Government & open data
iBabs (gemeenteraadsstukken)
iBabs is a commercial platform for administrative decision-making. Many Dutch municipalities, and also provinces and water authorities, use it to prepare meetings and to publish their documents through a public council or board information portal. What you find there is the paperwork of decision-making itself: meeting agendas, council and executive proposals, decision lists, motions and amendments, annexes and research reports. For administrative, real estate and corporate law work this is often the only place where the reasoning behind a local decision can be traced.
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Availability depends on your organisation’s configuration and access rights.
What this source does not give you
iBabs is a supplier, not a government source: the portal contains what the public body itself publishes, and only for organisations that use iBabs. Other municipalities work with a different system, such as NotuBiz, GemeenteOplossingen or Parlaeus, and therefore do not appear here. Which documents are present and how far the archive goes back differs per organisation.
Legal domains for which LEO consults this source
Dutch legal domains; each link opens the domain page on leo.prudai.com.
Frequently asked questions
- Are all Dutch municipalities on iBabs?
- No. The market for council information systems is split across several suppliers; besides iBabs, NotuBiz, GemeenteOplossingen and Parlaeus are the best known. Which one a municipality uses determines whether its documents are reachable through this source. For searching across municipal boundaries there is the national entry point Open Raadsinformatie and its successor OpenBesluitvorming, a collaboration of the Open State Foundation, Ontola and VNG Realisatie, which bundles documents from several supplier systems.
- What kind of documents will I find in a council information portal?
- The documents around meetings of the council, its committees and often the executive board: the agenda, the council proposal with annexes, the decision list or minutes, tabled motions and amendments, written questions and the answers to them, and the underlying memoranda and research reports. Those annexes are usually the reason to look here: the formal decision is short, the reasoning sits in the proposal beneath it.
- Is a council decision I find here a legal source?
- That depends on what it is. A decision of a public body can have legal effect, for instance a by-law or a decision on a plan or a subsidy. A motion, an amendment or a council proposal does not: those are documents from the decision-making process. For the text of local regulation in force, the official publications and the central facility for decentralised regulation prevail, not the meeting portal.
- Why is a document I know exists missing?
- Usually for one of three reasons. The organisation uses a different system and publishes elsewhere. That organisation's archive does not go back that far, since the period available online differs per body. Or the document is not public: the council, the executive board, the mayor or a committee may impose confidentiality on information held by that body on the basis of an interest listed in Article 5.1 of the Dutch Open Government Act, and that obligation is noted on the document itself.
- Can I infer a municipality's standing policy from this?
- Only with a date check. A portal holds the documents as adopted at the time, including proposals later withdrawn, amended or replaced. A 2019 policy memorandum is still there even if the council revised the policy in 2023. So use the portal to reconstruct the history and the reasoning, and verify the version in force with the municipality itself or in the published regulation.