Nowadays, cities and municipalities publish the minutes and proceedings of their council meetings on websites to inform the public about decisions made at the local policy level. However, these data, stuck in closed formats, are rather unstructured, not readable for machines, and difficult to process for accountability reasons. So information often doesn’t reach engaged citizens and stakeholders.

Now imagine that local decision-making is easy to follow using any digital channel. The project "Local Decisions as Linked Open Data" is searching for a solution to this challenge, with the goal to unlock the data reserves related to municipal decision-making.

In a first stage the research team studies the feasibility of applying the methodology of linked (open) data in the generation and publication of local decisions, taking into account factors such as existing software packages, the e-government maturity of the organization, interoperability, the integrability of solutions for local processes and their associated costs. The process will then be developed for a limited number of local decisions and tested using a Living Labs context.

So what would you do with linked decision-making data?

During our ideation-session at Open Belgium we will simulate an environment where decisions by local government are already linked and open. You will get the chance to work with real life decisions and brainstorm together with us on how (re)using this data can make a difference, and thus show the possible benefits.

Content contributions by Raf Buyle & Peter Mechant