Alaveteli is our platform that anyone can use to run a Freedom of Information site in their own country or jurisdiction.
As the number of requests grows on an Alaveteli site, it can become increasingly difficult to find released information that you’re interested in.
You can search, but the more general the term, the more likely that you’ll pull in results where the term is mentioned incidentally rather than being directly related to the information released. Or you can browse by authority, but that’s more fiddly when you want the same information from a range of authorities.
There’s also the issue that people new to FOI might not have a clear idea of what to ask about. Freedom of Information is great because you can ask for anything, but as a newcomer that can feel overwhelming. You need some direction to know where to start.
Request categories allow us to curate related requests to bridge the gaps mentioned above.
Here’s an example of a category on WhatDoTheyKnow that compiles successful Freedom of Information releases related to the British Post Office scandal.
Categories can be created in the admin interface via the Requests > Categories menu item.
Request categories work in a similar way to the current public body categories – in fact, as part of this development we’ve revamped the underlying code so that it applies to both!
At their core, they’re composed of three things – the title, body (where we can add explanatory content), and requests grouped by a tag.
Notes can be added to call out key information, and categories can be added to headings to create a layer of hierarchy. As part of this development, we’ve also improved notes so that they can be more easily styled with some preset colours, and added rich text editing to improve the formatting of longer notes.
We’ve started building up some interesting categories of requests on WhatDoTheyKnow, but we’d love to hear which ones you’d like to see.
If you’re interested in how the development unfolded you can take a look at the related work on GitHub.
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