WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, our Freedom of Information service for users such as journalists, researchers and campaigners, now comes with Projects bundled in at no extra cost. That means that, as well as sending batch requests more easily, you can also bring in colleagues or volunteers to help you refine and analyse the data you receive in response.

How WhatDoTheyKnow Pro can help you

WhatDoTheyKnow Pro is a useful tool for those sending the same FOI request to multiple authorities: what we call ‘batch requesting’. Often, when embarking on an investigation, or gathering data for research or to inform a campaign, it’s helpful to gather data from many sources to create a full picture.

For example, in this recent blog post, Zarino described how he used Pro to ask every local authority in the UK how many safeguarding referrals they had received from schools that they manage. Climate Emergency UK have also used Pro to good effect, gathering data about councils’ climate action that wasn’t otherwise publicly available.

WhatDoTheyKnow Pro helps with two of the more difficult elements of bulk requesting:

• finding/compiling a list of all the relevant authorities’ email addresses; and
• keeping track of which authorities have responded, and which need following up.

What Projects adds

Now, the inclusion of Projects eases another big challenge of bulk requesting: sorting through the masses of responses to pull out the information you need.

Even when you frame your request to ask for data in a certain format, as permitted by the FOI Act, experience suggests that you’ll rarely receive responses that fit neatly into a spreadsheet for your instant analysis.

As Zarino noted in his follow-up post on requesting safeguarding data, much depends on how the authority are storing the information at their end: “We think, in reality, very few of the authorities held this data in a format structured enough to count as a ‘dataset’, but a few did send over their data in spreadsheet format, which was nice to see! Others, however, sent us tables in Word documents, in PDFs, SharePoint links, even ASCII-art tables in raw email text.”

These days, AI might be helpful with some data-refining tasks; but as we discovered with our WhoFundsThem project recently, sometimes humans are the best bet for combing through responses and pulling out the parts you need, in the format you need. Climate Emergency also took the time to train large cohorts of volunteers to ensure the assessments they were pulling out of their FOI responses for the Council Climate Action Scorecards were fair and accurate. Both projects made good use of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro and Projects.

What can Projects do for you? 

If you have one or more associate working with you, or if you can assemble a team of willing volunteers, you can share the work of going through the FOI responses as they come in. Projects makes collaboration easy. 

You can use Projects to give your team an online interface where you describe the aims of your investigation, and set out the questions you need answers to. Your helpers will then go through each response in turn and identify the parts you need, putting them into your standardised format. At the end, all their inputs are pulled into a nice, tidy spreadsheet that allows you to do the analysis you need.

Contributors don’t need a Pro membership themselves, so there’s no extra cost to you, and the only extra effort required is in setting out what data it is that you need to pull out from the responses — something it’s useful to have straight anyway!

No team to help you? Projects can also be used solo, and still helps you keep track of the information you’re pulling out — helpful if there are lots of data points.

Subscribe to WhatDoTheyKnow Pro (with Projects included), or see the Help page for more detail.

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Image: Kylie Haulk