Research register functionality for active and passive disclosure.

In the implementation of the Dutch Open Government Act, there was a debate about whether or not to introduce a register of government documents, so that citizens could gain access to all public documents themselves. For feasibility reasons, this was replaced by an obligation to gradually make more types of documents actively public. In the search for ways to make these documents - and others - publicly available in an accessible manner, the Advisory Council on Openness and Information Management (ACOI) asked Dialogic to make an international comparison of register functionalities (simply put: the ways in which governments show citizens which documents exist). To achieve this, we conducted research on examples from Canada, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, the EU, Norway, the United Kingdom and Sweden. This provided a broad overview of the possibilities, ranging from internal document overviews without access (Denmark) to fully downloadable lists of documents (Estonia). There are also significant differences between countries in terms of which documents can be made public. For example, in many countries, unlike the Netherlands, draft documents or internal communications cannot be requested. There are some parallels in the forms of register functionalities with the current setup in the Netherlands. The Norwegian system resembles the Dutch Woo-index, where citizens can search through publicly available documents from different authorities via a central website. The key difference here is that in Norway, the documents are then requestable and do not need to be checked in advance for reasons for refusal. Elements of the Dutch selection lists for the Archives Act can be seen in the Swedish model, where externally it is published which processes exist, which information each process generates, and what information is requestable. Register functionalities are well assessed when they are easily searchable, which is a challenge in many cases. If a full-text search is not possible, it requires a lot of knowledge and expertise from the searcher to find what they are looking for.