The Geen Commentaar blog has built a front-end to Parlando, the government website that publishes the minutes of Dutch parliamentary sessions, including the texts of laws that are not yet in effect. The official Parlando service had several usability problems, including that it wasn’t possible to link to parliamentary documents directly, making hyperlinking far less effective, and making government far less transparent. The Dutch government has been aware of these problems since at least the end of 2005 and promised at the time to do something to improve the service, but had not even decided on a deadline by the start of this year.

Rumours have it (Dutch) that this slow progress is because the state has friends that it wants to share its big pie of work with, even at the cost of transparent government. I blogged about one of these friends before.

The new front-end can be found at www.geencommentaar.nl/parlando/.