A behind-the-scenes look at how Fiquem Sabendo uses Brazil’s FOI law to unlock data and support investigative journalism.

Maria Vitória Ramos, Co-founder and Director of Fiquem Sabendo, shares how the organisation prepares requests, processes government data, and supports journalists in turning information into impactful reporting.

Fiquem Sabendo is a non-profit newsroom and data agency that uses Brazil’s access to information law to uncover and share government data with journalists and the public. Since its founding, the team has released over a thousand new public datasets and trained thousands of journalists and citizens to make effective FOI requests. They also publish the popular newsletter Don’t LAI to Me, bringing transparency stories to a wide audience.

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Music: Serge Pavkin Music (Pixabay licence)

Transcript

0:00  Julia: We are joined by the wonderful Maria Vitória Ramos from Fiquem Sabendo in Brazil. Some of you may already know her from her fantastic presentation at TICTeC in London in 2024: I think it was a highlight for lots of people, including myself.

0:12  If you haven’t come across their work before, Fiquem Sabendo is a nonprofit newsroom and data agency that uses Brazil’s Freedom of Information laws to unlock public data and make it useful for journalists, civil society organisations and the public. 

0:22  I’m doing a bit of Maria’s work here for you. I’m sure she’ll tell us more about it in a second. But yeah, today, Maria is going to take us behind the scenes and show us how her team prepares Freedom of Information requests and supports journalists to uncover the stories that matter. 

0:38  It’s such a great opportunity to learn from one of the most innovative transparency organisations from around the world, and so we are so lucky to have you, Maria.

0:45  Maria: Thank you, Julia, thank you mySociety again for opening this space. I’m very excited. So Fiquem Sabendo, we call ourselves agents of public transparency, trying to empower citizens who question their representatives and actively participate in democracy. 

1:05  I’m not going to go a long way about us, but this is our team. Well, roughly, because we were remote, so there’s we never get a picture of all of us, but we’re around 15 people all over Brazil, and we, for the last seven years, we’ve been working and consolidating ourselves as the main reference in rights or information in Brazil. 1:33  

You see, sometimes I’m saying FOIA, sometimes I’m saying ATI, or RTI. There’s a lot of acronyms in English, but they’re all mean the same, right? 

1:44  So to this date, we have had quite a few impactful initiatives. We’ve uncovered over $100 billion in secret public spending, the datasets and documents that we’ve unlocked have been used to produce over 10,000 news stories in Brazil and abroad.

2:10  We’ve trained over 5,000 citizens, a lot of those are journalists, and we’ve been able to pass three new national laws for improving access to information in Brazil. 

2:22  Just a quick information, I like to say that Brazil is the eighth biggest economy in the world. Sometimes I feel like people don’t realize how big we are, and we are a benchmark in transparency. 

2:40  As I talk at the two TICTeCs that I’ve been to, I see how sometimes people are impressed by how good our ecosystem is, and I think a lot of that is due to journalism. Our FOIA was written by and lobbied by journalists that were working in the US and saw the Brazilian journalists who worked in the US and saw the importance of FOIA.

3:13  So since the beginning of our whole ecosystem, it’s been really deeply attached to journalism. By the way, our FOIA is only 13 years old, so it’s pretty recent, but it’s one of the top ones globally. 

3:28  Everything here is digital, which makes it much easier and more accessible. And I’m going to try to show you how you can also use journalism as a powerful tool to make Right to Information broader and better implemented in your own countries.

3:55  At Fiquem Sabendo I know Julia said in the introduction, we are more of an organisation that is working on the backstage of journalism. It’s one of our branches, but we work together with advocacy training programs and developing civic tech.

4:18  The process here, I think it’s interesting, because it shows how critical journalism is. But what we do is basically we file over 2,000 FOIA requests a year. With that, we find where transparency hasn’t reached yet. 

4:36  So you can see this first story is not one of our cases, but it’s the case that made me fall in love with RTI when I was a journalism student, and follow to found Fiquem Sabendo at 22 during journalism school. 

4:56  So this boy is Gabriel. Gabriel had a heart that wasn’t working properly. The Brazilian NHS found a heart that was matching, and it asked the Air Force, the Brazilian Air Force, to bring the heart from Brasilia to receive it, to make the operation. 

5:22  Everything was ready to go. The last minute, the Air Force used that airplane to bring a politician to spend the weekend in Rio de Janeiro, and the heart didn’t arrive. 

5:33  Vinicius Sassine, which was a reporter from O Globo, was following Gabrielle’s case, and he was a pioneer in using FOI in journalism in Brazil. And he did two really simple FOIA requests. He asked the NHS how many denials of transportation for transplanting organs they received, and then… 

5:59  it’s all good, OK, and then he also asked the Air Force all the flight logs for politicians, and matching these two datasets, he realised that in three years, over 150 lives were lost due to an absolute lack of priority in the use of public resources. 

6:23  And the day after he published his news stories, his his news piece, the government created a regulation applying the Air Force to always have a plane ready to go for transplanting organs. And in one year, almost 300 lives were saved due to this two very simple FOIA requests put together with the power of journalism. 

6:52  So imagine maybe just this request was just in a mySociety database, or was just there waiting for something, it would not have had this life saving impact.

7:06  Right now, moving to three examples of our own, we had this historical victory in a controlling agency, and we unlocked over $100 billion in public spending that was spent without any oversight whatsoever for over 100 years. 

7:30  That was over four years of work, but most importantly, it powered over 2,000 news stories all over Brazil, generating a national debate over a topic that was completely forgotten or unknown or a footnote in Controlling Agencies reporting, and it mobilised the public to change this the law for these benefits, and a lot of the benefits were canceled due to wrongdoing.

8:07  And, well, yeah, we’ve got some like, this is Brazil’s biggest newspaper. We got, front page, huge news stories everywhere, and that was due to a taskforce that we created. Actually, we had to do a lot. I tried to simplify it here, because we don’t have a lot of time, but basically it was this huge dataset, completely without any standards. A lot of problems. 

8:35  We had volunteers using Python and R to program and create a usable dataset. We corrected all the mistakes that we found with the technicians inside the government, and then we work with ten big journalists from competing organisations to work on this dataset, because when you have a big enough dataset, you can put them together, and they all will find scoops and it’s good for everyone.

9:06  Agenda Transparente is a tool we developed to monitor lobbying for news investigations, and it’s been used widely to cover politics, but also really impactful stories when we work with independent journalism that goes really deep into one specific subject. 

9:28  So with Reporter Brazil, they used our tool to investigate the lobbying for a pesticide that was very lethal for bees. It’s prohibited in Europe, in the US, and after the reporting was published, it generated a national ban on that pesticide. So also shows how impactful one news stories can be for everyone. 

9:51  And finally, on case studies, we also opened the Bolsonaro secret spending on the government’s corporate cards that included over a million dollars in questionable expenses, including hundreds of kilos of premium steak, carnival travel expenses, jet skis, yachts and a lot of other stuff, and it also was done through a taskforce with partner reporters. 

10:28  And the impact was immediate. In six months, we had over 4,000 stories published nationwide. The Attorney General launched an investigation. They opened a public consultation on how this corporate card should be managed going forward.

10:46  The Controlling Agencies demanded some reimbursements. There is a whole story published by Muckrock that you can see – it’s in English, so you could go look for it. 

10:59  But now we’re going to move to the fun part, which is the “how to”, right? Julia and Gareth really asked me to try to explain, step by step, how we mobilise journalism around ATI, and I tried my best. Let’s see if it’s comprehensible, and we can chat at the end. 

11:25  So why invest in journalism? First, of course, is awareness. If citizens don’t even know they have this right, how will they claim it when it’s threatened? Journalists are the most loud voices that you can have to defend Access to Information, and here in Brazil, we’ve had a few instances where presidents or very powerful people try to create really bad setbacks for for Freedom of Information, and they would have been successful if it was only the few organisations that are specialised in ATI that were working on it, you know, we would have been overpowered. 

12:11  And journalism was fundamental in the survival and amplification of our ATI laws. They also are very useful when you’re trying to to create new regulations or break barriers that have a lot of political will against it, right? 

12:34  So one of the like, really, the thing that changes completely the negotiations we have with the government, is when a big article was published in the big newspapers or on TV, it changes the playing field completely. 

12:50  And yeah, so this is a bit like a quick timeline of how it happened in Brazil in the last seven years. So it’s not that long term, but it’s also not that short term, right? 

13:05  But when we started, when we founded Fiquem Sabendo, it was three journalists and one lawyer, and it was, we would say, like out of the five journalists that used FOIA at the time in Brazil, three of them started Fiquem Sabendo, and then we created this really impactful newsletter that really delivered chewed information. 

13:32  You know, never before seen, datasets and documents that could be used freely by any journalist. They only had to say those datasets were obtained through for you and by us, of course. 

13:46  But mainly we wanted to get the public accustomed with the term, you know, people hadn’t our lives very new. So people even have hadn’t heard what is Freedom of Access to Information? 

14:01  And then the first step was they started publishing stories based on the data that we gave them, and started learning how we did it. So the inspiration part was very important, if you talk to journalists before this newsletter, and of course, you know a lot of other works by other organisations. 

14:22  But this was very impactful. They would say, FOIA is not for journalism. It’s too slow, it’s too complicated. We have a fast paced environment. You know, those that who knew what it was were against it. Most of them didn’t even know. 

14:42  So the first step was really showing them, hey, it’s possible to use FOIA for journalism in all these different areas, in health, in education. So here are, like, clear examples of these amazing datasets that you would die to have to report on. And this is how we did it, with the inspiration, and also tutorials, they start to experiment themselves, you know, going to investigations that we hadn’t proposed to them. 

15:13  And then there’s one really important thing in journalism, which is the position of where information is is placed in a new story, right? So the higher it is in an article, the most important it is. And we saw FOIA going from like the last line just being like this new story was based on FOIA to going up and up, paragraph by paragraph until it’s usually now, like the second phrase a reporter writes when it’s telling a story.

15:48  And then FOIA became itself newsworthy. That was not the beginning. First we need to we had to show them how it was useful for them. And then when they all loved it and it became a tool very important for their work, they started reporting, you know, oh, FOIA is getting worse in this aspect. 

16:10  We need to push forward on this. Here are the worst states on FOI. So they started fighting for better implementation because it was a tool useful for them, not because it was an important cause for us or other organisations.

16:29  So it’s a long term but very high impact investment, and we’re going to go step by step, but just like a glance at it, it’s first you need to understand how journalism works. Map the areas you have good information about and which reporters cover those.

16:50  Choose the data and package it, and then create an internal process to carry reporters with you. Literally, it’s almost like, get in the car. We have the whole car working. You just jump in and it will show you the way. And then you need to, you know, match your working plan with the news cycles that already exist.

17:15  The first thing is, journalism is a very broad term, and there’s many aspects inside of it. We’ll look a bit at the three biggest types. But you need to understand what types of journalism exist, what types of professionals are in the newsroom. It’s not just reporters. 

17:34  What is the daily routine like? So we all know journalism has been, you know, devastated by big tech and social media. So there’s not, you know, it’s very few reporters that are able to cover one single area with depth. 

17:49  Most journalists are just doing many new stories at the same time in all different areas. They have a really chaotic routine. So if you don’t understand how hard their life is, you’re not going to understand how to breach that and feed them what is important to you.

18:13  And then I think the most important thing is reporters want data, exclusive, relevant, different, unique information that they can add value to their own work. No press releases about the importance of FOIA or commemorating FOIA’s birthday or the International Day of Freedom of Access to Information.

18:42  That’s really, really rare you know, if it does work and someone publishes that, it’s not going to have any relevance. It’s not going to, you know, get clicks or big spaces in the print paper. They want stories, and they will mention for you inside the story.

19:06  And then a very important thing is to create a network and invest in those relationships. It doesn’t happen overnight, and preferably, I wouldn’t start jumping from one journalist to another, like find a few that are good partners, that you understand each other, and then you keep feeding them, especially if it’s you know, you gave them this document that they were able to create a new story on, and then you found another document that complements that story. 

19:38  Don’t give it to another journalist or a competing one. Give it to the same one that did the first reporting, so they can build on that and also strengthen the relationship with you. Try to create an exciting atmosphere. So here in Brazil, the acronym for FOI is LAI and we have this whole name that we started, and now everybody calls themselves a LAI lover. So FOI lover, and it’s kind of like a community.

20:12  Offering training is a really big strategy to get journalists on board. So we’ve done many programmes: FOI in the newsroom, FOI for communicators, FOI in indigenous territories, for indigenous communicators, and it works very well. 

20:35  We also have had recent experience of offering reporting grants, and I think that if I’m not sure, actually, if I would do that more in the beginning or after, you’ve gathered the experience of how journalism works and what it wants, but out of the eight reporting grants that we gave this year, four of them which were like, first time, you know, female black journalists writing for the first time, big stories, four of them are competing for journalism awards this year. So we’re very excited about that.

21:13  A very important thing is to package the information. I know there are some, you know, websites like Muckrock or mySociety, WhatDoTheyKnow, that you have a searchable database with the FOIA requests themselves. But like I said, journalists don’t have the time, especially in the beginning, when you’re trying to show them that there’s any value in FOIA.

21:43  So for us, it was very successful to have this, you know, biweekly newsletter that goes to 20,000 journalists now, and it gives them exclusive data. But you can also work, you know, instead of just publishing a report on something, again, not a report about FOIA, but a report done using FOIA for a specific purpose. 

22:16  So here’s, this is a report we did where we got the data of how much green area each public school in the capitals of Brazil had, and match those with the profile of students, showing very clearly the structural racism when talking about climate change, and instead of just publishing it and hoping someone picks it up, you have to create this whole strategy where you have an embargo, you know, you get your partner journalist with the report a month before so they can work on their exclusive look at that and publish it with you in the same day. 

22:59 This idea of like getting many journalists to publish on the same day as you publish something, or they all publish it at the same day, is a really good strategy when you think about how the news ecosystem works, because if you get two of the leading journalism voices in your country to report on something all the other ones who have to follow, you know, the editors of the competing newspapers will be, like, “You need to get a story about the pensioners as well, because CNN and that other one already have that story”, and then you can really, you know, amplify the impact

23:41  When you match this idea of understanding journalism, understanding who you’re talking to, and how to package the information. Try to apply the product roadmap concept, you know you need to interview people. You need to talk to them. Understand what, what is the actual problems and pains they are experiencing, and as journalists in the UK, in the Netherlands and and create solutions tailored to their needs.

24:16  So yeah, our newsletter is called “Don’t LAI to me”, which is like we have FOIA so you can’t lie to us. It has over 20,000 subscribers. It’s been going on for a while now, and it was our main tool for a long time.

24:33  Also be really clear and offer supporting materials. Remember that journalists now are covering many topics at the same time, so make it easier for them. So here example, we publish with and also partnering with organisations that are experts in that specific field. So we partnered with an organisation specialising in public safety, and we published a guide on how to obtain public safety data for journalists,and then also very important in that timeline. 

25:11  You know, after we inspired them, and they saw the value in FOIA and started to experiment themselves, it was very helpful to have our wiki FOIA, which has not just the explanations, but like really copy and paste requests that you can make on areas that are very you know, interesting for journalists, like child care availability or the control of guns or, you know, President’s spending, and so they can, they see the inspiration in your newsletter or whatever, they have their own ideas.

26:04  But then you also give them the steps on how to do it themselves. It’s very important that they know they can rely on you, right? So, like I said, carrying them is like really being there with them. 

26:19  First is, journalism is very fast paced. You need to be too. If you take three days to answer an email, you’re not useful to them. You’re not reliable. We usually, you know, we have WhatsApp depending on which country you are, and then we’re like prioritising answering them really quickly.

26:45  And also not just like with datasets that we uncovered little by little, those partners that were more most reliable, or most you know, got big columns in big newspapers. We have, like WhatsApp groups, which each one of them and their team and our advocacy team, and our advocacy team knows it’s a priority that whenever they say, like, “Hey, I was wondering, is it possible to obtain the fly logs of the President?”, our advocacy team answers really quickly, saying, “Yes, we can do the request for you if you want”.

27:20  So we do a lot of the work for them, and it’s great to have data analysts in your team that are also available to them. Data journalism, you know, there are very few data journalists. They don’t have a lot of data analysis capability in newsrooms. 

27:41  So if you can offer that, you’re going to get a lot more news stories if, if you give that data arm for them to use. 

27:53  So when we’re talking about “chewing” the information, it’s just simplifying the process and feeding them with like practical, usable information and cleaning of the noise. 

28:06  So in our newsletter, it will usually be like we already get the main leads, the most important things that we got, that we get from the data. So like, 80% of the government’s schools are not receiving medical professionals. Here is some other few key highlights from this data set. 

28:32  Sometimes we give them infographics or graphs, and then we suggest possibilities for investigation. So, you know, like so we gave you this big total number that is very impressive, but if it was us, we would go investigate how this is playing out, you know, city by city, or cross this dataset with this other few options. 

28:57  So because we don’t have the arms, and it’s not our purpose to do the reporting ourselves. But since we have journalists in our in our organisation, and our newsletter is done by a data journalist, we already offer some suggestions that that works very well and also explaining all the attention points you know, like, hey, this data set says this, but the methodology change in that that, because usually when you get the request right, the answer has like three pages of the government explaining all the things in the data.

29:35  If you just link that, they’re not going to read the entire for your response. So just give them what is really essential about that for response that is crucial so they don’t do any mistakes in their reporting. 

29:52  Pay attention to what’s happening. Of course, timing is everything in journalism, and it’s even better if you can make ATI useful for mainstream topics and culture. 

30:04  So for example, Brazil’s most famous football player, Vini Junior, has been suffering a lot of racism in Spain, and we got the telegrams from the Brazilian embassies talking about how they’re working with the Spanish government to, you know, stop that racism, or a really big one, and also that, I know there’s someone from Open Knowledge Brazil here. They did a very good job on that as well on exposing how much mayors were paying for famous artists to perform in their public events, and that generates a lot of you know, awareness from normal citizens who would not go for a news story, would not go for ATI, but they know the name of that artist that they like or they hate.

31:02  Create a new cycle calendar, right? So it feels like journalism is completely unpredictable, and I fear that it’s a bit harder for you in depending in which country you are from what I’ve heard, because in Brazil, we have really like, most of the FOIA requests are answered, you know, between one month and six months, so it’s somewhat controllable and like, when you’re going to get an answer,

31:36  but even 20 days, it’s too long for journalism if you’re going after the fact, right? So if you wait for something to happen, and then you’re going to think about a FOIA request and then file and then appeal, and that once you get that data, you’ve lost the news cycle. It’s already gone. 

31:56  So you need to start earlier than everyone, so you can actually, you know, get the train when it’s leaving the station.

32:06  Help me out in the chat, if you can think of things that happen in a season, you know. So here in Brazil, every time between July and September, it’s fire season in the Amazon, and you most certainly will get a lot of news stories about the fire in the Amazon. 

32:26  So a few months earlier, we start getting data and documents related to fire in the Amazon and getting it all ready. And also, like sometimes giving an advantage to few of journalism partners, giving them the datasets. You know, two weeks before our newsletter goes out. 

32:46  And did I skip something? Yeah, I’m gonna come back for a slide later, but give help me in the chat with like examples from the country you are in where, you know, every year something happens. 

33:03  So also, like the week before carnival, we always drop a dataset of the traffic points or the accidents the week after carnival, like the amount of accidents that help that happen. 

33:19  And during the past carnivals, and the journalists love it because they need stuff to fill in a 24 hour coverage of Carnival, which is a holiday. There’s very few people in the newsroom, and that gets us really far, and also some datasets that we know they love, like drugs seized by point of entry, or amount of guns seized by the police. 

33:45  We do, you know, we update them every year or every six months or every three months, depending on how we saw. Journalists like to consume that, also they love rankings. 

33:58  Rankings are easy to report on and also gives them some, you know, if you always drop a ranking during a dry season. So, you know, like July is usually a dry season because school’s out, Congress is off. 

34:21  Or, you know, those two weeks between Christmas and the beginning of classes, like, there’s very few journalists in the newsrooms. There’s no editors. They don’t have a lot of topics to cover, and then you feed them something that is easy to use and very effective in improving regulations and implementation, finally positioning yourself as an expert source in something broader, preferably broader than right to information, you know so like public transparency or public spending. 

35:00  Then, usually you start with, you know, interviews, and then you write one opinion article here, one opinion article there. And then maybe finally, you can secure a regular column in a newspaper, like we have a column in the biggest newspaper of Brazil where we have a lot of space and amplification to write about FOI.

35:28  give me just one sec.

35:37  All right.

35:39  And also, when giving statements to journalists, I’ve been in both hands, you know, like getting statements from experts and giving statement as an expert. 

35:50  Just remember, journalism counts each letter and space, so don’t give three phrases as an answer. You give one powerful, concise phrase with a normal vocabulary, no technical language that the journalist can use, don’t give the whole history of something, and all the caveats, like concise and powerful.

36:19  Finally, and I’m going to open so we can talk. A few bonus tips: write and speak like a journalist. Here’s the inverted pyramid, which is sometimes very opposite to what people from academia or, you know, somewhere else are used to. 

36:35  It’s just like the lead. The most important thing, you know.

36:41  I write my column with my co founder that is a lawyer. And now, after a whole year of us writing together, I can see how he is changing completely. But every column of his started from the Constitution, you know, be like the Constitution assures, you know, the the right to public Access to Information, and in the Republic, this is very important, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

37:10  And like in the fourth paragraph, we would have the topic in hand. And now I can see that after a year of me like, you know, we start with the most important thing. It goes like, the first sentence is, you know, the government just closed the dataset with 17 years of document showing how it was transferring money to the States.

37:34  And then you can say which laws are related to that, and blah, blah, blah, it’s very helpful to have a journalist in your team, because as much as we try to explain, is a completely like different way of seeing the world, right? 

37:49  So our advocacy team, that is, you know, done by lawyers. They love, they really love FOIAs. So they’re always for following lot of stuff, and then they come very excited to us, like, Hey, I got this. And we’re, like, nobody cares. Like, that’s not a thing. 

38:08  That’s the thing that you like because you are very nerd that loves this specific topic. But like, no, no one’s gonna, like, no journalist is gonna care about this. Or, you know, this is from a really old time. It just it’s a different way of seeing the world. So try to have one in your team.

38:29  Always agree in advance with the journalist that you’re partnering with, how they should credit you, and make sure that they explicitly refer to for you. And yeah, help your partner newsrooms apply for prizes. 

38:45  So whenever, you know, journalism prizes appear, we’re like, oh, that dataset that we gave to Folia, they produced a really cool story that I think would fit this prize. We write to the journalist, being like, hey, what do you think about, you know, filing that because most sometimes it’s not going to come to us, but it does give us, you know, more impact and credibility.

39:09  Julia: Maria, that was fantastic. I love your honesty and everything that you do. You’re such fantastic presenter, and I learned loads. So a lovely question from Liset: can you give some examples of the topics you write about in the national newspaper, you talked about having a kind of calendar view. 

39:24  But are there some things that like are always a winner, always a hit, a thing that you think that, if you’ve got limited time, some topics that we could focus on, and yeah, some sort of format or target certain topics was Liset’s question. 

39:37  Maria: Our strategy was, journalism is very fast paced. You need the latest information. So like, if you have an amazing data set of 20 years, an economist or an academic would die for it, but if you don’t have the past six months, it’s useless for journalism, right?

40:00  Not going to write a story about something that you only have data until you know, if it’s not like a clear time, you know, like, oh, this period is this President’s mandate or some sort of, like, clock, you know, timing.

40:18  So our strategy was always to, just like, you know, shoot a million bullets at a time, to all different agencies, all different topics, and then, just like, filter the golden that comes out of it. 

40:34  Because every time, it’s much harder when you have, like, this one specific topic that depends in this one or two agencies that can be really bad agencies, or, you know, like, and then you’re depending on on them, and they’re taking too long, and you don’t have information ready, available for a journalist. 

40:54  So we cover every like, we shoot our shots to education, health, entrepreneurship, sports, everything. But if I were to choose, I would, of course, choose the, you know, like the three biggest topics, usually, you know, it’s health, education and public security. 

41:20  But not usually. That’s in Brazil, public security is a very big thing, but probably in the Netherlands, not so it depends on where you are. Also like here in Brazil, anything related to the military personnel is really big because we’re only like 40 years after a military dictatorship. 

41:40  We almost had a coup three years ago. So anything that has military in the name always goes really big. And yeah, I think it’s hard to say like specific topics, because, you know, each country has their own focus. But once you realise those like, build on them, you know, and update those every six months or something, some examples. 

42:06  So, yeah, like I said, military, drugs, gun control, access to health for kids, you know, like every year we update the amount of kids that receive cash transfer programmes that have been accompanied by their health professionals or not. 

42:31  That’s always a big thing, and public spending like it can public spending can be from you know, like how much this Senator spends, but also, like the investment in combating deforestation in the Amazon and how it’s being up and down and, you know, usually simpler things.

42:54  Julia: I think that was really helpful. Yeah, thank you so much. I had a couple of questions myself, if that’s OK. 

42:59  The first was a simple one for your training programmes. Do you charge journalists to come to them, or does it depend on the kind of training that it is – I know they’re free. And then do you ever get accusations of kind of political bias? Or how do you handle those when you are dealing with such political topics? 

43:15  Maria: Rule of law, never expect money from journalists, OK, so not journalists, not newsrooms. They cannot be your source of income. They are very poor, very stranded. Nobody has money in newsrooms. It’s a like, you know, it’s an industry that was decimated in the past 30 years. 

43:36  So no, they are tool for you, you know, like a space that you invest in, they’re not, they’re not a resource. So what we do is we get money from someone else to train journalists, right? 

43:52  So Internews funded our program to train indigenous communities. The British Embassy funded us to train the female journalists and the reporting grants. The Canadian fund funded us to do the programme in newsrooms so they’re not going to just get the get money from someone else, because you’re going to be in just like it’s not going to work, right? 

44:23  And then the second question was bias. Amazingly, we don’t have any haters on social media, even after seven years, touching very, very sensitive topics. But I think the big thing is you can clearly see in our posts, in our newsletter and everything, that we are literally shooting at everyone, like every party, every level. 

44:56  And also we are not doing the final reporting most of the time, right? We’re just saying like, hey, society, here’s all the data. And then 20,000 journalists from 20,000 different, you know, ideologies, and they covered the same thing with their own interpretation. So we’ve been able to skip that.

45:24  Julia: Amazing, yeah. That is really, really helpful. And I see what you mean, that when you’re casting the net so broad, then that definitely helps. 

45:34  Liset was asking about, have you experienced any of these dataset requests for coming proactive disclosure? That’s always nice when we get to that. And Miquel: making a mass information request tool and making it available to them for a fee, but potentially asking anything. Yeah, if you were saying charging journalists for anything is kind of hard, um, yeah, interesting, interesting questions.

45:53  Maria: So I’ll start with Miquel, but then remember me to come back to Liset. Um, I think you would be shooting yourself in the foot, because the value that they can offer to you is much bigger than any like fees you’re going to get from them. 

46:12  You know, we’ve been cited in over 10,000 news stories. Imagine like how much better it is to get funding from big donors when you have all this credibility and name recognition, we have an indicator of a KPI that shows through our clipping agency, we’re able to see that we’ve got 400 million Reals, which is $500,000 in spontaneous media, in value. 

46:50  So meaning, if we would pay to be advertised in the big newspapers, on TV, for people to know who Fiquem Sabendo is, you would have been less effective because, you know, it’s just advertisement, and we would have paid a lot of money for it, so just an ad, money that you would get, it’s a lot more valuable. 

47:12  But I think it’s just really like, it’s the most powerful community you could have to protect the right and to advance them, because most of the people who use FOI in Brazil now are journalists, and they’re like, opening the doors and making the things happen, because it’s one thing to have the law right. 

47:30  And as I’ve heard a lot of like, complaints from European countries, it’s like, they just don’t answer, or it takes them a million times, or everything is secret, like journalists love to report that the government is putting something under secret, the government hates it and opens it because the journalist said it’s on secret. 

47:49  They’re not going to open it because Fiquem Sabendo, or mySociety, says it’s secret because we don’t have the social pressure that journalists are actually able to have, you know, so I wouldn’t. Yeah, I wouldn’t. I would give everything for free for journalists. 

48:10  Our tool, the one that we developed for agenda transparency at first, like we were gonna charge lobbies and give it for free for journalists. But then actually, it was supposed to be a tool to generate request recurring revenue from journalists, but then we learned that that’s not a real market. And then we said, OK, we have to sell it for lobbyists.

48:36  And then we were like, okay, but we don’t like that, because that’s against our mission. So now it’s just free, but every time we think about something that would be paid for, it would always be free for journalists, because they, you know, they bring a lot more value to the table than whatever money they would be able to pay. 

48:54  Oh, yeah, if the dataset request resulted in proactive disclosure from authorities, yes, especially when it’s something that you make journalists love, because they are very annoying. 

49:05  So for example, one time we gave this dataset that we opened through FOIA on how much public servants were spending on app based cars, right? So like, how much were they spending on Lyft? 

49:23  And then journalists really love that, and they started asking every month for that data. And then the government got tired and created this whole portal for Lyft spending, just so they didn’t have to answer the same question. 

49:36  So they also give you this mass you know, like, it’s one thing for the government to receive one request, but receiving multiple and every month, then that really, you know, goes to the proactive disclosure. 

49:51  “Do you track other KPIs around these processes?” So, yeah, we have two major KPIs that we sell to donors. One is the media value, because it’s a very like the market understands that, you know, and there’s also something about being, yeah, like they understand what’s the value of spontaneous media. 

50:22  And then also, we use some OCDE studies to say that usually anything that is exposed reduces in 10% the corruption. We use the 1% to be really safe. So out of everything that we’ve uncovered in public spending, we say that we’ve saved the government the equivalent of 1% of that amount. 

50:52  So in clear words, what we tell investors is our return of investment is one to 700 so every $1 every one Real invested in us, results in 700 Reals not spent by the government in problematic spending. 

51:15  “Do you try to make journalists file the request themselves, or do you not really care?” That’s what I said in the timeline. Like  it’s a step by step. So I would start by doing the requests yourself and giving the results to journalists. 

51:35  But then once they like taste the value of it, they’ll start doing them their own requests, and that’s when we supply them with tutorials and and materials to help them do their own and that’s really important in scaling and making the FOIA better. 

51:53  You know, just like me and the three other organisations that work on FOIA in Brazil, we would never have been able to turn a law that was barely functional into very, very functional, at least in the federal executive government in less than 10 years, if it was just our teams working so like now, you have thousands and thousands of journalists using it daily, and that, you know, it’s, it’s a completely different scale than we would be able to, but what is their incentive to file themselves? 

52:33  What are you going to try to show them with the process that I gave you? Is how, how useful it can be for their jobs, right? So journalists are always being asked by their editors to come up with exclusive stories with new data, with and they don’t like they have a limited known resource. 

52:56  So everybody is reporting on UN report on migration, everybody is reporting on the same like macro reports from big organisations, and they need scoops. They need exclusive data. 

53:10  So if you show them that FOI is a way for them to get scoops in a way that it benefits not only the newsroom but personally themselves. FOI is a huge asset for for new journalists, like when you don’t have, when you’re not a big old, credible journalist, to have those resource, those sources that will give you, you know, up to date information from Congress, because they’ve trusted you in the past 30 years. 

53:37  If you’re just like a new intern and you have FOI, you might out do the old, famous journalist, and that’s really, like, a really big jump in your personal career. So their incentive is to do a better job, be more recognisable. Like it’s not to help FOI. It’s for them, and then they will help FOI, and they’ll learn how to like, how important it is and help FOI intentionally.

54:09  Julia: I think that’s such an inspiring note to end on. I totally see what you mean that you can  show the the value of FOI, but then it’s almost a challenge to the new journalist to be like, what datasets can you think of that Fiquem Sabendo aren’t already looking into and like, and, yeah, get that scoop themselves. 

54:26  Maria. Thank you so much. That was fantastic. I learned so much. Your honesty and like, powerful, everything you do is so so cool and so inspiring. And I think I have some things to learn from you. Just like, what you’re saying about, don’t talk about FOI, just for the sake of FOI or the anniversary of FOI, but like, what is important and what other people care about is a good reminder for me, just because I think about it every day doesn’t mean other people do. 

54:48  So, yeah, super, super helpful. Thank you so much. Round of applause to you, and have a lovely rest of your day, everyone.