Vergunningenkaart.nl (Licensemap; Dutch) shows all current building, cutting and other licenses from the neighborhood in one orderly map. The site shows current municipal license applications for a large amount of Dutch municipals on Google Maps. It uses public announcements on overheid.nl.Vergunningenkaart was founded by SWIS (Dutch) to encourage municipalities and other government bodies to optimize the use of internet to relay information to citizens. To help municipalities along Vergunningkaart offers them the ability to integrate the city map with announcements into the municipal website. Beside each make is an embedded code (a few lines of software code) which allow this to be done quickly and simply.
Vergunningenkaart uses the government’s announcements search engines (Dutch). This search engine registers the current announcements (license requests) of a large number of Dutch municipalities. Vergunningenkaart.nl ‘consults’ the search engine of the service and supplies every announcement that contains a ‘valid address’ with xy-coordinates. The results are projected onto municipal Google Maps maps (for example: http://www.vergunningenkaart.nl/kaart/den_helder). At the moment not all Dutch municipalities are mentioned on Vergunningenkaart. Reason is that not all municipalities are participating in the overhead.nl’s project ‘announcements’. From the top 20 of biggest municipalities, Zoetermeer is the positive exception. In total there are 112 Dutch municipalities for which the announcements can be presented in the desired way on the map.
Future Vision by Erwin Van Lun on this article
In a commercial environment consumers can force an entrepreneur to change its behavior by creating declining sales. The stock market too is a good way to get a company moving. With the government it’s different. Here it’s the civilians that show the initiative. When the governments of the world will soon have the email address of every inhabitant (maybe social_numer.nl@world.com) we’ll start to inform them too. Indeed, for example, of the licenses your neighbors applied for, the change in traffic laws for those who hold a driver’s license or the change in the times the garbage is collected. And so the brand ‘government’ or ‘the Netherlands’ will also enter the dialogue.