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Recap of the Woorkshop 2026

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 Woorkshop 2026 program The full program of the day.

The students and their projects

  • 👉 Tessa van Hooft presented her data science master's thesis: research into the use of LLMs to automatically identify narrative patterns and structures in Dutch House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer) debates on migration.
  • 👉 Bram Schoen presented his bachelor's thesis on automatically classifying policy changes in municipal council documents.
  • 👉 Noah Hamzaoui did research into automatically segmenting transcripts of hours-long municipal council meetings using text segmentation.
  • 👉 Thom van der Ent and Jason Zonjee wrote their master's theses on discovering and linking legal references in court rulings.
  • 👉 Noor Koevoet carried out a literature review in which she frames the passive Woo as a "tragedy of the commons".
  • 👉 And finally, Tibbe Rosbergen presented his research into the technical and organizational challenges around accessibly publishing Woo documents.

Lab and faculty contributions

David Graus (standing in for the absent Maik Larooij) gave a short presentation on work into the use of (local) LLMs for classifying personal policy opinions in internal government documents. Joris Wechsler gave a brief overview of WOOLens, an AI-based tool for making sense of large Woo dossiers, along with his thesis on analyzing email threads in Woo dossiers. Finally, Jaap Kamps gave a short overview of several Woo-related theses coming out of the MSc Cultural Data & AI (FGw).

Because of the extreme heat ("code red"), the session was also broadcast via Zoom at the last minute. We're looking into whether we can publish (parts of) the recording!

Thanks to everyone who braved the heat to travel out to Science Park, and congratulations to all the students who presented their work and handed in their theses! 🎓