Discover how three organisations are using crowdsourcing and Access to Information laws to uncover data, monitor public projects, and drive accountability.

Access to Information (ATI) is the more internationally-recognised term for FOI or FOIA. Its laws make it possible to piece together insights from many different public authorities, creating a fuller picture of how decisions are made and resources are used.

This session explores how ATI empowers communities, volunteers, and civil society groups to use information requests to assemble datasets, track public projects, and enhance accountability through collective inquiry.

Hear from three projects that have turned transparency into a community effort with fantastic results! We’ve got fantastic speakers from across the globe:

• Nnenna Eze from PPDC Nigeria
• Marzena Błaszczyk from Citizens Network Watchdog Poland
• Stefan Wehrmeyer from FragDenStaat in Germany

Definitions:

• MDA – Ministries, Departments, and Agencies
• DEX – Digital Employee Experience

Credits:

Music by HigherUniversalMan, Pixabay free usage licence.

Transcript:

0:00  Julia: Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for today’s webinar, which is Networked auditors: crowdsourcing and community-led ATI. 

0:06  My name is Julia Cushion. I’m the Policy and Advocacy Manager here at mySociety, and I’m really delighted to welcome you to this session, which is part of our Access to Information Community of Practice. 

0:16  If you haven’t joined one of these before, this series brings together people and projects who are using Access to Information in interesting ways all around the world to share ideas, tools and experiences and make change. 

0:28  In the past sessions, we have explored climate and Access to Information; AI decision-making; and evaluating Access to Information in practice, as opposed to looking at the legislation. 

0:39  So we’ve been having a really enjoyable series so far, hopefully you’ve seen some of them. Today, we are focusing on how Access to Information can empower what we’re calling networked auditors, which is communities, volunteers, civil society groups, to come together and use Access to Information to work together to uncover and connect information, to build big datasets and to do something with that data. 

0:59  It’s a really exciting area of practice. And yeah, a great place, I think, where what can be a disparate Freedom of Information requests can be brought together and achieve something really powerful. 

1:08  We have a brilliant panel of speakers today who I’m so delighted to be joined by. They’ll each do about 10 to 15 minute long presentations, and then we have a bit of time for question and answers at the end. 

1:18  First, we’ll hear from lovely Nnenna from the Public and Private Development Centre in Nigeria. She’ll talk about the Budeshi project and how they use Freedom of Information and community monitors to track public projects and link budget data with what’s happening in real life. 

1:18  And then we’ve got Marzena from Citizens Network Watchdog Poland, a brilliant presentation all about how Citizens Network Watchdog uses volunteers and FOI data to track what is going on in government. 

1:42  And finally, lovely Stefan from FragDenStaat and the Open Knowledge Foundation ,talking about FOI, food hygiene data and data driven campaigns that transform transparency across the sector. 

1:55  So I think without too much further ado, I will hand over to you, Nnenna. 

1:59  Nnenna:  So good morning everyone, or good afternoon. And thank you, Julia and mySociety, for putting this together.

2:05  So my name is Nnenna Eze, and I work with the Public and Private Development Centre. It’s a citizen society organisation based in Nigeria, and today I’ll be sharing how some of our work is transforming governance systems in Nigeria through data, civic technology and citizens engagement and how you know we’re using our Budeshi model in expanding to unreachable communities or undeserved communities. 

2:33  So let’s begin with who we are and what drives our mission. So as I mentioned, at PPDC, the civil society organisation dedicated to improving citizens participation in governance for the past 20 years, this is what we’ve been doing, focused on how to bridge the gap between citizens and the government, making sure that citizens are carried along in government processes, government policies, service, delivery, procurement, open, contracting, and things that would necessarily be excluded at the grassroot level. 

3:04  So these are some of the things that we have been doing for the past 20 years. We have also utilised the Freedom of Information Act, which we advocated strongly for in for the adoption in Nigeria. 

3:18  So currently, we are expanding our reach to the UK and the US. You know, seeing that the work that we have been able to do has reached a lot of grassroots organisations, and we have been able to make significant impact, it was important for us to expand to the international communities, raise fund and bring the funding back home to Africa, making sure that the funding is reaching grassroots organisations that will necessarily not be qualified or have the capacity to house or implement such big funding from big donor organisations. So that’s what we’re currently doing now. 

3:57  So what is Budeshi? Budeshi is a Hausa word, which means “Open it”. So what we’ve seen in the past or prior to Budeshi was that, you know, the government data was very difficult to come across or even difficult to understand and utilise, you know, effectively. 

3:59  So what we did was, after the advocation of the open contracting government partnership that Nigeria has signed up to, we also advocated for the Public Procurement Act and the FOI act. 

4:25  So what we do is write FOI requests to ministries, government agencies. So when they give us the data, we simplify this data and put it on Budeshi. So what this does is makes procurement data easily accessible to journalists, to citizens, to civil society organisations, and later on in my slide deck, I’m going to talk about how, Budeshi has really impacted communities, but that is what Budeshi is, in a nutshell. 

4:51  It’s a civic tech tool that links budgets to procurement data to various public services using the open contracted data standard, which is a part of what the OGP is advocating for and is championing for. 

5:03  So what is the Budeshi journey? For the past 20 years, we have really worked in championing, you know, membership of Nigeria in open government partnerships, so working with state governments, making sure that they have open contracting data, standard portals. 

5:20  It’s one thing to be at the federal level, but it’s another thing to ensure that we are going to the local and state level, to make sure that this data is also open, easily accessible, because we found out that a lot of corruption happens at the local level, because people often tend to, you know, overlook that area overlook that sector of government, arm of government, rather so we worked with over 10 state governments, you know, to make sure that they have streamlined their procurement data, their procurement processes, and making sure that they are constantly updating on their OCDS portals. 

5:57  We also have our FOI ranking, which is where we rank MDAs based on their level of disclosure, their responsiveness and their proactive disclosure. So we’ve done this for the past 10 years, and what we’ve seen is significant increase in the level of disclosure and proactive disclosure of various MDAs that you know we have worked with. 

6:30  So in the course of our rankings, when we see that MDAs are not being proactive, they don’t have FOI DEX officers, we provide our support to them. We provide trainings to them. We help them set up an FOI DEX officer. 

6:37  We ensure that once they are receiving FOI requests, not just from our organisation, but from any other organisations that are able to reply to those requests in a timely manner. 

6:48  Because the law states that every MDA should respond to an FOI request within seven days. And if there is any cause for delay, it should be written. It should be documented in writing. 

7:01  So you know, the organisation that or the individual that is asking for the request is aware. So this is what we are able to do with that for our ranking. So we’ve seen a huge impact or improvement in the disclosure processes. We see MDAs are now proactively disclosing. 

7:14  We see MDA is and now, even if they don’t fully disclose their special disclosure, these are something that citizens can work with in the sector. I think one of our biggest challenges doing our FOI, or doing the course of our FOI ranking, is the security sector. 

7:29  It’s it is still experiencing a level of paucity and lack of data because of security reasons. But then you know, our debate is, if these things haven’t procured for the in the past ten, five years, why is it not open to the public? But that’s the conversation that we’re still currently having with the security agencies in Nigeria. 

7:54  Also, I’ve said that we provide technical support to states to set up open contracting portals. We’ve trained journalists and investigative reporters on how to use the FOI act, how to use data on Budeshi, I will speak more about some of the initiatives that we’re currently working on with investigative journalists later in my slide. 

8:13  And of course, we engage with communities to facilitate training. So this is one of the huge things that we do in PPDC, is we go down to grassroot communities to ensure that we’re giving them information. We’re giving them the capacity while connecting them with their local representatives, to their senators, their House of Reps, you know, their representatives that are in charge of their communities. 

8:33  Because we have also seen in the course of our work that there is a huge gap community members often see, often think that government projects that are coming to their communities are a favour from the government. Meanwhile, it’s taxpayers’ money. Meanwhile the government is supposed to be accountable, is supposed to be transparent on how they are judiciously spending the monies they are supposed to, you know, conduct, even needs assessments in those communities, before even entering communities and building those projects. 

9:01  So what we do is we translate the FOI data, the the procurement data that we’ve gotten via FOI. We translate them to their local languages. We translate how they can even write FOI requests to their representatives. We make sure that we’re giving them the data, up to date data. We give them a toll free line that enables them to call us whenever, you know they see a project that is coming up in the community, to ask questions. 

9:26  So our goal is just to ensure that communities are asking questions. Communities don’t get substandard projects, communities you know have value for money, and that government is being held accountable. So some of our impact I’ve enhanced since participation in governance in rural communities, which is one of our biggest impacts. We’ve seen where schools have been dilapidated. Contract awards have been made, but yet the schools you know are not functioning. And we go there, we conduct our research, we conduct our advocacy, we see what contractor was supposed to do that, what agency.

9:59  We awarded that project, and we begin our campaign online and with the agencies. And we’ve seen, you know, contractors come back, government agencies come back to ensure that that project is being rehabilitated. So we’ve also improved service delivery. We’ve used media to drive accountability and awareness, our Budeshi radio, our Budeshi Worker. 

10:18  This is something that we do regularly, going from communities to communities, to communities, making sure that we’re empowering them. And our overall goal at the end of the day, of course, is to improve civic delivery and make sure that we are reducing corruption. Because we have seen that over 70% of corruption that happens in Nigeria happened within the public procurement space. 

10:35  So these are some of our case studies. The board of primary health care in Delta State, which serves a population of over 200,000 indigenous also this project in Buzunkure, Abuja, water projects. This project was done in 2020, for this water project. And it was very surprising to me that Abuja is the Federal Capital Territory. So it was very surprising to me when I went to this community that they didn’t have a borehole or good water. 

10:58  They had to go, you know, fetch water from a stream. It’s very embarrassing to say. But yes, they had to go, fetch water from somewhere else. And monies have been allocated for this project. So what we did, of course, write letters. Represented the representative who is in charge of that local government. And they came back and did the water project. 

11:26  So I think for us, when we amplify these things, when we highlight these things, when we spotlight these things, the government officials become scared. We have had cases of investigative journalists investigating projects, and they have been offered bribes, so they know what they’re doing, and it’s important for us at PPDC to continue to spotlight these issues, to continue to use FOI, to continue to use the Procurement Act, to spotlight the issues of corruption and positive data in procurement processes in Nigeria.

11:59  There’s another case study of a classroom. So it’s very similar. We have classrooms, we have water project, we have roads, we have health care. I was in the field in Delta State some years ago, and, you know, we hear stories of people who lose their lives because the primary health care that is there is not well equipped, you know, and money has been allocated to equip these things. 

12:22  So where’s the money going to? That is where PPDC comes in, making sure that the money that has been allocated is used for what is supposed to be useful. 

12:29  So some of the initiatives that we’re currently working on, our mini grant. So we have the Budeshi mini grant and the Budeshi media grant. So what this is, like I mentioned earlier, we’ve seen that there is a huge gap between grassroot organisations and big donors. So we want to step into that gap, to want to step into that space, to bridge that gap. 

12:51  So we’ve launched a $7,000 mini grant for grassroot organisations across 36 states in Nigeria. So what this does is empowering them. We are building their capacity. We are helping them with the legal registrations that they need to attract more donor funding in future. We are giving them a hands on holding hands, kind of training on how to go into the field, how to track and monitor projects, how to report those projects, how to create campaigns that will bring about impacts and fixes to that those communities. 

13:28  The second one is our $4,000 investigative journalist grant, which is very similar to, you know, the Budeshi mini grant. So it’s also empowering journalists to uncover some corrupt projects, you know, that they might have seen in their communities. So all these projects, all these grants, is going back to communities, going back to the grassroots. 

13:48 Because, again, like I said, it’s one thing to do, or make impact, or to make some form of wave at the federal level, but at the end of the day, we have it better at the federal level, we have better hospitals, better schools, you know, better infrastructure. 

14:04  But how do we bring it down to the grassroot, which is where most of the corruption is actually happening, because those people there are, you know, don’t have education. They are scared. They don’t have, well, I say, they don’t have the capacity to advocate for themselves. 

14:18  So that is where we come in, making sure we are empowering them to be able to advocate, so that when we leave to focus on, you know, other things, they have the capacity and they are able to advocate for themselves, making sure that the project in their communities up to standard and fit for purpose. 

14:33  So I think that’s it. I hope I was right on time.

14:37  Julia: That’s perfect timing Nnenna, thank you so much. Yeah, really, really inspiring. We’ve got a great question from Catherine but I will save it for the Q&A at the end. And  I’m now going to Marzena.

14:47  Marzena: Hello, everybody. My name is Marzena Błaszczyk. I represent Citizens Network Watchdog Poland, and today I’ll be talking to you about the crowdsourcing and Freedom of Information. 

14:57  Let me start with introducing our organisation, Citizens Network Watchdog Poland has been active since 2003. We are focused on Freedom of Information. We provide legal help for citizens, local activists, journalists. We also prepare different litigations. 

15:22  And last year, we won our first case before the European Court of Human Rights. And talking about the crowd sourcing, I would like to mention to our tools, the first one is Fedrowanie, which we can translate as mining, data mining, and the second one is the service “We check how it is”, Sprawdzamy Jak Jest. 

15:47  Last year we closed the service, but it’s still an interesting example of crowdsourcing. And on base of that, we are developing something new. So I just want to talk about this today. 

16:04  So let’s start with Fedrowanie. It’s our platform to send the Freedom of Information to requests via email. It’s quite similar to the Alaveteli platform, but it’s not so open to the public as other platforms.

16:24  We can send different Freedom of Information requests we had. We have a lot of different institutions in our database, and we are using this tool to monitor different topics, different teams in local governments, but also among other institutions like environmental institutions or central institutions, courts and so on.

16:53  And we are also giving access to this platform to other organisations or journalists, but as I mentioned, it’s not open for the typical user who would like to send Freedom of Information requests. 

17:09  And what we can say it’s no matter how much work we would put into preparing a Freedom of Information request, there was always a struggle with the replies, with gathering the information from this responses that we’re getting, and that’s how we developed Sprawdzamy Jak Jest, the “We check how it is” website. 

17:38  It was thought and designed as a place that we can make crowdsourced document analysis. And in this service, we were presenting the responses from our Freedom of Information requests to the users, and they were tasked with finding specific information in the documents, and there was this statistical model developed that was showing the same document for several times to different users.

18:14  And until a statistically reliable level of agreement wasn’t reached. It was showing it to other users again and again, and it was interesting, because the citizens could check the responses from the their local governments or other local institutions. 

18:40  But what was the problem? Different type of formats of the replies, because sometimes it was plain email, sometimes it was something attached, sometimes it was even a letter response, and, you know, with stamps and signature.

19:01  So it was really hard to gather all those documents and the information, and there was a lot of challenges and limitations to this model. We were always struggling to get the volunteers to at the beginning. 

19:20  We were informing that we are starting a campaign. We were informing what was the topic, and we were encouraging our fans, our members, to take part in checking the documents. 

19:33  But it was quite consuming process for us and for the volunteers. Sometimes we had decided that we must resign from different questions because they were more complicated and they would be very hard to put them into the system and to be very well understood by the responders and because of the time and the money, we could only do a limited number of monitorings in the year, and there was a lot of work around those monitorings for our comms department. 

20:15  And in the end, we even have to check those documents by ourselves. So as you can see, it wasn’t so simple. There were topics that were very interesting for people, but there always be some places in Poland that were not checked, and it was quite a challenge for us. 

20:45  This was a great tool during one of our most important monitors, monitoring from the presidential election in 2020. It was a monitoring in which we had sent the Freedom of Information request to every municipality in Poland, and we were asking about data of Polish voters, if they were given to the Polish post, which, according to the Covid provisions, was supposed to organise the presidential election,

21:23  and at the time, people were helping us, not only with the verification, with the responses from the system and but also they were helping us with other information, because sometimes the municipality didn’t answer for our Freedom of Information requests, but citizens had this knowledge of whether the data of voters was given to Polish post or not.

21:54  Sometimes from local media. Sometimes someone was working in the municipality office. So we were also gathering this kind of information, and when we were receiving the answer for our Freedom of Information request, we could check it with other answers. 

22:12  So it was very interesting process, and what we are planning right now is use crowdsourcing to develop the new service in Poland, we are struggling with local governments and how they are working, how the local councils are controlling the mayors.

22:41  Last year, one of the President’s mayors, the Mayor of Szczecin, when he was asked about the work of the members of local council, stated that everyone has to work somewhere. 

22:56  And of course, it’s true, but from different sources, citizens, local media, we can see that members of local councils are often working in the companies that are owned by the local authorities. 

23:19  So there is a huge conflict of interests, and we want to develop this kind of service, crowdsourced type of service that will enable citizens activists to give us this information about different local councils and councillors’ employment. 

23:50  So we are now working on a new service. We plan to start in the first Q of 2026 and the objective is to map the local councillors’ employment in the municipal and communal companies. 

24:10  It’s important because in many cases, we can see that when councillors are being employed in these municipal and communal companies, they are losing interest in controlling the mayor’s office, and they are just, you know, agreeing with the mayor with everything so and in many cases, we can also see that there are different conflicts of interest that is influencing the local public debate and is also a big problem in local communities. 

24:51  The information that we want to gather are hard to find right now in Poland, we do not have the central system for the assets declaration. It’s being developed, but it’s still not working, and still our government is working on the new provisions right now in Poland, depending on the fact that you are, for example, Member of Parliament or judge or prosecutor or local councillor, you are supposed to file different assets declaration 

25:31  and around 26 different templates right now, sorry, 17 templates and 26 different Acts that are based for this activity. And in each declaration, you can find the information about the place of employment of the municipal councillor, and very often, those information are not provided. 

26:05  On the right, you can see the template of the declaration. So in many cases, those documents are filled just print the declarations printed from the file and just people are filling it by hand, and sometimes it’s even hard to recognise what is written inside. 

26:32  So we see this service as a place that we will gather information from different source, from the citizens, who we hope will help us to get these declarations from the websites of the local governments and local councils, also from local media. 

26:57  And we also plan to use the Freedom of Information requests just to check the information from the citizens and media in different cases, sometimes we can see that also the general knowledge is important that In small municipalities, people just know who is working where, and we also want to use it in some way. 

27:26  I think that I can tell you more about this system next year. I hope that it was interesting for you. Thank you very much for having me here, and if you have any questions, please contact me. Thank you once again. 

27:44  Julia: Yeah, fantastic. That was so lovely from Marzena; I think a great example of what we at mySociety called ‘fragmented data’, and the power that Access to Information has to try and piece those bits together, but more broadly, making the case that that data needs to be joined up. 

27:57  And yeah, some great comments in the chat all about how interesting is working at that local level, where the scale is so huge, and so there is lots to be done, and I’m delighted to hand over to Stefan. Thank you so much for joining us. Over to you.

28:10  Stefaan: Perfect. So this is about Freedom of Information campaigns and how we run those in Germany at FragDenStaat. 

28:17  FragDenStaat is the Freedom of Information portal for Germany, and we also have EU institutions in there, and that’s how we started in 2011, but at this point, we also have three lawyers on staff that help with legal support around Freedom of Information, and also now SLAPP- so Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation defence. 

28:42  So we have, like a defence fund against SLAPP and other projects in the legal space, and we have an investigative journalism team that publishes with other media outlets, and at this point, not only about Freedom of Information documents, but also leaks that we are now receiving because they are so well recognised in the space. 

29:02  And sometimes you also run FOI campaigns. Our last campaign has been a while because we are trying to reassess how we want to have impact with that and also finding the right campaign can be tricky, but I’m going to present, I think, three to four campaigns that we’ve done, starting with the largest and how it developed. 

29:25  So we have a staff around 30, and our finance by grants and small donations. So just that, you have an idea of how we are scoped. 

29:35  So what’s an FOI campaign? So in our idea, it’s a there’s some type of information available via FOI, so you can request it. But for example, the information is only released to an individual, and that individual is not allowed to publish it. 

29:49  That happens or used to happen more often. In Germany, we kind of put a stop to that, but it happens occasionally, and that type of information may be distributed among many authorities, and so you lack, like, a whole picture. 

30:04  So even if you know, like the this type of information from like two or three authorities, there may be like 400 that have this kind of information, and requesting all that might be too difficult for you as an individual, and it could also be, and this is supposed to be the type of information that should be published by the authority in the first place. 

30:26  So it’s not something that has a very narrow interest, but maybe a broad appeal, and ideally the public should be interested in it, or you, you know, have a way to make them interested in it. 

30:40  So an FOI campaign, for us is something that makes it attractive for individuals. So not only easy, but also like they, they it’s easy to click a button, but they also have to have some interest in the information behind it, or understand in what context you’re requesting it. And then you make it easy and attractive for them to get this type of information via an FOI request. 

31:01  And our most successful campaign so far has been, it’s called ‘Topf Secret’. Let me translate that to ‘Pot Secret’ – it’s like a little pun on ‘top secret’, I guess. And it’s about food safety reports. 

31:14  So we have around 400 authorities in Germany, local authorities that check businesses that handle food. So that’s not only restaurants, but also supermarkets and like your cheese shop, anything that basically handles handles food and needs to be checked for hygiene, and so they do checks.

31:37  And there’s a consumer advocate law that allows you to request that information from that authority, and they have to give you the report if they have been like, if there’s a deviance from, from from the rules.

31:57  And so we work together with Foodwatch, a quite large consumer advocate, NGO, to make these food safety reports more accessible, because in other countries, they are published, or they are or businesses are required to put them on their door, so when you go in, you already know what the what the food safety looks like in there. And that’s not the case in Germany. 

32:21  Here it’s mostly kept very secret. So it’s like, some of it is published when it’s like a very egregious case, but usually you don’t know anything about these businesses. And so the idea is to make it more transparent. And that was our initial thought when we started Topf Secret. 

32:40  So this is the interface for it. You basically just have a map, and the map has businesses. Here it’s like bars and restaurants and supermarkets, and we use a couple of different sources, but in the end, we settled on Open Street Map, where we just get the whole data dump for Germany and filter by text, that identify businesses in that space, and then put it on a map. 

33:06  And then you can click on one of these icons, or like on the list and on the side, and you always see already by the colour, if it’s already requested, if the request is ongoing, if the request was successful. 

33:16  We are not judging the actual report at this point, because that may be legally challenging, let’s say, but we just make it available. So is the request ongoing, or has it been answered? And so when you click on one of these icons, you get, like the normal FOI form, but it’s pre-filled, and we’ve already chosen the authority for you, because based on the location of the business, we have, like, a little geographic information system in the background that knows, OK, this authority is responsible for that point in space, and so we pre-select that, we pre-select, or we pre-fill, a little request text. 

33:54  And we also pre-fill, hidden behind that little three dots, the ellipses, is more legal texts that we have gathered over the years in support of these requests, where we have learned what you have to do, and there’s a little edit button at the top so we can still claim, you know, users can actually edit these requests and write something else if they wanted to.

34:18  Most really don’t, but so we wanted them to have the at least keep the impression that, you know, users are in control of these requests. And we’ve run this through the newsletter of Foodwatch, which has like 300,000 people. 

34:35  That was in 2019 and, yeah, lots of people used it because it’s very easy to get started. You know, you just have a map, you have to click, you have to fill in your name and email address, and off you go. And so we had lots of requests going on, and that is the easy part. 

34:50  The hard part is the responses. So responses come into these users on our FOI portal, which works similar to WhatDoTheyKnow and other Alaveteli instances. 

35:00  And so the first thing we did is we started classifying the authority reactions. It looks a bit like this in like a Google sheet, so you have a list of all the 400 district authorities and what kind of, you know, argument they are using in order to reject it or delay it, or, you know, send a letter or something like that, and you could already tell that, you know, they are talking to each other, and, like, coordinating responses to that. 

35:28  And we, in turn, can’t do like a manual support of all these requests, so we came up with systems in our FOI portal to handle that a bit better. For example, it looks a bit like this. 

35:45  Here they say, “Oh, you make this request by email, but you have to send a letter in order to request this”. And that’s not true, and we detect it in the reply text, and then we show this little box at the top that says, OK, yeah, they say this and that. 

36:04  So we translate what they what the authority said, and we offer this little button, and when you click that, we prefer a reply for you, and then you can send that and hopefully continue the request that you’ve started by email. And we call these guidances, and we are now able to basically try to find text via – not very smart; AI would do that probably now – but back then, we just use regular expressions and other, like, just text detection.

36:38  And with that, we are able to show certain actions a user can take based on responses. And this is not automated, it’s just hints here. “This is what probably what they said. You can send this”, and then users can act accordingly.

36:53  And so now the outcome of Topf Secret is that we have, like, over 70,000 requests made by 34,000 users since January 2019, so the beginning was very strong.

37:07  Now it has ebbed a bit, and the after the first like wave of requests have been like lots of lawsuits from businesses against the authorities in order to prevent releases of reports. But by now, we have basically settled this all and the 11 high court rulings all resulted in the release of reports. So, the legal situation has been cleared up. 

37:34  You know, we can do this. You can do it via email. You can do it online. We can publish the reports. And, yeah, we could have not done that with without our partner, Foodwatch, this other organisation that is, still already quite, was more mature than we were, and had they not paid for the legal support, the lawyers, and supported users when they wanted to hand in something into into the court case, and they also reviewed the requests and to see where they get stuck, for example. 

38:08  And so the best outcome we had so far is that one district, at least one district in Berlin, now publishes reports. So in that sense, we have achieved at least something. But our current conservative Berlin government – yes, surprise to many, maybe that there’s a conservative government in Berlin – but yeah, they do want to limit this access again, and delay the the processing of these requests and Foodwatch they again reported on that in their in the newsletter. 

38:40  And you know for that the government, like the authorities in Berlin, got like, another 2000 requests just in a week, because people are still interested. Yeah, when you tell them you can know how your businesses around you are doing, their food hygiene, they they’re interested in that. 

38:56  They go there and they they want to know. So the campaign for us is a bit over, because we are, as an organisation, are not too invested in food hygiene as a as a concept, but we still run it as a service. So you can still do these requests. 

39:15  They basically flow into the normal request service. The interface is still there, and we maintain that for now indefinitely, because it’s still such a good, attractive way to get people to make their first FOI requests.

39:32  Another campaign we did is access to old high school exams. So the problem that one of our actually, he started as an intern, but then is now one of our employees, the student employee. 

39:46  He saw that you can get access to old exams, high school exams, but you have to buy them from publishers and how does that work?

40:00  The states, the German states are responsible for education. It’s not a federal thing in Germany and these states, they sell these exams that are written by teachers through private publishers so that students need to buy them back, individually. 

40:13  So there’s kind of a money making machine, and we wanted to disrupt that. And also have more equal access in educational material. We are part of the Open Knowledge Foundation. So open educational resources are like a concept we are standing behind. 

40:31  And so we looked at how we can get access to that through FOI. It’s quite a messy situation. Our education system is complex, and so accessing all these things is also very complex. Some states they publish it already. Some states you don’t have an FOI law. Some states they you can only get individual access, so they send it to one student if they ask for it.

40:58  So we built an interface that can accommodate all of that, where you if you have to request it individually, yeah, you can do that. And then you just have to press one button, and then you basically send that request and they have to reply. I think they also automated it on the other side now that they also reply with the thing, more or less, and but we also convinced some states to just publish it.

41:19  Now that has worked well. Here in the bottom left, you see like part of that interface, like the different years and the different topics, like maths, history, German, English, and also what kind of degree you are trying to attain. 

41:34  And then there’s basically already, maybe something you can download, maybe there’s something you can request, maybe they’ve denied it at some point, and we’re trying to really push that topic forward. And we had some great success. 

41:47  And at some point, we decided to also publish the things where they said, “Oh, only individuals get access”. We just took that data and then made it available. You just have to fill in an email, and then you get an email with a link, and then you can download it there. So we no longer going through the authority, but just, you know, we are providing that access now, because that’s that’s easier and for everyone.

42:10  And I don’t know if they’ve noticed what we are doing, but yeah, it’s very popular around exam times in Germany. So every, every spring, basically, this site gets a lot of traffic.

42:23  And two more campaigns. One is the Public Building Energy report cards, where we run, similar to Topf Secret, you also have a map we try to identify via Open Street Map, which is bit difficult, what buildings are public buildings, and then get to request the Energy Report Card of that building. 

42:43  Our partner here, Deutsche Umwelthilfe, a very large German environmental NGO. And the idea is that, if this is a building that has a bad energy report card, it should be, you know, renovated, because insulation is like such a large climate impact. 

43:01  And the state should be the first to work on that with their public buildings, and to try to find out, like, which public building is the worst, where can you do something. And just to get a bigger picture of how that looks like. 

43:17  And the campaign on the right here is the country situation reports by the Foreign Office. So how the German Foreign Office sees other countries and like the security and safety situation in that country.

43:30  And we did that together with Pro Asyl, an asylum NGO. And these are just so with the public buildings that might be very, very many, a lot, you know, hardly countable. But here like countries, we have, like 59 countries in that list. So that campaign, you know, when we launch it, it’s quite easy to fill them all up, then they’re all gone. But you know, you still engaged users on the topic, and you onboard them to, like an FOI request. 

44:02  So it’s like a it’s like a small thing, but you can do it every year, and we’ve done that continuously, and also trying to lobby this Foreign Office to just publish them. They get redacted, but the contents are, like invaluable to asylum lawyers. 

44:16  And the idea is also they’re saying, “Oh, the Taliban are now OK, so we now can send people back to Afghanistan”. But if you look at their country situation report of Afghanistan, you learn that you know, the situation is not OK.

44:36  And in this way, we also do some policy work together with this asylum NGO. 

44:42  Yeah, so maybe you should run an FOI campaign. Yeah, it’s, it’s a good way to bring people to file their first FOI request, and by just filling something out online where they, because often they if you tell them, “Why don’t you find out? Have you ever filed an FOI request?”, they don’t know what for. “What? What do I file an FOI request for?”

45:04  But if you come to with them with a topic and something that’s also locally  interesting to them, they may just do that, and it puts pressure on authorities to change their publication policy.

45:16  We’ve seen that with the Topf Secret campaign. We’ve also seen it with other campaigns before, with a campaign with our federal parliament, where they now publish reports that they’ve previously kept kept secret. 

45:28  And it engages users with the topic at hand, and the other NGOs, so they learn a bit about that topic, and it engages them with government accountability and transparency. And when the request gets maybe rejected, they still learn something, right. 

45:45  They know this is how it works here, maybe we should have better FOI law and some tips if you want to get started. So work with a partner organisations for more impact. 

45:54  For us, it also means we work mostly with larger organisations, because then we can also leverage their larger audience, and bring the topic of FOI to them. 

46:05  And preparing a campaign, you need to test if it works. You don’t want to send thousands of people to make an FOI request that gets definitely rejected. So, yeah, we test locally, in different jurisdictions and with different laws. If it would work out. 

46:21  And then come up with strategies to really make it easy and you can keep it low tech. So some of our campaigns are very – they’re not a map with dots. They are just links to pre-filled request forms, like a request form, if you change some URL parameters, you can put in already pre-filled stuff, and then it’s ready to send. 

46:40  But you also need to be  – because the sending of a FOI request is easy – you need to be ready to offer support via like automation, maybe provide, like some legal texts. And we also have a community forum where Topf Secret users are mostly now engaging with each other, so the support at the end, or like during after the initial sending is quite important. Yeah, that’s that’s it for me, and I’d love to hear your questions.

47:06  Julia: Thank you so much. That was so inspiring. Absolutely loved it. And yeah, now I really do want to go and run some more FOI campaigns, but I will start from our first questions, and we’ve got a couple of minutes, Nnena, if you’re still around, there was a question for you about whether you got resistance when you are making FOI requests on those really important projects where you might be trying to uncover corruption or things that are going on that shouldn’t be.

47:35  What is your success rate for getting the answers that you want out of your FOI requests? Do you deal with resistance and delay on things?

47:41  Nnenna: Absolutely, we deal with a lot of resistance, and some of the things that we have done to overcome those is legal, taking legal action. So we take them to court, because the law allows us to sue them. So we do take them to court and finally get the results that we want. 

47:55  The second one is building, or finding relationships with those who work in the ministries. Because another thing we found that they don’t even know how to respond to these requests. They don’t know what to do. So it’s new to them. So when we build the relationships, we’re able to build a capacity and train them, and then they respond to us. 

48:12  So those are the two tactics that we have been able to use to ensure that we’re getting value for money, or requests, answers responses to our requests.

48:22  Julia: That’s fantastic. And then there was a question from Lisette as well, about which projects you support, maybe a bit about the criteria for when you have these open applications for the mini grants that you give.

48:34  Nnenna: The organisations that we support are grassroot organisations. So this is our first grants that we are releasing, or we are conducting. So these are our pilot phase. So we want to focus solely on grassroot organisations, so those who don’t have a lot of capacity don’t have the structure that big organisations have. So those are who we’re focusing on. 

48:52  At the moment we’ve rounded up all the calls now, so we’re about to start implementation. So they’re about to go in the field and start monitoring, but we intend to do more of this of course in the coming next year. 

49:03 Julia: I love that. Well, maybe in a year’s time we could meet again, and Marzena can update us on her new project that was so exciting. And you can update us as well. And Stephan, if there are any more updates from your campaigns. So I look forward to that. 

49:20  Stefan, loads of great comments for you here. Maybe you’ve seen some of them. Willing to share broad costs involved, and maybe also a little bit about how you decide the projects you start on, and a bit about the partner projects? How do you decide or source the partners that you work with?

49:31  Stefan: Let me talk about partners a bit. So yeah, partners, it’s it isn’t easy to find partners because they are bit skeptical, because they also, why should we send like our audience to your website, where they make an account, but we’ve been able to show like a good track record, also with like smaller NGOs that are, like more aligned with us, where it’s mostly about government transparency, where we’ve made an impact, and now we’ve tried to convince them to do the same thing, basically in their space. 

49:59  And environmental NGOs are a good partner, because there’s the Aarhus Convention, which gives you access to environmental information. And, for example, the building energy report cards, they are fall under that. And there are other things, but, for example, and these were the more or less successful campaigns, but we’ve been struggling to get a campaign off the ground about pesticides in Germany, where you should get access to how much pesticide is on a specific piece of land, but we’ve tried to run a campaign around that so to reduce pesticide use.

50:38  But it’s it’s tricky because the authorities are not digital enough. They have to go to another office to find that information somewhere, and they don’t have a database. So we are struggling with the authorities basically can’t keep up with their digitisation and how we want to have access to that kind of information. 

50:59  And it’s always a bit of a struggle with partners to come to terms, like, are we linking to our newsletter? Whose logo is the biggest, and stuff like that, but we usually find a solution. 

51:11  And for us, I saw also a question about money, how much does it cost? So in 2019  we had, we were not many people, and we could just finance this, and because we also, I built a software and we could just run it. But nowadays we definitely have more of an idea of how and why we would run such a thing. 

51:34  And we have more of a business sense around that, and it still totally makes sense, because when we get into a newsletter of a larger NGO, like 300,000 people, we saw it results in 2,000 requests. 

51:51  And it also means the people subscribe, they basically come to onto our platform, and we also ask them, “Hey, do you want to subscribe to our newsletter?” And that way, we get them into our donation funnel. 

52:02  So because we are trying to grow our small donors, and we’ve done that a lot this year in order to be more independent from grants. And we now thinking really into this classic funnel, you know, get them into the newsletter, get them into the donation, get them into like, a continuous donation.

52:19  And when you partner with other organisations and give them something of value, like your technology platform, where, you know, they can engage their own users, you know, provide them something like that’s a bit shiny of sorts, and at the same time, you can introduce them to your topic and get them into your own audience base. So for us, it totally makes sense. 

52:41  We’ve been able to grow our direct audience a lot with that, and yeah, I hope this translates to others. We’re not churning out campaigns like every week or something. You know, it takes a lot of time to work, find a good partner, work with them, and for also find a good topic that you know is easily requestable, and that totally differs from country to country.

53:08  Julia: That’s so interesting. Thank you so for being so honest and candid and really interesting. I think that combination of finding the right topic is a big one, and in terms of like getting that in and then, really interesting to hear about your drive for small donations, because I think that’s something that many organisations are thinking about, including us. 

53:31  Yeah. Thank you so much everybody for coming. I will wrap up, thank you so much for coming. Really love to see lots of you here, and once again, thank you to our brilliant speakers, and have a lovely rest of your day everybody.