October’s News from the ATI Network

All of us working on Access to Information here at mySociety were extremely saddened to hear of the death of Helen Darbishire on October 18th. Helen was one of the key leaders of the Access to Information space, and her tireless enthusiasm and drive to improve transparency around the world – along with her warm and welcoming personality – will be sorely missed by us all. Please join us in sending best wishes to the Access Info Europe team during this difficult time and supporting Rachel and Carlos in their mission to build on the work Helen started. 

FragDenStaat: have been uncovering hidden tax havens in secret forest locations in the middle of Germany – held by the descendents of the founders of the ottoman empire; the kinds of stories that feel like they’re fiction but are actually fact!

mySociety: are working hard on our new round of AI experiments to detect misuse of WDTK, finishing up and submitting our year 2 report for the ATI network project and planning out the next couple of meetup events. We’ve also been getting campaign groups on board for a FOI support pipeline we’ll be running from January to July 2025 to go through the process of forming a request to analysing data. 

Access Info: have been liaising with MaDada and SPOON to finalise the legal framework projects they’ll be working on over the next 6 – 12 months.

SPOON: experimented for the first time sending in a legal opinion in a court case of  a citizen who had started a legal procedure after his FOI-request for  disclosure of a memo was dismissed. He had won in the first instance, but the municipality hired the most prominent government law firm to appeal the decision. The point of contention was the interpretation of an important provision in our FOI-act that had not previously  come before our highest court. The court allowed us to join in the hearing and answer questions. This way we could make for a level playing field and make sure the court heard all arguments on the side of the citizen. Compared to starting your own case from the beginning, it is more time effective and a real case from a citizen is more sympathetic. And you achieve the status of ‘expert’, which is good for your reputation. Judgement is expected  late November. 

Regarding our Alavetelli platform, we are in the process of coming to an agreement with the Ministry of Interior Affairs on our handling of the privacy of government officials.

Ma Dada: got a new grant to pimp up the website and reach out to civil society organisations and non-profits in France. We got started with work on this. We are also discussing how to approach GDPR in relation to public bodies.

ForSet: ForSet has been focused on upcoming parliamentary elections. Following ideation sessions and working groups from Civic Tech Summit hold in Tbilisi in August, we co-launched two civic tech platforms (https://daitove.learnworlds.com/ for educating and certifying volunteer election observers and https://damkvirvebeli.ge/ for coordinating work of 3000+ observers). Media news aggregation tool https://skhivi.com/ has been launched as well for assisting journalists in covering elections. We have continued Data Communication Fellowship programs, where 5 Georgian journalists produced in-depth data stories regarding the changes in elections system, predictions, and transparency. Although we don’t have an active grant for AskGov.ge, we have seen the increase of FOI requests (42) at the platform, concerning the transparency and open data for election related processes. 

ImamoPravoZnati: Gong has published a set of evidence-based recommendations for improved access to information in Croatia. The publication is available in English.

KiMitTud: have been investigating Hungarian think tank’s investments in the US political system

Vouliwatch/Arthro5A: Vouliwatch published a set of recommendations for the improvement of the access to information legal framework in Greece (in Greek, soon in English). These recommendations have been sent to the Prime Minister, the competent Minister as well as to members of Parliament. The recommendations were accompanied by an open letter signed by 15 CSOs and investigative journalism orgs. We have so far held two meetings with MPs on this issue and hopefully by the end of the month/beginning of next we will be meeting with the Minister. In addition, October marked the beginning of our awareness raising campaign aimed at introducing the wider public, CSOs and journalists to the right to information. For the purpose of this campaign we created social media posters (1+ 2+3) and videos (1+2).

Abrimos Info: We have published a joint positioning with other organisations regarding the reform of the transparency institute (in Spanish)

The proposed constitutional reform seeks to abolish several autonomous and decentralised bodies, including the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection (INAI). This reform is set for debate by the LXVI Legislature.

The dissolution of INAI poses significant concerns regarding transparency and public access to information. The elimination of INAI could severely restrict citizens’ ability to monitor government activities, impacting civil society and journalists the most. Without INAI, the transparency necessary for democratic oversight and accountability in government operations could be significantly undermined.

OpenUp ZA: are getting ready to deliver us a workshop next week on Impact measurement and working on a mentorship programme with European organisations working in the Anti-Corruption space.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash