In our latest online webinar, we convened three experts to tell us about how Freedom of Information works in practice – in other words, how does the law work when it comes into contact with the real world?

You can rewatch the video on our YouTube channel.

Speakers were:

Toby Mendel, founder and Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Democracy, who have run the Right To Information rating since 2011. This makes it easy to see at a glance which countries are performing well across a number of different indicators around transparency and FOI, and which not so well.

Toby explains how a ranking can have interesting effects – not least encouraging countries to compete against near neighbours to do a little better! For us, of course, it’s interesting to see this in the light of the Council Climate Action Scorecards, where this race to the top is also one of the positive outcomes.

Giovanni Esposito from the Université Libre de Bruxelles described a set of field experiments he conducted in collaboration with the Belgian Alaveteli site Transparencia.be, to see what factors make a difference to responsiveness when putting in a request for information. This involved asking for the same document from several different municipalities – and you can find out the results by watching the video.

Then finally, Mária Žuffová of the European University Institute shared her research into what the UK public actually want to know, based on analysis of WhatDoTheyKnow requests – as one might imagine, this was of great interest to all of us here at mySociety, as it will be to everyone with a curiosity about humankind!

Enjoyed this?

We’ve put on a lot of online webinars and events recently, all with the aim of sharing knowledge among our global networks of civic tech organisations, and beyond to anyone who has an interest in our topics of democracy, transparency, climate and community. If you’d like to be kept informed about upcoming webinars, sign up for our newsletter and be sure to check the box marked ‘conferences and events’ (or just tick the topics you are most interested in, and then we’ll let you know everything we’re doing in those areas, including events).

 

 

Did you know that Home Office data doesn’t include the reason that individuals have been taken to immigrant detention centres? Or that the UK is the only country in Europe with no limit on how long they can hold someone in such facilities?

One organisation keeping a careful eye on the situation is Spanish investigative journalism and fact-checking foundation Maldita, whose recent series of articles (in collaboration with Romanian organisation Funky Citizens) also reveals that the detention of Europeans is at its highest level since Brexit, with Romanian, Polish and Lithuanian citizens most represented. 

Maldita’s project is replete with the stories of those detained in the UK; insights from organisations concerned with migration and data retrieved from Freedom of Information requests to UK authorities — new ones, and ones they discovered in the vast archive of public responses available on our FOI site WhatDoTheyKnow.

Reading the set of four pieces, it becomes clear that much of the data required to understand the wider picture is either not collected, or has only come into the open thanks to the public’s right to information.

Happily, when it comes to information from UK authorities, this right is available to those outside the country (despite a threat to this, back in 2020), giving a higher chance that data impossible to source from one end of the equation may be retrieved from the other.

Mentorship

We came to work with Maldita thanks to the Journalismfund mentoring programme, through which we offered support and guidance based on our experience around FOI and supporting cross-border investigations (see, for example, the Lost In Europe project). We were happy to provide expertise on navigating the UK’s FOI system, and making introductions to other organisations that would be of help.

The resulting articles present sobering facts about the quantity and length of detainments, as well as health issues and self harm among detainees. Until reading these, you may not be aware that the UK is the only country where no date has to be given for release — and, as one might imagine, this results in poor mental health among many.

Investigative journalist Coral García Dorado, Coordinator of Disinformation Investigations for Maldita, told us how our interventions had facilitated their project.

During the time we worked together, we introduced Maldita to our WhatDoTheyKnow platform and mentored them around the best way of writing FOI requests. “You can’t imagine how important this tool was for us”, says Coral. “It’s something we don’t have in Spain”*.

An invaluable archive

Perhaps Coral’s greatest discovery was around how useful a vast archive of existing requests can be. This helped in three ways: 

→ They came across data that had already been requested, and used it in their pieces: 

“It’s very valuable,” noted Coral, “because sometimes you would just be asking for the same information that others had — and if you put in the request yourself, you’d have to wait some time for them to send you the information. So if someone has already asked for it and the information is there, you don’t have to replicate the same job again.”

She gave two examples of where they used this approach: “We published incidents of self harm in detention centres. It was requested by one person, and we just picked it up from there.

“And also thanks to someone who requested it on your tool, we know what the longest amount of time is that someone has been held an immigration removal centre: 1,131 days“. You can see how both of these requests fed into the work in this article.

→ Where a request would have been useful, but was several years old, they replicated it

 “We made a request to the NHS because we saw another person’s one. It’s very useful because maybe you don’t know that this information exists, so you don’t know that this information can be provided, and once you see that, you can use the precise same wording to ask them to send you the updated information.”

→  They discovered new ideas to explore

Coral explained that searching the archive using keywords around immigration “gives you an idea of what you can get”

Different countries, different access 

Maldita encountered frustrations around getting information from the Spanish authorities — it turned out that getting it from the UK side was more fruitful. 

“We asked [the Spanish authorities] for information about Spanish people detained in the UK, but in the end, we couldn’t get it – they gave us information about Spanish people in prison,” explained Coral.

“They didn’t have — or at least they said they didn’t have — information about the number of Spanish citizens detained in an immigration removal centre. But then if we go back to some articles published by all the newspapers, for example, El País in 2021, someone from the government said, ‘We know, at the moment of nine people who entered an immigration removal centre this year’. 

“So they had this information, but they said they don’t record this kind of information! In the end, we struggled a lot getting information from the Spanish authorities.”

Other challenges

This kind of setback can be dispiriting, but it surely helps to share one’s woes with others who can precisely understand them. In the course of their investigations, Maldita spoke to a number of organisations.

One of these was the Oxford Immigration Observatory, who explained ongoing frustrations around the cohesiveness of data between centres — making it impossible to track detainees if they were moved from one place to another. In turn, this of course makes it more difficult to pin down precise numbers. 

All worthwhile

Finally, we asked Coral how the investigation has been received. “It did have impact – I have to say most of all in the UK, from the different organisations helping migrants.”

She added, “It’s been great working with you, and having access to the tool. So thank you so much.” 

We return the thanks — it is always a pleasure to facilitate a vital piece of investigative journalism.

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* In fact, Spain did once have its own functioning Alaveteli site, which closed in the face of challenges around the government’s reluctance to adhere to the spirit of their own Access to Information law.

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Image: Schumi4ever (CC by-sa/4.0)

Often, responses published on our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow result in newspaper stories, or feed into campaigns or research.

When this happens with one of your own requests, you can add a link to the page. These then appear in the side column, like this:

It’s a great way for other users of the site to see the direct results that come from the simple act of making an FOI request — and now we’ve also added an ‘FOI in Action’ page, where you can see all of them in one place.

Here are five stories that have caught our eye from that page:

• A request for all communications around Eric Trump’s March 2025 visit to Edinburgh allowed the public to see the briefings made to the First Minister of Scotland ahead of their meeting — and resulted in this national news story.
• Minutes from the Ministry of Justice’s Working Group on Unregistered Marriages, acquired via this request, fed into a chapter of research on many aspects of modern marriage, this one being on unregistered Muslim marriages.
• All evidence points to this response being the basis for the New York Times piece [paywalled] that broke the massive story of the government’s £2.4 million expenditure to hide a life-or-death data breach, concerning Afghans who worked with the British forces. 
• A 2022 report into misogyny in the British Army was not released until requested and then pursued via the user’s right to an internal review. The user knew of its existence thanks to previous news stories referring to it. The Byline Times reveals the report’s shocking findings in this news story.
• This 2019 report from The Bureau of Investigation looked into public sector adoption of algorithmic and data-driven systems, presciently foreseeing the explosive adoption of AI in our public services. This was based on several requests from a single user.

We’re not far off listing 3,000 citations on WhatDoTheyKnow — and these are just the ones users have added. If your request resulted in a piece of journalism, informed a campaign or fed into research, do add it in. As well as helping to show others what FOI can do, it provides a significant link back to the external site, helping bring it more readers.

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Image: Peter Lawrence

We launched WhatDoTheyKnow with two goals: to make Freedom of Information more accessible to all; and to provide a free public archive of all the information that is released as a result. Today, 17 years later, those goals still guide us, and there’s more we can do towards them every day.

Most recently, we’ve developed a couple of features: a series of guides that aim to help newbies take the first steps into Freedom of Information; and a new way of browsing to make it easier to find what you need within the huge and ever-growing archive of information on the site.

FOI 101

We here at mySociety might talk about FOI all the time, but we know that to much of the population, the concept is vague, maybe daunting, and often riddled with misconceptions. To try and address this, we recently launched our Learn pages, which provide simple guidance to anyone taking their first steps into using the Act. 

Beginners — or anyone who needs a refresher — can follow these very simple instruction pages, and in no time will be using FOI to request information that can strengthen the power of campaigns, inform the public conversation or simply satisfy their own curiosity.

Browse by category

Our second addition is a new way to browse the closing-in-on 1.25 million public requests on WhatDoTheyKnow.

Even with clear guidance, it can be hard to pin down wording for that first request, so If you’d like some examples of how others have done it (or inspiration on the types of things you can ask), you can head to the ‘browse by category‘ page, where we’ve started to group examples of requests by topic. 

At the moment, these are heavy on topics relating to the environment, as this interface was conceived by our Climate team to feed into the Scorecards project — however, there are other categories too, and more to come.

So, whether you’re interested in information around cinema, radio and television; historic eras; railways; past exam papers; flood defences or a wealth of other topics, there is plenty of inspiration to be had there.

WhatDoTheyKnow was launched in 2008. 

We’re still working hard to increase transparency, in the UK and around the world

In this era of misinformation, the value of factual data, straight from the source, increases every day. Donate here and help ensure that we continue to provide the services that make Freedom of Information available to everyone, here in the UK and in the 30 sites around the world built on our free, open source software.

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Image: Gabriella Clare Marino

If you were one of the 100+ people who joined us for today’s webinar, you’ll already know it was hugely informative and timely.

We packed three fascinating speakers into the course of one hour-long session on using FOI to understand AI-based decision making by public authorities. Each brought so many insights that, even if you were there, you may wish to watch it all over again.

Fortunately, you can! We’ve uploaded the video to YouTube, and you can also access Morgan’s slides on Google Slides, here and Jake’s as a PDF, here (Jake actually wasn’t able to display his slides, so this gives you the chance to view them alongside his presentation, should you wish).

Morgan Currie of the University of Edinburgh kicked things off with a look at her research ‘Algorithmic Accountability in the UK’, and especially how opaque the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)’s use of automation for fraud detection has been, over the years.

Morgan explains the techniques used to gain more scrutiny of these decision-making and risk assessment processes, with much of the research based on analysing FOI requests made by others on WhatDoTheyKnow, which of course are public for everyone to see.

Secondly, in a pre-recorded session, Gabriel Geiger from Lighthouse Reports gave an overview of their Suspicion Machines Investigation which delves into the use of AI across different European welfare systems. Shockingly, but sadly not surprisingly, the investigation found code that was predicting which recipients of benefits are most likely to be committing fraud, with an inbuilt bias against minoritised people, women and parents — multiplied for anyone who falls into more than one of those categories.

Gabriel also outlined a useful three-tiered approach to this type of investigation, which others will be able to learn from when instigating similar research projects.

Our third speaker was Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch, who spoke of the decreasing transparency of our public bodies when it comes to AI-based systems, and the root causes of it: a lack of technical expertise among smaller authorities and the contracting of technology from private suppliers. Jake was in equal parts eloquent and fear-inducing about what this means for individuals who want to understand the decisions that have been made about them, and hold authorities accountable — but he also has concrete suggestions as to how the law must be reformed to reflect the times we live in.

The session rounded off with a brief opportunity to ask questions, which you can also watch in the video.

Presented in collaboration with our fellow transparency organisations AccessInfo Europe and Frag Den Staat, this session was an output of the ATI Community of Practice.

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Image: Michael Dziedzic

Partners across the Access to Information Community of Practice have been hard at work this summer. Read on to find out what we’ve been up to, and book your tickets for our exciting new webinar!

At mySociety, we’ve had a packed few months: in May we kicked off a new three-part webinar series on the practical applications of ATI, focusing on climate. We introduced new WDTK Learn pages, and in June we were thrilled to host so many organisations at TICTeC and our ATI day. All of the sessions from TICTeC are now available to watch on YouTube: I’d definitely recommend checking out network members Marzena, Liset and Krisztina‘s sessions. 

In July, we were lucky enough to attend the International Conference of Information Commissioners (ICIC) in Berlin.  This year’s event brought together around 200 participants from 85 countries and, for the first time, featured a civil society day alongside the commissioners’ closed sessions — resulting in a civil society declaration. 

The conversations throughout the week reinforced many of the themes raised during our ATI day, including the tension between privacy rights and transparency, the shrinking civic space in some regions, and the growing need for civil society to support embattled Information Commissioners. The conference sparked new connections and revived old ones, and it left us thinking ambitiously about where the network could go next!

Speaking of the network, how about some more updates:

In Poland, Citizens’ Network Watchdog has been active on many fronts: working with partners on anti-SLAPP and AI governance; influencing policy to protect NGOs’ access to courts; continuing legal advocacy around contract transparency and government surveillance; and successfully engaging communities through podcasts, roadshows and court wins. They’ve also raised concerns about Poland’s absence from the newly launched European Network for Transparency and Right to Information (ENTRI).

In the Netherlands, SPOON and Access Info Europe collaborated to publish legal recommendations for strengthening the Open Government Act (OGA), aligning it more closely with international standards. These were shared with government, oversight bodies, and the Council of Europe’s Access Info Group. Across Europe, Access Info also just announced the second winner of the Helen Darbishire Award, congrats to The Forever Lobbying Project!

Meanwhile, Ma Dada in France continues to serve its growing community despite funding challenges. While operational work is paused, the site recently passed 2,000 users and hit 50,000 requests – a clear sign of continued demand. mySociety and MaDada are making great progress on some GDPR technical work as a result of a successful bid to NLNet.

In Croatia, Gong has wrapped up a national workshop tour and launched a social media campaign to boost ATI awareness via ImamoPravoZnati. They’ve also been testing the ATI law’s strength by filing requests and complaints around the recent local elections.

What’s next?

Whether through litigation, policy, storytelling or platform-building, it’s inspiring to see the range and reach of our collective efforts across Europe and beyond! The inspiration doesn’t stop there: please join us on Tuesday 19th August for our next FOI in practice webinar, this time focussing on the topic everyone is talking about – AI! We’ve got three great speakers and we’d love to see you there. 

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Photo by Audrius Sutkus on Unsplash

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen public debate and campaigning around the government’s proposed cuts to PIP — benefits that are intended to ease the additional costs of living that come with being disabled. 

The Bill was voted through, but only once it was agreed that the proposed changes to PIP eligibility would be paused until after a ministerial review involving disabled people has taken place. This concession was the result of MPs threatening to rebel.

With the objections coming from within the Labour party itself, it would be easy to think that the entire discussion was happening between MPs. In fact, when MPs vote with their conscience, their stance has often been partially informed by lobbying from their constituents and from campaign groups with a particular interest in the outcome.

Freedom of Information can be an excellent resource for this sort of lobbying: it provides incontrovertible facts, sometimes from the very authorities being petitioned. 

We’ve recently seen how FOI requests on WhatDoTheyKnow have helped create news stories that inform opinions around PIP. 

For example, Learning Disability Today published an article in April, casting light on how many current claimants would have lost out if the government had, as they originally planned, removed the daily living component from claimants scoring less than 4 points for at least one activity. They say that their FOI request to the Department of Work and Pensions “revealed much higher numbers than previously suggested”, resulting in “almost nine out of ten current standard daily living awards failing on renewal”.

And Rightsnet has the stats on the number of PIP decisions reversed before going to appeal, alongside the medical conditions where this has happened most and least often — a useful benchmark for those considering an appeal, but such stats are also frequently used to point out the inadequacy of the system.

As the matter is not yet settled, and given the requirement for a ministerial review that involves disabled people, we expect to see many more relevant FOI requests in the near future.

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Image: Roger Blackwell CC by/2.0

Parliamentarians (MPs and Peers) have access to two different systems of getting information from the government.  As members of Parliament,  they can use Parliamentary Questions (PQs) to ask questions and receive information from government ministers. They also have the same rights as everyone else to access information from public authorities through the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. 

This blog post describes the different features of the two systems, and where it might benefit Parliamentarians to use the more general right to access information.  

Parliamentarians should use FOI when:

• The information is held by a public authority that is not a central government department or agency.
• The information is held in datasets or full documents rather than snippets of information. 
• If information is likely to be (or has already been) withheld on public interest grounds and a right of appeal would be useful. 

In general, we think that Parliamentarians should take the same interest in Freedom of Information compliance that they do in Parliamentary Questions, and recognise it as an essential way that information enters debate and facilitates parliamentary scrutiny of government. 

FOI is not just directly useful for Parliamentarians, but is part of the information environment that informs wider work and scrutiny.  FOI use by journalists, campaigners, and researchers regularly finds its way back into the parliamentary discussion. 

We think Parliament can do more to take an interest in the good functioning of the FOI system, and would always love to chat to any MPs or Peers who want to see a stronger FOI system. 

If you’d just like to learn more about Freedom of Information – we have a series of guides on WhatDoTheyKnow with everything you need to get started.

Parliamentary Questions and Freedom of Information

The Freedom of Information Act requires information to be disclosed on request except where it is covered by one of a range of exemptions. The Information Commissioner’s Office is the regulator for FOI, and the ICO’s decisions are ultimately appealable in the Information Tribunal. 

Parliamentary Questions are based on a convention of government transparency to Parliament rather than a formal law. This convention is part of the general expectation that government business should be open to Parliament, that also underpins how Select Committees ask for documents. 

This is reflected in the Ministerial Code as: 

Ministers should be as open as possible with Parliament and the public, refusing to provide information only when disclosure would not be in the public interest, which should be decided in accordance with the relevant statutes and the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

How this works in practice is led by the government’s Guide to Parliamentary Work. Parliament’s interest in the effectiveness of this system is shown through the Procedure Committee producing monitoring statistics and recommendations for updates to the guidance. 

The two systems are of comparable scale: in 2023 there were 56k Written Questions to central government departments and 70k FOI requests. Within a department, the responsibility to reply may or may not be held by the same people (there may be a practical split between wider parliamentary affairs and FOI management), although requests for information will then branch out to teams within the department. 

Differences in practice

In principle, where both mechanisms can be used to ask for the same information, they should get the same response. In practice, FOI can be a more reliable way of accessing information if the information is covered.

The government’s guidance encourages alignment between the standard applied for Freedom of Information and PQs (i.e. information should not be withheld that would be released under FOI) and the language used to deny access to information is similar across both.

However, there are examples of where information not released under PQs may be released under FOI, or the underlying source information can contradict answers given (as found early on in FOI’s availability through usage by the All Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition).

This difference does not require a bad faith approach to giving Parliament information, but this may sometimes be the case and it is something that Parliamentarians should pay attention to. The parallel systems have different compliance approaches,  and are often administered separately, and this can lead to different results.

Comparisons

	Freedom of Information	Parliamentary questions
Scope (authorities)	All public authorities	Central government departments and agencies
Scope (information)	Must be existing documents or information	May involve (within cost limit) extra analysis on top of existing documents to answer the question
Time period	20 working days	5 working days
Right of appeal	Yes – internal review, ICO and courts.	No – seen as Parliamentary activity but no explicit internal appeal system.
Cost limit	£600 (24 hours) – Central gov £450 (18 hours) – Other public bodies	£850 (34 hours)
Who can use it	Anyone	MPs and Peers
Results are…	Private/Public (it depends)	Public

 

Scope

Freedom of information covers all public authorities (Scottish public authorities are covered under the similar Scottish Freedom of Information law), while PQs can only be asked of government departments or their associated agencies. 

FOI requests must be for existing information or documents. PQs have a wider scope in that they may involve (within cost limit) extra analysis on top of existing documents to answer the question.

In practice, if seeking information from an existing document, PQs may result in an extract from this document, while an FOI response may return the whole document. 

Time period

PQs should be returned faster. The standard for PQs is they should be answered within five working days, and are considered late after ten.

Freedom of Information requests should be responded to within 20 working days. Technically, it should be as fast as possible – but information tends to be released at this last point.

A shorter time limit is an advantage for certain kinds of questions,  but may be a disadvantage when documents are hard to locate/access, leading to an incorrect “not held” response. This is one of the reasons why we recommend FOI for full documents. 

Right of appeal

A key advantage of FOI is the legal appeal route. 

Under FOI, there is an appeal regime through an independent regulator and the courts. There is no similar function for PQs. The guidance may encourage departments to apply the same logic to FOI and PQs, but the department’s logic may be wrong. Under FOI there is an external check on this, and disclosure can be compelled. 

Because the question and answer process is seen as part of Parliamentary proceedings, outside regulators and the courts cannot compel different answers. This is a construction of Parliamentary supremacy that is to the advantage of the government, and to the disadvantage of MPs.

As FOI exemptions are part of the logic used to allow information to be withheld, requests can end up in a situation where the FOI standard is used to withhold information, but without the equivalent ability to appeal.

For instance in this Written Answer there is the effective use of the FOI commercial exemption. If this was an FOI request, this could be appealed at first through internal review and then to the ICO. As a Written Answer there is no right of appeal (although it could be resubmitted as an FOI request). 

Cost limit

PQs have a higher threshold for the cost limit, meaning that in principle a slightly higher search time is allowed. 

Freedom of Information requests to central government departments and agencies have a cost limit of £600 worth of time (24 hours).The “disproportionate cost threshold” for PQs is currently £850 (34 hours)  — this is pegged at 140% of the FOI cost limit to the nearest £50.

In practice, this will rarely matter. Most responses that engage the cost limit reflect search times well above either cost threshold. An example of the disproportionate cost threshold being used can be seen here.

Who can use

Anyone can make an FOI request, while only MPs and Peers can ask PQs. 

In practice this is a fuzzy boundary. Campaigners with a friendly MP/Peer may be able to have questions asked and information released. Similarly, it might sometimes be useful for a government MP critical of party policy to have information requested by a third party through FOI. 

Information or documents released through PQs will enter the record or be a deposited paper, and so covered by parliamentary privilege and effectively public domain to use.

Information released under FOI does not have this same guarantee. Public authorities have a duty to provide information even if it is copyrighted or defamatory, and can’t be guaranteed to be legally safe to further republish. 

For instance, an FOI request for an internal report that a third party considers defamatory might be vulnerable to a SLAPP. In most cases, this is not a significant factor. When it is and the requester is an MP/Peer, key information could be covered under privilege in different ways. 

Who can see the results

The responses to FOI requests are less public by default, but this varies. 

Answers to PQs are given to the parliamentarian in question and published as part of the official record. 

FOI results are returned to the requester. If requested through WhatDoTheyKnow, the results are published in public (unless using our WhatDoTheyKnow Pro service, where results can be embargoed for a time). 

The authority may (or may not) release the results of an FOI request either through a disclosure log, or other public disclosure. For instance, information might be released simultaneously through FOI and through a public announcement to get the authority’s framing of the information across, and reduce the newsworthiness to the original requester. 

FOI is worth Parliament paying attention to

Both Parliamentary Questions and Freedom of Information open doors the others can’t. Both are important tools in a Parliamentarian’s role. 

FOI is not just directly useful for Parliamentarians, but is part of the information environment that informs wider work and scrutiny.  FOI use by journalists, campaigners, and researchers regularly finds its way back into the parliamentary discussion. 

We think Parliament can do more to take an interest in the good functioning of the FOI system, and would always love to chat to any MPs or Peers who want to see a stronger FOI system. 

Header image: Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Transparency is always a strong theme at TICTeC, and since so many members of the Access to Information Network were in town for the conference, we thought we’d take the opportunity to meet up. 

And so, the day after, several people who run Freedom of Information sites came together in an airy attic room to share knowledge and discuss challenges. 

As always when we convene this specialised interest group, participants were delighted to have in-depth discussions to other people who fully ‘get it’ — to whom the challenges of running such sites are not just academic, but form part of their day to day realities.

Sitting around the tables were Stefan and Luisa of Frag den Staat (Germany); Michael from CoST (Uganda); Ana from ForSet (Georgia); Miguel from Plaza Civica (Peru); Liset and Tim from SPOON (Netherlands); Krisztina from Átlátszónet Foundation (Hungary); Martin from Abrimos (Mexico); Rachel from AccessInfo (Europe); Michal, Piotr and Marzena from Citizens’ Network Watchdog (Poland); Laurent from MaDada (France); Maria from Fiquem Sabendo (Brazil); Matt from the Civic Tech Field Guide and Julia, Louise and me representing mySociety.

Positive wins 

We began by sharing recent successes. A few of the organisations were successful in overturning governmental attacks on, or restrictions to, FOI rights, while others had used research and activism to undermine negative perceptions around the Right To Know. We heard of successful campaigns and grant bids too — overall, sharing these wins was a great way to kick things off.

Learning new skills 

Ana gave a really insightful presentation on how ForSet had worked with ‘influencers’ to reach a new audience. Here, the term ‘influencer’ really just meant content creators with a wide following among the Gen Z audience they were trying to appeal to. 

For context, in Georgia young people have been out on the streets en masse, successfully protesting against proposed laws. Even if they weren’t yet old enough to vote, Ana pointed out, they could still influence public discourse and the political agenda. 

And now, as that generation reaches voting age, ForSet wanted to use social media platforms to encourage democratic participation.

As with everything the organisation does, the level of preparation and analysis that they brought to the project was outstanding, making sure that they fully understood who Gen Z would pay attention to, and trying out different messages to see what worked. There was so much to learn here about how to break into new audiences and how to ensure that what you were doing had an effect.

A forest of trees

Next, Rachel led us in an exercise to plot the challenges we face running ATI sites onto a tree diagram – with causes at the roots, core issues on the trunk, and consequences in the leafy canopy.  

What we discovered was first, that challenges and problems tend to be the same in every context; and second, that causes and effects are so interlinked that it is often difficult to decide which is which. For example, a lack of public understanding around ATI can both cause a low usage, and be the result of inadequate education around the topic. Authorities’ low response rates might be the result of poor governmental oversight, or the cause of public apathy – and so on.

Batch and back-ups

In the afternoon, the topics were decided upon by consensus: we had a useful conversation about the issues around batch requesting (sending the same request to multiple authorities), which sites offer in a variety of different ways ranging from it being open to most users, to being available only to staff (and some don’t offer it at all).  

Secondly, we discussed ‘backing up’ – both backups to ensure our own site archives were safe from loss, and means by which to scrape massive public archives when it becomes clear that they might be taken down by the authorities running them. This is not an imaginary scenario, as members were able to testify, and of course as we have seen recently in the States.

Finally, people voted on which topics they are keen to see covered in future webinars of the ATI Network, with youth and AI decision-making being most popular – so watch this space for those webinars to happen.

If you’re someone who’s concerned about the climate but not really sure what to do about it, this webinar is definitely a good place to start.

Our event this week brought together investigative journalist Lucas Amin of Democracy for Sale; Anne Friel, Head of Just Societies at Client Earth; and Joschi Wolf of the German transparency project Frag Den Staat – all sharing their knowledge around Freedom of Information as an invaluable tool for tackling the climate crisis.

It was very encouraging to hear practical tips and thoughts that made FOI-based activism seem within reach, even to the beginner. And all from your own desk!

Watch the webinar on YouTube. We’ve also compiled the responses to the questions from the audience that there wasn’t time to answer during the session: you can see those here.

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Image: Matteo Miliddi