Informing ourselves: what we learned at AlaveteliCon 2015

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AlaveteliCon – the conference about online Freedom of Information technologies – took place in Madrid last week.

It was an opportunity for people who run sites based on our FOI software Alaveteli (as well as other FOI platforms such as Frag Den Staat and MuckRock) to come together and share experiences, frustrations, solutions—and the kind of anecdotes that only FOI site implementers can truly understand.

It was also a fascinating snapshot of FOI laws around the world, and how digital tech is enabling the shoots of FOI to germinate in a variety of places, many of them previously closeted. It was inspiring, helpful and a refreshing reboot for practitioners, many of whom are fighting against quite considerable difficulties in their attempts to provide access to information.

We heard from delegates from countries as diverse as Rwanda, Australia, Uganda, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Spain, and many more. As we heard of each country’s specific problems, we also learned, conversely, that many of our challenges are much the same everywhere.

Resources

Over the next few weeks we will be sharing videos, photos and further blog posts, but for now you can get a taste of AlaveteliCon 2015 for yourself in the following places:

  • The conference agenda shows which sessions ran and who was speaking
  • A Storify gathers together tweets and photos to trace the conference’s main themes
  • Some photos (we hope to have more soon) are on Flickr and Instagram
  • The Twitter hashtag, #Alaveteli15 lets you see how things unfolded in real time
  • We’ve put together a Twitter list of Alaveteli deployments around the world: should be a great follow if you’re one of them
  • There’s now also an Alaveteli Slack channel for those who would like to continue the conversations begun at AlaveteliCon: ping @HenareDegan if you’d like access
  • Join an Alaveteli Google Group: There’s one for sharing experiences of running online FOI platforms, and another for developers using Alaveteli.

We co-hosted Alavetelicon with Access Info, and the event was made possible with support from Open Society Foundations. Many thanks to all our speakers and delegates, whose insights and generous sharing of experiences ensured that everyone went home with plenty to work on!

We hope to summarise several of the themes that emerged in a series of upcoming blog posts.

Finally

There were so many discussions, offers of help, ideas, and plans for the future that it’s hard to pick out just one benefit that came from the conference.

But to my mind, the overarching mood is expressed in the following two tweets:

It’s the idea of Alaveteli as not just a piece of software, but a genuine community, with the ability to support its members. The idea that, working together, we can identify and overcome difficulties.

Putting faces to names, listening to stories—and yes, sharing a cerveza or two over the two days of AlaveteliCon—really helped to consolidate that idea.

A lot of enthusiasm was born in Madrid: long may it last.