With Kamervragentracker.nl you can follow questions asked by members of the Dutch House of Representatives. You can search for themes, people, locations, organizations, or questions based on a given source. 830 Kamevragen has been asked since the beginning of 2017 and 382 of them are still waiting for reply.
Members of the House who ask a question to one or more ministers send them to the chair of the parliament. She then sends them to the relevant minister and then informs the members of the House of Representatives of the forwarded questions and makes them public. If a minister is unable to answer the questions within three weeks, he or she will inform the chair. With Kamervragentracker.nl you can search for parliamentary questions and answers and for unanswered questions and you can see how long these questions are waiting for answers. You can search for themes, but also on individuals, parties or based on a given source.
Kamervragentracker.nl made with support from the parliament, uses the recently launched API of the Dutch House of Representatives. The data is retrieved via the REST endpoint as a JSON feed from the API, but Kamervragentracker.nl also provides its own data via its own API. This offers one important function to the House of Representatives API: a link between questions and the answers that are attached. This was also the biggest challenge in developing Kamervragentracker.nl because parliamentary questions and answers in the original data are not linked to each other. This has been done based on text analysis of the titles and texts from both feeds.
The Dutch House of Representatives API provides access to public parliamentary data, such as data about members, meetings, permanent committees and group employees. This is a typical example of open data for the accessibility of politics, and has been on our wish list for years.
On June 9, 2017, Accountability Hack takes place. For this we have written a number of data blogs, including one about the Dutch House of Representatives API. During this hackathon, we are going to follow government money flows with public data and map government achievements. Do you want to join? Sign up here.
