Raadzoeker
What the Rotterdam city council says, decides and promises, searchable in one place.
Purpose
Council information is public, but spread over agendas, minutes, videos and separate systems. Raadzoeker brings it together so you can search a topic and see right away what was said, decided and promised.
Every meeting has a short and a long summary with verbatim quotes and the video moment. Each topic, domain and area has its own page, with open motions and commitments and the places in the city where it plays out.
Why
To find out what a council member once said about parking, or whether a commitment was kept, you currently search several systems. That is a barrier for residents, journalists, civil servants and council members alike. I also wanted to show how much you can build quickly with open data and AI assistance.
Data
Everything comes from public sources: the iBabs environments of the city council and the district councils, the public video and subtitles of the meetings, officielebekendmakingen.nl, CBS, PDOK, RDW Open Data, the Rotterdam Court of Audit and the Rotterdam-Rijnmond Ombudsman.
There are no accounts and no cookies. Names of residents who spoke in public are not shown.
What you can do with it
Search debates and documents, follow a topic and get notified, see what is going on per district, check whether promises were kept, or generate a briefing on a topic.
AI summaries are labelled as such. Every quote is mechanically checked for a verbatim match in the source. That catches invented quotes, but not an overly broad summary of a real quote.
For other organisations
The building blocks are open: fetching, aligning subtitles to speakers, quote checking and the build of the topic pages. Another municipality needs some adaptation, but the design is meant to be reused.
For clerks' offices, council members and policy teams it is also an example of making existing public information accessible without new systems.
Status and next steps
The site is running and updated every night. It is my own unofficial tool, not a product of the municipality or the council clerk.
Ideas for next: the same approach for other municipalities through open council information, national debate from the House of Representatives next to the local one, and regional decisions of MRDH and the provincial council.