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WhatDoTheyKnow has been built to help you get information out of government departments and agencies.
Just visit, pick a department, type a request, and we’ll handle the rest.
Even better, WhatDoTheyKnow is an archive of requests and responses made by other people, so you can search for information other people have found, or even set up email or RSS alerts to get notified when something comes in that you’re interested in.
It seems Transport for London (TfL) really didn’t want anyone to be able to get hold of their internal guidelines describing how they deal with congestion charge appeals. Now though, thanks to mySociety’s freedom of information site WhatDoTheyKnow anyone wanting to find out in what circumstances TfL will cancel a congestion charge penalty can read the document detailing TfL’s criteria themselves.
I believe there are basic principles involved here; we all ought be able to find out what the law is, both “in statue” and “in practice”; it is right that we can find out the detailed rules which are being applied to the application of the congestion charge in London. I think that this request, enabling that, has been an excellent use of the Freedom of Information Act; it also shows how using the access to information laws can redress the balance of power between the citizen and the state.
The Road User Charging (Enforcement and Adjudication) (London) Regulations 2001 (the law) describes six circumstances in which someone served with a Penalty Charge Notice relating to the London Congestion Charge can make representations against it. However in practice TfL are in-fact allowing representations on a much wider basis. Now the internal document is available it can be seen that even the detailed: “Helping you with your Congestion Charging Penalty Charge Notice” information sheet offered by TfL does not contain the full details of what is and is not accepted as a valid reason for not paying the congestion charge.
Members of the public can now find out that TfL is happy to waive the congestion charge for those who are travelling “to register a death or travelling to hospital due to death of relative”, as long as proof of the death is provided, but not for someone who is “travelling to attend a funeral”. The document also suggests TfL won’t waive the charge if your vehicle has a breakdown and is recovered while the charge is operational; but the charge will be waived if, as a result of being clamped by a local authority, you have to collect your car from within the zone. Reassurance that TfL won’t pursue you for your congestion charge after you’re dead (assuming someone proves you’re really dead to TfL) is also provided.
There is a wealth of detail in the document, including revelations that foreign military vehicles are subject to the charge, but UK ones are not; along with details of circumstances where people will be given a second chance ie. their first appeal will be allowed but second and subsequent ones will not.
The public availability of this document may well make TfL’s life easier; some people may no longer bother making appeals in circumstances where they know they’ll be rejected and others will be able to phrase their appeal letters in such a way that it makes it easy for TfL staff to assess them against their criteria and accept them.
Request Details
Transport for London (TfL) is responsible for the London Congestion Charge. A document entitled: “Criteria for dealing with Representations and Appeals” describes the procedure TfL staff use to determine if someone’s appeal against a congestion charge penalty will be be accepted or rejected. This document was the subject of a Freedom of Information request made January 2008 which was initially refused. The argument TfL made against disclosure was that releasing the document would prejudice the exercise of TFL’s functions; Freedom of Information Act exemptions under S.30 (Investigations and proceedings conducted by public authorities) and S.31 (Law enforcement) were claimed.
On appeal the information commissioner’s office issued a decision notice saying it agreed with TfL that “the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosure”. The individual who had requested the document was persistent, and took his case to the information tribunal; there the information commissioner’s decision was overturned and TfL were ordered to release the document. The tribunal ordered the document be released to the original requestor by the 23rd of December 2009. A WhatDoTheyKnow.com user had made a separate request for the same document on the 8th of December 2009, and received it on the 7th of January 2010.
TfL still have not placed the released document on their disclosure log, which is perhaps an indication they’re still not too keen on the fact they’ve been compelled to release it.
Members of the team running mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com also campaign for improvements to freedom of information law.
Volunteer John Cross has been drawing his MP’s attention to a major loophole in the UK’s Freedom of Information Act which means that a company wholly owned by one local authority is subject to the act but a company owned by two local authorities is not. John’s MP, Peter Bottomley, has been convinced that this anomaly in the law does not make sense and has submitted an Early Day Motion calling for the loophole to be closed. The EDM also highlights the fact that currently a company owned 95% or even 99.5% by a single public authority is not subject to the provisions of the act, as only companies owned 100% by a single authority are currently covered.
The text of the motion states:
“That this House notes that section 6 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 with certain exceptions makes companies wholly owned by the Crown or by a single public authority subject to the Act; further notes that a company wholly owned by two or more public authorities or 95 per cent. owned by a single public authority will be outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act 2000; and calls for the closure of this loophole and for companies owned 90 per cent. or more by any number of public authorities to be subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000.”
The motion is currently open for other MPs to sign-up to and show their support. If you would like to help increase the number of public bodies that are covered by Freedom of Information legislation please consider writing to your MP, asking them to add their name to the current signatories.
There are many situations where public authorities working together or even setting up jointly owned companies is commendable. Such arrangements can lead to savings though economies of scale and avoid duplication; we may see more such companies set up as a response to economic pressures. What is problematic though is the loss of accountability which currently occurs when public bodies come together and set up these companies without requiring them to follow the highest standards of openness, transparency and accountability.
Examples of Companies Which Would Be Made Subject to FOI if the Loophole was Closed:
Many housing associations, purchasing consortia, representative bodies and urban development companies are among the organisations which would be required to operate in a more transparent manner should this loophole be closed.
Many MPs and Lords use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain information from public authorities despite the fact they are able to table parliamentary questions. Occasionally they make their requests via mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com which ensures both the request, and its response, are freely available online. Surprisingly the freedom of information route can result in the release of more, and better quality, information than a written Parliamentary Question.
For example on the 12th of November 2009 Eleanor Laing the Conservative Shadow Minister for Justice submitted the following written Parliamentary Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many staff in his Department were employed on the management of freedom of information requests submitted to his Department in each year since 2005; and how much his Department spent on the management of such requests in each such year.
The response contained the number of staff per year as requested but with respect to the spending the parliamentary response stated: “The information requested on expenditure could be provided only at disproportionate cost.”
A very similar request for information had been made many months previously, in July, by WhatDoTheyKnow.com user and FOI campaigner Heather Brooke. The response to the FOI request contained more information, and more precise information, than Eleanor Laing had obtained via her parliamentary question. When the request was made via WhatDoTheyKnow how much staff substantially involved in answering requests were paid was disclosed, in detail.
While the costs of complying with a particular request are capped by regulations under the Freedom of Information Act, data on total costs of FOI compliance such as that released by this request allows the average costs of dealing with a request to be calculated.
Do let us know in the comments if you’ve spotted any more!
Today we have a strange story about a department that appears to think that it has a duty not to release information under FOI if it makes people angry.
It all starts in January 2009 the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) appointed an expert by the name of Graham Badman to conduct a review of elective home education in England. It probably goes without saying that this is an issue far from our concerns, and an issue that mySociety has no views on – what makes us interested is the process that followed.
Shortly after the publication of the report, Elaine Walton, a user of mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com requested copies of communications between the Department for Children, Schools and Families and Nektus Ltd. the company through which it appears Mr Badman was paid for his work.
According to email replies to Ms Walton, the DCSF located two relevant invoices which show how much money was paid, but refused to disclose them. Strangely, though, they were not refused on grounds of commercial confidentiality, but rather on something more unusual. Here are the exemptions they cited:
Health and Safety? A little investigation reveals more.
When Ms Walton appealed against this decision, an internal review was carried out within the DSCF. The internal review’s findings stated that Mr Badman was likely become a victim of harassment if certain personal details were made public, hence a health and safety concern, and hence no publication of these invoices. Fair enough – nobody would be in favour of revealing private, sensitive information that would endanger anyone’s life or family, especially in the presence of a known threat. But take a look at this:
“That the Department had initially been drafting a response that included the release of invoices with only personal data redacted. But before the draft was complete it was apparent that there was a campaign of harassment and vilification against Graham Badman and other individuals/organisations that had contributed to the Report. In the light of this, at the weekly review meeting of FOI cases, it was considered that the balance of public interest might have shifted towards withholding.”
What is very curious here is the admission that the department had been thinking of releasing the invoices with personal data hidden (ie no home address, bank details etc). But then because of a campaign of harassment, it was decided that they wouldn’t publish anything at all. So not just no personal information, but no dates, no amounts of money, nothing.
What is so unease-making about this FOI decision is that it appears to be saying that departments may conceal information on how much public money has been spent on something because releasing that information will make some angry people even angrier. Surely this can’t be right – if it were every budget would be conducted in complete secrecy. We would encourage the Information Commissioner’s Office to take a look.
mySociety’s Freedom of Information website WhatDoTheyKnow is designed to appear simple and straightforward to users. That appearance belies the fact that behind the scenes a significant amount of effort goes into making sure both those making freedom of information requests and those answering them have a positive experience of the site. While the site is almost entirely automated sometimes human involvement is necessary. This article highlights those key “edge cases” which are dealt with by the staff and volunteers who make up the WhatDoTheyKnow team.
In the last year 15,233 freedom of information requests have been made via WhatDoTheyKnow.
Message Delivery
444 messages on 360 requests (2.3%) had to be manually placed on the correct request as a result of authorities not sending replies to the email address given. The errors are introduced as authorities apparently manually transcribe email addresses from incoming email into correspondence management systems. There have been suggestions some may even print out and scan-in emails into such systems. WhatDoTheyKnow’s code has been improved in light of experience, common errors are now detected automatically and in many cases the system suggests which request the message was intended to be directed to.
In terms of outgoing messages just 52 (0.3%) requests over the course of the year were marked as receiving an error message in response and users marked 94 (0.6%) as requiring administrator attention. These are generally either transient errors which simply require a message to be resent or prompt us to check and update the contact details we hold for a particular organisation. Regularly there are problems with authority’s spam filters and we have to encourage them to change the way their filters are set up to allow messages from WhatDoTheyKnow.com through.
Gone Postal
119 (0.8%) requests were at some point marked as “Handled by Post”. In many of these cases users eventually persuaded authorities to release the information in electronic form. Where information is supplied outside the site users can add annotations describing the information released, then can link to copies of the data they have posted online, or as has been done in respect of 14 requests (0.1% of the total, 11% of those handled by post) they can supply the information to WhatDoTheyKnow to upload manually. When the site was being designed there was a worry that authorities would reply to many requests by post. This has not occurred, in part perhaps because the freedom of information act contains a provision (section 11) requiring the requestor’s preferred means of communication to be used where it is reasonable. A requestor using an @whatdotheyknow email address is clearly expressing a preference for a reply to be made electronically via the site.
Libel
One of the major challenges facing the site is keeping it operating in the face of the UK’s libel laws. Unlike in other countries, such as the US, we cannot publish statements on our users’ behalf without taking the risk of being sued for libel ourselves. Even simply republishing FOI responses from public authorities is not without risk in the UK. While we don’t actively police the site a lot of administrator time is taken up dealing with cases where potentially libelous or defamatory comments have been brought to our attention. Cases can be very complicated and involve a great deal of correspondence. mySociety is lucky to have the services of a specialist internet and technology barrister with expertise in libel who provides his services free of charge. We try and act in such a way as to maximise transparency while ensuring that the existence of WhatDoTheyKnow and mySociety are not threatened by legal risks.
In the last year there have been only seven significant cases where requests have been hidden from public view on the site due to concerns relating to potential libel and defamation. Three of those cases have involved groups of twenty or so requests made by the same one or two users. While actual number of requests we have had to hide is around 70 (0.4% of the total) even this small fraction overstates the situation due to the repetition of the same potentially libellous accusations and comments in different requests. In all cases we have kept as much information up on the site as possible. Our policy with respect to all requests to remove information from the site is that we only take down information in exceptional circumstances; generally only when the law requires us to do so.
Personal Information
Sometimes people accidentally post personal information to the site; for example they make a request which is not a Freedom of Information request but a subject access request under the Data Protection Act. We are happy to remove such requests. On occasion we get requests from both our users and public sector employees asking us to remove their names from the site. As we are trying to build up a FOI archive we are very reluctant to remove information from the site, our policy is only to remove names in exceptional circumstances. Often information, such as an out of office reply, which a public body or civil servant considers irrelevant and asks to be removed is in fact critical to the correspondence thread and timeline of a response.
Copyright and Control of Information Released
The fact information is subject to copyright and restrictions on re-use does not exempt it from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (though there is a closely related exemption relating to “commercial interest”). Occasionally public bodies will offer to reply to a request, but in order to deter wider dissemination of the material they will refuse to reply via WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Southampton University have released information in protected PDF documents and the House of Commons has refused to release information via WhatDoTheyKnow.com which it has said it would be prepared to send to an individual directly.
Mantaining and Expanding The List of Authorities
WhatDoTheyKnow lists around 3,000 public authorities, there is a regular turnover of changes in contact details. Our coverage, while large, is not comprehensive so we have requests to add bodies such as parish councils, schools, and doctors surgeries which we have not yet attempted to add in a systemic manner based on official sources of information.
We have also had to carefully consider what we do when for handling the various situations where an authority becomes defunct and its responsibilities are taken over by another body for example as a result of reorganisations of local government and the creation and merging of government departments.
Providing Advice and Assistance
The team at WhatDoTheyKnow.com often provide advice to users. We encourage users to keep their requests focused so as to reduce the chance of any problems due to libel or requests being classed vexatious. On occasion we suggest appropriate authorities for users to direct requests to, provide advice to those unhappy with the response to their request, and answer a broad range of other queries as they arise such as if particular bodies are subject to the act or not. Increasingly we link to authority’s publication schemes which are intended to let people know what information an authority has and how it can be accessed.
Spam
Lastly, like all websites which allow people to post content online WhatDoTheyKnow.com occasionally suffers from spam in various forms. Most is dealt with automatically but some has to be removed by hand. With spam, like the other aspects of running the site, the site’s code and processes are constantly being developed and improved to reduce the fraction of cases requiring any manual intervention.
This article was prompted in part by a team in New Zealand considering launching their own version on the site asking us what’s involved.
Statistics were recently released on the performance of UK central government departments with respect to their handling of freedom of information requests. The latest figures are for the second quarter of 2009. We have been able to use these to calculate the fraction of all requests which are made via mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com.
What these statistics mean is that an ever increasing fraction of the information released in response to freedom of information requests is being archived and made publicly available by WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Hopefully this will reduce the number of duplicate requests being submitted and ensure the information released is made available to the widest possible audience which in-turn should increase the chances it is acted on.
Only forty-three central government bodies have their freedom of information performance monitored centrally. This is a tiny fraction of the three thousand or so bodies currently listed by WhatDoTheyKnow.
On Saturday John Cross and Richard Taylor, two volunteers who work on mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com, gave a workshop on FOI to a meeting of activists from Republic, an organisation which campaigns for an elected head of state in the UK.
mySociety and WhatDoTheyKnow are non-partisan and don’t get involved in campaigning except in specific areas relating to openness and transparency. That said, members of the WhatDoTheyKnow team are be happy to consider invitations from any groups wishing to hold a workshop discussing freedom of information.
Many of those present at Saturday’s event were active campaigners on a wide range of subjects ranging from human rights to fair trade as well as having an interest in constitutional reform. The FOI workshop was oversubscribed with the majority of those present at the event deciding to attend the session. Unlike a previous workshop held at OpenTech where most attendees had made an FOI request themselves prior to the event, at this workshop all but one had not done so.
The Royals and FOI
Given the audience, the status of the royals with respect to FOI was particularly pertinent. The FOI act exempts information if it relates to: “communications with Her Majesty, with other members of the Royal Family or with the Royal Household, or the conferring by the Crown of any honour or dignity”. This exemption does not apply though if it is determined that it is in the public interest for the information to be released. The requirement for this public interest test is under threat as the Prime Minister has been moving to strengthen the restrictions on releasing information related to the Royal family. On the 10th of June 2009 in a speech to Parliament on Constitutional Renewal Gordon Brown said:
…we have considered the need to strengthen protection for particularly sensitive material, and there will be protection of royal family and Cabinet papers as part of strictly limited exemptions.
Following that speech BBC journalist Martin Rosenbaum obtained a statement from the Ministry of Justice clarifying that in practice what Gordon Brown’s words meant was:
… the relevant exemption in the Freedom of Information Act will be made absolute for information relating to communications with the Royal Household that is less than 20 years’ old.
In FOI jargon an “absolute exemption” is one not subject to a public interest test.
Even with the law as it stands it is not easy to obtain information on how the royals are, or are attempting to, influence government. For example John Cross has asked the Ministry of Justice to supply him with copies of correspondence they had received from the Queen and Prince of Wales. They rejected his request on the grounds that the public interest in non-disclosure exceeded the public interested in disclosure; as well as suggesting exemptions relating to “information provided in confidence” and “personal information” also applied.
The Royal Household’s position on FOI
The Royal Household is not subject to the freedom of information act; though it has made a statement on the subject saying:
Despite its exemption from the FOI Acts, the Royal Household’s policy is to provide information as freely as possible in other areas, and to account openly for its use of public money.
WhatDoTheyKnow’s policy is to include such organisations which have indicated they are willing to voluntarily comply with the act to the site. While we list The Royal Household, at the time of writing no-one has yet used the facility to request information.
Using WhatDoTheyKnow for Campaigning
While we stress the importance of keeping freedom of information requests focused, FOI is a powerful tool for campaigners. We were asked if it would be possible for a group like Republic to set up an account on WhatDoTheyKnow for their campaign? The answer to this is: “Yes! – WhatDoTheyKnow wants to encourage groups to use the site”. The information commissioner has confirmed that it is acceptable to use the name of a “corporate body” when making a FOI request, that’s a broad term which encompasses many organisations, groups and charities.
Republic themselves use FOI extensively and often generate major national news stories as a result of responses to their requests. They want to be able to either offer journalists exclusive stories or write a press release based on information released. They can’t do this if the story gets out first via WhatDoTheyKnow so would be interested in an ability to make requests initially in private. mySociety and WhatDoTheyKnow have been considering an option for journalists to be able to make hidden requests via the site. Such a feature could potentially generate an income stream for the site as well as encourage a greater proportion of FOI requests to be made via it. Once the article had been published then the FOI correspondence could be opened up to the public providing access to the source material backing up the story.
As well as meeting those who use, or might want to use, the site to make requests WhatDoTheyKnow also wants to engage positively with public authorities; we see them as important users of our service too. Developer Francis Irving represented the site at the FOI Live conference for information professionals in June and will be speaking at the Freedom of Information Scotland conference in December.
Paywall met by those trying to access the research article via the publisher's website.
Exemptions Applicable to Research
In terms of the freedom of information act there are a number of provisions which can be used to exempt the output of publicly funded scientific research:
With the above exemptions in mind it might well be possible to phrase requests in such a way that they don’t apply. For example I have had some limited success in relation to a request for a research protocol.
First Come First Served?
Our user was offered a hard copy of the publication; the reason this request was drawn to our attention was that the team to was contacted to help the two parties to get in touch directly. I suspect the reason that an electronic copy of the document was not supplied via WhatDoTheyKnow may have been related to a concern over breach of copyright on the research results which has probably been transferred or licensed to the publisher. While one individual may have obtained a copy of the information, it is still not accessible to everyone. Tony Hutchings, the Forestry Commission’s Head of Land Regeneration and Urban Greenspace, who led the research told me: “We have prints of the paper which we could supply you with”. How many printed copies he has to distribute and what happens when he runs out is not clear.
Open Access Publishing
Ideally the results of publicly funded scientific research ought be published in an unrestricted format in open access journals. The UK government, is moving towards such a stance but at a painfully slow pace. I asked the author of the research why he had taken the decision not to publish in a more accessible journal. He responded by saying:
The Research Councils (as do many funders from both private industry and public bodies) assess the quality of the research undertaken by the impact factors of the papers produced. … To my knowledge there are unfortunately few open access journals with high impact factors.
The EPSRC who funded his research have a Policy on Access to Research Outputs which states: “knowledge derived from publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use”. When I asked them for a comment on this particular case Dr Sue Smart their Head of Performance and Evaluation responded saying: “Tony Hutchings is mistaken in his assertion that we use journal impact factors in assessing the quality of research”, but she also ruled his offer of a paper copy of the research article was: “in keeping with the principles of the RCUK (Research Councils UK) position statement [on access to research outputs].”
Like the other volunteers who help out with WhatDoTheyKnow.com I use the site for my own activism and campaign independently for more openness and transparency in a range of areas. I have written an extended article on my own website on the subject of open access publishing where I have included more details of the responses from the research council and researcher quoted above.
WhatDoTheyKnow keeps growing and growing, sucking people in from Google as its archive of maybe 8.5% of Freedom of Information requests gets more and more detailed.
(Graph of number of FOI requests made using WhatDoTheyKnow over time; click for larger version)
There’s round about 8Gb of unfettered Government data in the core database, plus a whole bunch more for indexing and caching. For comparison, TheyWorkForYou (which now goes back to 1935) has 12Gb. And it’s catching up on traffic also – WhatDoTheyKnow has about half the number of visitors as TheyWorkForYou.
Unfortunately, this new found traffic has led to performance problems. You might have seen errors when using WhatDoTheyKnow in the last week or two. This post is firstly an apology for that. Thank you for your patience. Hopefully it is fixed now – do let us know if you get problems still. And secondly it is some techy stuff about debugging such problems in Ruby on Rails…
When WhatDoTheyKnow started failing, we did the obvious things to start with – moving the database to a separate server, and moving some other services off the same server, to give WDTK more room to breathe. It still kept breaking.
None of my server monitoring tools shed any very clear light as to the problem. I upgraded to the latest version of Passenger, the best Rails deployment tool I’ve seen yet. It’s pretty good, but still not mature enough for my liking. I was still getting the same problems with it, but reporting tools like passenger-memory-stats were really helpful.
Eventually I worked out that it was to do with memory use of the Rails processes. Individual ones would leap up to 1Gb, and never drop back down. If several did, the server (with 4Gb of RAM) would start swapping and grind to a halt. The world of Ruby and Rails memory monitoring software is patchwork at best, and in the end I found the simplest tools the most useful. Here’s some:
check system localhost
if memory > 3500 MB then exec "/usr/sbin/apache2ctl graceful"
I’ve more work to do, I think there are quite a few other quick wins, all of which are making the site faster too. I’m quite happy that WhatDoTheyKnow also has a bunch more test code as a result of all this.
On the other hand, what a disappointing disaster for open source languages beginning with P/R (as opposed to J). Yes, the help and tools were just about there to work it out, but would seem primitive if you’d used say Java’s Memory Analyzer. Indeed somebody over on StackOverflow suggested running your site in JRuby and using exactly that tool…
Image from jaygoldman
Note: This post is a work in progress, I need your help to improve it, especially with knowledge of non-English sites
I was recently in Washington DC catching up with mySociety’s soul-mates at the Sunlight Foundation. As we talked about what was going on in the field of internet-enabled transparency, it came clear to me that there are now more identifiable categories of transparency website than there used to be.
Identifying and categorising these types of site turns out to be surprisingly useful. First, it can help people ask “Why don’t we have anyone doing that in our country?” Second, it can help mySociety to make sure that when we’re planning ahead we don’t fail to consider certain options that be currently off our radar. Also, it gives me an excuse to tell you about some sites that you may not have seen before.
Anyway, enough preamble. Here they are as I see them – please give me more suggestions as you find them. As you can see there’s a lot more activity in some fields than others.
1. Transparency blogs & newspapers – At the technically simplest, but most manual labour-intensive end of the scale is sites, commercial and volunteer driven, whose owners use transparency to help them to write stories. Given almost every political blog does this a bit, it can be hard to name specific examples, but I will note that Heather Brooke is the UK’s pre-eminent FOI-toting journalist/blogger, and we’ve just opened a blog for our awesome volunteers on WhatDoTheyKnow to show their FOI skills to an as-yet unsuspecting public.
2. What Politicians do in their parliaments – These sites primarily include lists of politicians, and information about their primary activities in their assemblies, such as voting or speaking. This encompasses mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com, Rob McKinnon’s one man labour of love TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, Italy’s uber-deep OpenPolis.it (6 layers of government, anyone?), Germany’s almost-un-typable Abgeordnetenwatch, Romania’s writ-wielding IPP.ro, Josh Tauberer’sGovTrack.us, plus the bonny bouncing babies OpenAustralia and Kildare Street (Ireland). Of special note here are Mzalendo (Kenya) who unlike everyone else, can’t reply on access to a parliamentary website to scrape raw data from, and Julian Todd’s UNDemocracy (International), that has to fight incredible technical barriers to get the information out.
3. Databases of questions and answers posed to politicians – These sites let people post politicians questions, and the publish the questions and answers. The Germans running Abgeordnetenwatch (Parliament Watch) seem to have had considerable success here, with newspapers citing what politicians say on their site. Yoosk has some politicians in the UK on it, too.
4. Money in politics – This comes in two forms, money given to candidates (MAPlight), and money bunged by politicians to their favourite causes (Earmark watch). In the UK, as far as I know, the Electoral Commission’s database remains currently unscraped, perhaps because the data is so ungranular.
5. Government spending – where the big money goes. In the US the dominant site is FedSpending.org, and in the UK we have ukpublicspending.co.uk.
6. Websites containing bills going through parliament, or the law as voted on – This includes the increasingly substantial OpenCongress in the US which saw major traffic during the Health Care debates, and the UK government’s own Acts database and Statute Law Database. Much of the legal database field, however, remains essentially private.
7. Services that create transparency as a side effect of delivering services – Our own sites lead the way here: FixMyStreet’s public problem reports and WhatDoTheyKnow’s FOI archive are both created by people who aren’t primarily using the site to enrich it – they’re using it to get some other service.
8. Election websites – These come in many forms, but what they have in common is their desire to shed light on the positions and histories of candidates, whether incumbents or new comers. The biggest beast here is Stemwijzer (Netherlands), probably in relative terms the most used transparency or democracy site ever. However these sites are popular in several places, the big but highly labour intensive VoteSmart (US), Smartvote.ch (Switzerland), plus others. mySociety is shortly to start to recruit constituency volunteers to help with our take on this problem, keep an eye on this blog if you want to know more.
9. Political document archives - This is a new category, now occupied by Sunlight’s Partytime archive for invitation to political events, and TheStraightChoice, Julian Todd and Richard Pope’s wonderful new initiative for archiving election leaflets and other paper propoganda.
10. Bulk data - Online transparency pioneer Carl Malamud doesn’t do sites, he does data. Big globs zipped up and made publicly available for coders and researchers to download and process. The US government has now stepped into this field itself with Data.gov, doubtless soon to be followed by data.gov.uk.
——
Please don’t shoot me if I’ve missed anything here, the world is a big place. But I thought that was a useful and interesting exercise, and I hope you’ll both find it useful, and help me improve it too. Comment away.
Earlier this week someone browsing mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com contacted us reporting they couldn’t open a PDF document Southampton University had sent in reply to a request asking about the amount of printer credit purchased at the institution. The user suspected the file might be corrupt.
We investigated and determined the attachment is in fact in a fancy PDF format which cannot be read by many PDF readers. Those applications which are able to open the document present a cover page inviting the reader to agree to an “intellectual property rights notice”. The terms of the notice forbid “use” of the “material” without “the written permission of the university”. The intent appears to be to ensure only those agreeing to the terms are given access to the document’s content.
The Freedom of Information Act requires authorities to release information whether or not the person making the request wants to enter into an agreement with respect to its use; so one could argue the university are not properly discharging their responsibilities. In any case their stance is silly because anyone who wants to can request their own copy of the information. All they’re doing is creating more work for themselves.
What were they thinking?
An article John Ozimek of The Register has written in response to the correspondence reports the university explaining their actions by saying:
The Freedom of Information Act gives applicants the right to have information held by public authorities communicated to them, not to documents. Applicants are entitled to use that information so long as they do not breach the intellectual property rights of the public authority: taking the information and using it in a document of their own is acceptable, making use of a document which contains not only the information requested but copyright material is not.
One problem with this was pointedly highlighted by a comment on the Register article saying: Ask yourself, “how do I prove my facts if I can’t publish the evidence?”
WhatDoTheyKnow routinely publishes information released under FOI despite a wide variety of copyright and other legal notices and disclaimers suggesting we shouldn’t. (Read the policy on copyright.) This has been the first relatively elaborate technological attempt to circumvent WhatDoTheyKnow’s efforts to make the responses to FOI requests easily accessible to everyone.
Actions
WhatDoTheyKnow’s staff, volunteers, and users have responded to the university’s actions in a number of ways:
They’ve got form
This is not the first time the freedom of information team at Southampton University have been inventive in their use of PDFs; back in May they responded to a request via a password protected PDF version of a compliments slip which they attached to an email.
Do you have a ‘mySocietyish’ idea that you’d like to see become reality? Is there something radical about the sites we already run that should change? Do you have any smart ideas about helping more people to benefit from the services we already offer? Or would you just like to read and comment on ideas submitted by other people?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we’d like you to submit your idea to our 2009 Call for Proposals (built for us by Richard Pope). We’ve run these twice before in 2003 and 2006, resulting in the launch and success of sites such as WriteToThem and WhatDoTheyKnow.
Just as on previous occasions we’ll pick a winner and some runners up, but also just as before we can only promise to do our best – we don’t have the resources to solemnly promise to build the winner, whatever it might be.
What We’re Looking For (or, an insight into the mySociety mindset)
The characteristics of the winning and runner up ideas are highly likely to include one or more of the following factors. Don’t try and include all of them, that’d be silly :)
We might well change these guidelines a bit as the first responses come in. The call will stay open until September 15th, and we’ll hope to announce the winners in early October.
So what are you waiting for – check out the 2009 Call for Proposals
The volunteer team behind our Freedom of Information (FOI) site
WhatDoTheyKnow.com, has used statistics released by the Ministry of Justice to discover the proportion of all FOI requests being made via the site.
They found that in the first quarter of 2009, 8.5% of all requests made to central government departments were made using WhatDoTheyKnow. In absolute terms that was 514 of 6019 requests.
The breakdown by department is given in the below table. Notably, one in five FOI requests to the Home Office (122 of 643) were made via WhatDoTheyKnow.
WDTK = WhatDoTheyKnow; Source for total FOI request statistics : Statistics for Q1 2009 (released on the 25th of June 2009); Extended table covering all monitored bodies available.
The Ministry of Justice only monitors, and provides statistics on, 44 bodies’ compliance with the Freedom of Information Act; WhatDoTheyKnow currently lists 2910. We cover a wide range of local bodies including Primary Care Trusts, Local Councils and the Police. There is no national monitoring of how many FOI requests are made to such bodies, or how well they perform when responding to requests.
If you want to see such performance statistics, please help categorise more of the responses made via the site. It can be quite addictive!
Thanks to Richard Taylor for doing this research – see his blog post for some more details, including some information about Scotland.
Is there something part of the government is doing that you’d like to investigate? Find out everything from MPs’ expenses, to the length of allotment waiting lists, to whether your council’s Guy Fawkes bonfire is properly checked for hedgehogs.
mySociety are running a practical workshop on Freedom of Information at OpenTech on 4th July.
The workshop will help you make your first Freedom of Information request, including working out what to request, where to request it from and what exactly to write.
If you’re an old hand, you can get and give tips on how to take requests further.
We’ve got a fantastic team of Freedom of Information (FOI) experts to kick things off and answer hard questions.
Bring a laptop if you have one. Internet will be provided for the workshop only, so we can scour Government websites, and make requests on mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow.com website.
As usual, the rest of OpenTech is brimming with great talks, and will be full of interesting geeky wonks and wonky geeks. Book your place here so you can go to them and to the workshop. Hurry, it’s nearly sold out.
Super WhatDoTheyKnow volunteer John Cross has made an interesting petition about Freedom of Information and publicly owned companies
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to support a change to the law to make companies owned two thirds or more by public authorities subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000.”
The petition goes on to explain (in more details at the bottom right of the petition page) that the situation is quite comical at the moment. If a company is owned by one local authority, then it is subject to FOI, but if it is jointly owned by two then it isn’t. This makes little sense, and it is also very important, as private companies owned by authorities often do important work.
Last week I gave my first presentation by video conference. It was to the intriguing Circus Foundation, who are running a series of workshops on new democracy. It came about because I was a bit busy and tired to travel from Cambridge into London. Charles Armstrong, from the Circus Foundation, suggested that I present over the Internet.
We used Skype audio and video, combined with GoToMeeting so my laptop screen was visible on a projector to an audience in London. Apparently my voice was boomed round the room. It was a slightly odd experience, more like speaking on the radio. However, I had a good serendipitous one to one chat while we were setting up, with Jonathan Gray from OKFN.
I was asked to give a quick overview of mySociety, as a few people in the audience hadn’t heard of us, and also to talk about how I saw the future of democracy. I talked about three of our sites, and what I’d like to see in each area in 10 years time.
Charles Armstrong, from the Circus Foundation, has written up the workshop.
Downsides of the video conferencing were that I couldn’t hear others speak, as they didn’t have the audio equipment. I had to take questions via Charles. This meant I also couldn’t participate in the rest of the evening, or easily generally chat to people. All very solvable problems, with a small amount of extra effort – Charles is going to work on it for another time.
Of course this also all saves on carbon emissions (cheekily, taking off my mySociety hat for a moment, sign up to help lobby about that).
We sometimes have incorrect or out of date addresses for sending Freedom of Information requests to. Now anyone can check our addresses. Click “view FOI email address” on the page for any authority, and enter two of those squiggly words to prove you are not a robot.
If you are using WhatDoTheyKnow, and suspect problems with a request, please do check the address we are using is correct. If you are from an authority, or work closely or know a particular authority, please also check the address.
The Register has an article today Parliament’s take on Freedom of Information which describes an FOI request I made using WhatDoTheyKnow, and the House of Commons’ refusal to respond to it because the response would be automatically republished.
Hopefully the House will choose to waive copyright on the document, and send it soon – I still haven’t seen a good reason why they could or should not.
(Also, I haven’t changed my name to Francis Stirling, hopefully The Register will correct it soon!)
Public authorities have now sent back 100 Excel files in response to FOI requests on WhatDoTheyKnow.
The nice thing is, that if somebody bothered to use a spreadsheet, it must contain useful, factual, numerical data across either time or space. Everything from job advert expenditure in Kings Lynn council, to school budgets in the Western Isles.
Have a mine.
P.S. Don’t forget to click “Track things matching ‘filetype:xls’ by email” to be emailed when there are new spreadsheets to look at :)
I’m enjoying the weather at the moment, seems to be sunnier than the summer, but cool with an atmospheric autumnal taste in the air.
mySociety is changing as ever, leaping forward in our race to try and make it easier for normal people to influence, improve or replace functions of government. More on this as it happens.
Meanwhile, I’ve been continuing to hack away at WhatDoTheyKnow. A little while ago Google decided to deep index all our pages – causing specific problems (I had to tell it to stop crawling the 117th page of similar requests to another request), and also ones from the extra attention. There have been quite a few problems to resolve with authority spam filters (see this FOI officer using the annotation function), and with subtle and detailed privacy issues (when does a comment become personal? if you made something public a while ago, and it is now a shared public resource, can you modify it or take it down?).
Right, I’ve got to go and fix a bug to do with the Facebook PledgeBank app. It’s to do with infinite session keys, and how we send messages when a pledge has completed. Facebook seem to change their API without caring much that applications have to be altered to be compatible with it. This is OK if the Facebook application is your core job, but a pain when you just want your Facebook code to keep running as it did forever.
(the autumn photo thanks to Nico Cavallotto)
It’s the first full working day for the new facility to annotate Freedom of Information (FOI) requests on WhatDoTheyKnow, and people have been hard at it.
Mr Ormerod points out that private information isn’t necessarily so private if someone has died, so perhaps the exemption the MOD used shouldn’t apply.
Trevor R Nunn has posted three annotations (e.g. this one) to show that his three FOI requests are being treated as one. The annotations facility is great for handling edge cases like this, which don’t happen often enough to be worth explicitly adding to the code, but need some mention.
And finally Edward Betts has processed the list of post boxes retrieved by FOI into a more structured data format, and posted up a link to it. Exactly the kind of collaboration I love to see!
And that’s just this morning!
Francis has been furiously adding new features to our Freedom of Information website WhatDoTheyKnow ever since it launched earlier this year. He’s just added one of the most important missing features, the ability to leave annotations or comments on FOI requests.
This is especially useful for providing plain English summaries of what information in a response was actually interesting, or to discuss refusals to supply information and what to do with them. To add one just go to a request page and scroll to the bottom, just like adding a comment on a blog post.
So, whether you’ve made a request in the past, or you’re just interested in helping out, get annotating.
A WhatDoTheyKnow user Tom Taylor has posted a cool query to the Royal Mail – he wants a list of where all the postboxes in the UK are (presumably so he can build a ‘find your nearest post box’ web site).
After some delay Colin Young of the Royal Mail responded with a list in a PDF file. However, whilst the list is pretty long, it only contains the postcode location of each postbox, not an actual coordinate that can be plotted on a map. So neither he, nor anyone else, can build a postbox finder service.
Just think about that for a second. The Post Office doesn’t know where its Post Boxes are. Whoda thunk? Good use of WhatDoTheyKnow.com, Tom!
One of the special pieces of magic in TheyWorkForYou is its email alerts, sending you mail whenever an MP says a word you care about in Parliament. Lots of sites these days have RSS, and lots have search, but surprisingly few offer search based email alerts. My Mum trades shares on the Internet, setting it to automatically buy and sell at threshold values. But she doesn’t have an RSS reader. So, it’s important to have email alerts.
So naturally, when we made WhatDoTheyKnow, search and search based email alerts were pretty high up the list, to help people find new, interesting Freedom of Information requests. To implement this, I started out using acts_as_solr, which is a Ruby on Rails plugin for Solr, which is a REST based layer on top of the search engine Lucene.
I found acts_as_solr all just that bit too complicated. Particularly, when a feature (such as spelling correction) was missing, there were too many layers and too much XML for me to work out how to fix it. And I had lots of nasty code to make indexing offline – something I needed, as I want to safely store emails when they arrive, but then do the risky indexing of PDFs and Word documents later.
The last straw was when I found that acts_as_solr didn’t have collapsing (analogous to GROUP BY in SQL). So I decided to bite the bullet and implement my own acts_as_xapian. Luckily there were already Xapian Ruby bindings, and also the fabulous Xapian email list to help me out, and it only took a day or two to write it and deploy it on the live site.
If you’re using Rails and need full text search, I recommend you have a look at acts_as_xapian. It’s easy to use, and has a diverse set of features. You can watch a video of me talking about WhatDoTheyKnow and acts_as_xapian at the London Ruby User Group, last Monday.
We’re busy as bees, lots of things happening, increasingly many of which are commercial, and we can’t talk about until they’re released.
Commercial? But you’re a charity! Yes – but just as Oxfam have a trading subsidiary company which runs the second hand clothes shops, we have a trading subsidiary company that sells services relating to the websites that we make (structural details here).
Everything from other small charities to large media companies are buying our services – which range from customised versions of FixMyStreet, through to strategic consulatancy. If you’ve got something that you think we might be able to help with, email Karl. He’s easier to talk to than us geeks.
Meanwhile we’re cracking on with our free services for the public, which are increasingly funded by this commercial work.
TheyWorkForYou recently launched a Scottish version, thanks to volunteer Mark Longair, and Matthew. More goodies in store as the Free Our Bills campaign unfolds. We’ve started a sprint to get a photo for every MP’s page. If you work for or are an MP or have copyright of a photo of one that we’re missing, then email it to us.
WhatDoTheyKnow is getting lots of polishing – the new site design that Tommy has been working on is nearly ready. Today I just turned on lots of new email alerts and RSS feeds, so you can get emailed, for example, when a new request is filed to a particular public body, or when a request is successful.
Our super ace volunteers have been busy adding public authorties to the site, and we now have 1153 in total. We’re getting a steady trickle of good requests (pretty graph) coming in. Blogs such as Blind man’s buff and confirm or deny are sorting the wheat from the chaff. Do blog about and link to any interesting requests that you see!
Other things in the works are a much needed revamp of www.mysociety.org, some interesting things on GroupsNearYou, and no doubt squillions of other things. I’ll let Matthew post up anything I’ve missed :)
We’re going to be adding lots of features and major design improvements to our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow.com in the next few weeks. One thing we want to add is little explanatory videos helping describe how to make the best request possible.
Today we’re launching the hastily named WhatDoTheyKnow Video Challenge. We want you to make short videos (max 2 mins) in which you explain in a clear and friendly way how to file successful FOI requests. We’re not expecting Hollywood production values, just a friendly face and a good explanation would do fine. If you can do funny, splendid.
Instructions:
1. Record your vid
2. Upload to your video hosting venue of choice
3. Post the link as a comment to this post
We’ll send out a coveted mySociety hoodie to anyone who makes anything we’d seriously consider using (unless bazillions of people enter, of course – do you want to bankrupt us?). We don’t sell our coveted mySociety hoodies, they’re only for people who’ve done something useful for mySociety so they’ll mark you out as a pillar of the community the first time you walk down the street.
There’s a lot left to do, but Francis Irving’s brilliant new mySociety Freedom of Information site is now live. You can file requests to central government departments (most of the them), and browse what other people have been requesting (already fascinating). It doesn’t have a name yet, nor any slick design, nor half the features we want it to have, but it works and it gets things done.
And dammit, people, that’s what mySociety’s all about. Can we explain it any better?
This week has been quite bitty. I’ve been doing more work on the Freedom of Information site, have been getting into the swing of Ruby on Rails. Once you’ve learnt its conventions, it is quite (but not super) nice.
As far as languages are concerned, Ruby seems identical in all interesting respects to Python. It’s like learning Spanish and Italian. Both are super languages. Ruby has nice conventions like exclamation marks at the end of function names to indicate they alter the object, rather than return the value (e.g. .reverse!). But then Python has a cleaner syntax for function parameters. It is swings and roundabouts.
Rails has lots of ways of doing things which we already have our own ways of doing for other sites. The advantage of relearning them, is that other people know them too. So Louise was able to easily download and run the FOI site, and make some patches to it. Which would have been much harder if it was done like our other sites. Making development easier is vital – for a long time I’ve wanted a web-based cleverly forking web application development wiki. But while I dream about that, Rails packaging everything you need to run the app in a standard way in one directory that quite a few people know how to use, helps.
Other things… I’ve been helping Richard set up GroupsNearYou on our live servers, it should be ready for you to play with soon. It looks super nice, and is easy to use. I’ve had some work to do with recruitment. And catching up on general customer support email for TheyWorkForYou and PledgeBank. I’ve also been updating the systems administration documentation on our internal wiki, so others can work out how to run our servers.