box.

The data unlocked for OpenGR can be found on Open State Foundation’s Github. Here you can find the data that was retrieved after a formal FOIA and re-use request of the information from regional authorities. We also have published the data (after a re-use request of government data) that forms the basis of regioatlas.nl. On this website the government collects sub-local government cooperations and regional divisions but no information on common arrangements.

Of some 147 common arrangements with annual expenses exceeding 20 million euro, budgets and annual accounts can be found on openspending.nl. The budgets and annual accounts of common arrangements collected via de regional authorities can be found via DocumentCloud’s API. Ofcourse, you guessed it, the data was not in a machine readable open format.