Posted on 20/10/2022 by Peter Tessel
Last week Raadzaam, our search engine for city councilors, was launched on raadvanalmere.nl. At the beginning of the plenary part of the 679th Political Market, Mayor Ank Bijleveld showed a video about the new search engine on the council portal:
The Municipal Clerk's Office (MCO) of the council of Almere develops this portal in dialogue with the users, while striving for the best possible user experience. Deputy Municipal Clerk Christine Visser:
'We want to unburden council members and citizens as much as possible and create a single site from which they can intuitively access all the resources that are available to them. In this way we want to make politics easily accessible to them.'
Important in this pursuit of an optimal user experience is intuitive access to all available information. If councilors or non-elected citizens want to delve further into a subject after reading about it, the MCO wants to make this possible quickly and easily. Christine:
'It used to be hard to find relevant information without historical knowledge: searching the council information system is simply difficult. If you found something, you often had to look further to get a complete picture.'
The MCO opted for Raadzaam as the search engine on raadvanalmere.nl. Raadzaam integrates data from separate sources, adds knowledge about the municipal domain and so creates one conceptual model. This approach allows users to search for concepts without knowing what system they are stored in and how they can be retrieved. In this way users can search various sources efficiently and navigate seamlessly through the information in the connected systems. Initially, the information from the council information system is now being combined with a number of internal sources of the MCO. The plan is to connect other sources in subsequent phases. Christine:
'The MCO of the council of Almere has ambitious and innovative plans to create a so-called 'Information Room' to provide the council and residents with maximum information.'
We welcome the council of Almere as a customer of Raadzaam! We share the ambition of the MCO to make council information intuitively accessible and look forward to further furnishing the Information Room.