U-reka reaches final of Gemeentedelers!

Posted on 19/05/2022 by Peter Tessel

U-reka, the search engine for city councilors we created in close cooperation with the municipality of Utrecht, has reached the final of GemeenteDelers 2022! GemeenteDelers is a competition between initiatives that improve municipal services. The main aim is to generate attention and to share knowledge and experience between municipalities. This year, 94 initiatives were submitted, ranging from getting quick access to a letter address for homeless young people in The Hague, clearer texts by the reader panel of the Simplify team in Zwolle to a regional approach to health and care in Twente www.gemeentedelers.nl.

Jade Besuyen, process and quality advisor at the Municipal Clerk's Office of Utrecht, submitted 'U-reka; finding Utrecht's council information at lightning speed':

'When I saw the call to submit initiatives, I immediately thought: 'Yes!' U-reka is an innovative and valuable application that is widely applicable. Why should every municipality reinvent the wheel if we all have the same goal: open information that is easy to find? I wanted to share this with other municipalities!'

In the first round, all cases were scored by a diverse group of people on the basis of a broad set of criteria. This resulted in a long list of 31 cases. This was followed by an extensive assessment for each case with two assessors who did not only look at the final result, but also at the approach, the involvement of stakeholders and the reusability of the initiative. In the case of U-reka, the assessment was with two former city councilors who did not only interview the stakeholders within the municipality, but also a city councilor and us, the supplier. At the end of the second round the assessors jointly selected the 12 finalists.

In the final round the finalists presented their cases to the GemeenteDelers jury and for each initiative a video was made:

The winners were announced at the annual VNG conference on June 29th in Hoorn. U-reka did not win in the end, but Raadzaam was shared with a second municipality: at the end of June we launched the bèta version of Raadzaam Almere. Check https://raadzaam.nl/blog to find out more!