Every year, the ICAI OpenGov Lab has a cohort of graduation students who do "something exciting with the Woo" (the Dutch Open Government Act). Last Friday we hosted our annual Woorkshop, where a number of these students gave short presentations of their work.
The full program of the day.
Three papers from the OpenGov Lab have been accepted at the AI & Open Government Workshop (AIOG 2026), co-located with ICAIL 2026 in Singapore on 8 June.
The OpenGov Lab's WooZM (former WooGLe) dataset was used as a source for training GPT-NL, a large language model focused on Dutch language. The Woogle dataset, which contains millions of documents and metadata from the Dutch government, provided a rich and diverse source of text for training GPT-NL.
There we are, at the bottom right corner!
We're excited to announce the 1st AI & Open Government Workshop (AIOG), co-located with ICAIL 2026 in Singapore on June 8, 2026. The call for papers is now open!
The workshop is co-organized by David Graus (University of Amsterdam & ICAI OpenGov Lab), Graham McDonald (University of Glasgow), and Jason R. Baron (University of Maryland). David initiated the workshop out of the OpenGov Lab's mission to connect the communities working at the intersection of AI and government transparency — spanning information retrieval, legal AI, NLP, e-discovery, and open government practice — who don't always meet at the same conferences.
Every year around Christmas, we take stock of WooGLe's growth. And once again, the most recent numbers are remarkable: WooGLe has doubled in size, now indexing over 8 million documents across more than 90,000 dossiers from nearly 800 government bodies! Maarten Marx has written an extensive blog about this on Wooverheid (Dutch). Read the summary below!
WooGLe's document count has doubled each year since launch
This week we met at the Rijksorganisatie voor Informatiehuishouding (RvIHH) in The Hague for the ICAI OpenGov Lab Governing Board meeting. With GB members Marion Hermans-Koelemij (RvIHH) and Peter van der Donk (Universiteit van Amsterdam) we discussed progress, collaboration, and plans for the coming year.
We hosted colleagues from the AI Lab voor de Publieke Diensten (Utrecht University) at LAB42 UvA for a joint PhD meetup.
David Graus kicked off with an overview of the ICAI OpenGov Lab, followed by Maik Larooij and Lisa Winters, who presented their first projects and work packages. Iris Beerepoot, lab coordinator of the AI Lab voor de Publieke Diensten, then gave a helicopter overview of the Utrecht lab, their focus areas and stakeholders. Throughout the session, Guido Ongena (Hogeschool Utrecht) contributed thoughtful reflections from an information management perspective.
We’re proud to share that Barbora Wenzlová has won the Victorine van Schaick Prize 2025, awarded by the Victorine van Schaick Fund, for her Cultural Data & AI master thesis, written under supervision of Jaap Kamps at the ICAI OpenGov Lab.
Barbora received the award at the annual conference of the KNVI (Koninklijke Nederlandse Vereniging van Informatieprofessionals) in Ermelo on November 6, where she presented her research to an audience of information professionals focused on responsible and transparent digital transformation.
On Friday, October 31st, and Saterday, November 1st, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations and the program Open Government (Programma Open Overheid) organised a hackaton to improve the internal process of responding to Woo-requests. David, Damiaan, Maik and Jos (PhD student @ Utrecht University) represented the OpenGov Lab as one of the ten teams that participated in the event!
The team, very focused, at work while the time was running out