OpenStad is a Dutch open-source platform for digital participation, designed to help public organisations run online consultation processes alongside in-person meetings. The project was originally developed in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and is now used by municipalities including The Hague, Haarlem and Alphen aan den Rijn. Its core aim is straightforward: to give residents more influence over decisions affecting their street, neighbourhood or city, while making participation processes easier for local governments to set up and manage.
The platform supports a range of civic engagement functions, including idea submission, single and multiple voting, participatory budgeting, arguments and structured discussion. It also offers different authentication methods, a CMS and sitebuilder, an API, and an administration panel for managing multiple sites. In practice, municipalities can reuse templates, example sites and widget libraries to launch participation websites more quickly. OpenStad presents this as a way to standardise the process while keeping sites adaptable to local needs.
According to the project’s documentation and public materials, OpenStad has been used in roughly 115 projects, with another 10 in development. Its application areas include neighbourhood agendas, area redevelopment, public space, energy transition, greening, waste and culture. The platform is positioned as open source, with code available on GitHub and documentation published online, allowing municipalities and contributors to develop it further together.
The initiative is community-based and linked to municipal users and practitioners. Public references identify Jochem as one of the contact persons for the project. OpenStad’s model combines software development with process guidance: it recommends starting with a pilot project, setting up a project team, securing political support and involving communication, participation, privacy and IT staff from the outset.