Flemish municipalities are required to publish their decisions. Hundreds of them do, as linked data, and until this existed almost none of it was findable by the people it concerns. I made the first commit on the citizen-facing database and worked on it across seventeen pull requests: search inside a session, keyword search, multiselect on classification, filters by governing body that actually stay open when you query them, and a detail view that shows an agenda item with the body that decided it and every source it came from.
The harder half is upstream. Publishing something is not the same as publishing it correctly, so I built a validation library and the tool on top of it: maturity levels for how complete a published decision is, a view of exactly what is missing against the standard, and correct and complete scored separately, because a decision can be one without being the other.
That is the part that turns a legal obligation into something a municipality can act on. It is also the part that means the citizen-facing side has data worth searching.
