News item | 07-09-2023 | 4:00 pm
The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport today launched a new platform that makes it easier and more user-friendly to search publicly released documents about the corona crisis. The platform has been developed in collaboration with various stakeholders. All documents published from now on will be published on the new platform. The documents that have already been made public will be added retroactively.
Since March 2020, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport has received more than 450 corona-related Wob/Woo requests. In response to the submitted requests, several decisions have been taken in which documents have been made public. This can involve hundreds, or even thousands, of documents per decision. These decisions, which now contain tens of thousands of documents, have been posted on the website since the autumn of 2020 https://wobcovid19.rijksoverheid.nl published. However, it turned out to be impossible for an applicant to find the information he was looking for in that multitude of documents. For this reason, the ministry has decided to develop a new platform.
The new Woo platform is solely intended as a searchable database of new decisions and already published corona-related documents from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. From September 1, all new decisions will be published on the new platform. The decisions already published will also follow in the coming months.
Improved accessibility
The new platform – https://open.minvws.nl – has been completely redesigned with the aim of improved search functionality and improved accessibility. This is reflected in the fact that each document is individually accessible instead of one large collective document. In addition, almost all documents are also searchable using search terms. Meta-information is also added to the documents, such as date, file format and the relationship to other published documents. All this improves user-friendliness. The ministry will continue to develop the platform in the coming months to resolve any user issues and to further improve user-friendliness.
Cooperation with applicants
During the development of this innovative platform, a transparent community-driven and open-source approach was chosen. This means that during the process feedback was actively requested from the platform’s target group, such as journalists, scientists and citizens. In this way, the new Woo platform must match the wishes of this target group as closely as possible.