Organisations all around the world run Freedom of Information sites based on our Alaveteli platform. There are also sites running on other codebases. Either way, we’re all working to the same goals, and we believe that each site can learn from the others: for that reason, we’ve set up the Access To Information (ATI) network, a place for people who run FOI sites to meet, chat and share experiences.

Within this framework, there’s the chance for practitioners to pair up and exchange specific skills under a mentorship arrangement — and last week, we heard from GONG in Croatia who have been learning from Georgia’s ForSet.

ForSet began life as a data visualisation organisation, and these beginnings have allowed them to communicate data from their FOI site as compelling, visual stories: skills that GONG were keen to get to grips with. Sara, project co-ordinator at GONG, told us about working with Jubo from ForSet on data visualisations — and how her learnings will change the organisation’s work going forward.

Sara explained that they agreed two main goals for this project: firstly, to improve GONG’s data visualisation skills; and secondly, to use data visualisation to promote their FOI site Imamo pravo znati (IPZ) to journalists and general users. They were successful on both counts, not only did Sara learn how to use new methods and tools; but their outputs also brought approximately 50 new users to IPZ, and two additional Pro users (Pro usage is free on the site, but numbers had been stagnant of late, so this was notable).

So, how did they go about it? The mentorship comprised four stages: data collection, analysis, storytelling and visualisation, with the last being very interconnected.

1. Data collection

This stage began with both sides brainstorming potential topics for FOI requests that would be good candidates for data visualisation. An initial set of 12 topics was whittled down to five: local referendums in Croatia; special advisors (Spads) in the Croatian government; local participatory budgeting projects; local support for youth civic education; and local financing of civil society organisations. 

GONG then sent 575 requests to local and county authorities, from which they received 525 responses — a pretty good response rate, and higher that expected. They didn’t hit many problems, although several authorities asked for the requester’s ID details, and there was one ministry that cited GDPR as a reason for refusing information on Spads. This case has now been referred to Croatia’s Information Commissioner. 

2. Data analysis

Jubo and Sara organised the responses they received into spreadsheets: they were looking for an angle or a story among the data, and tidying it up in this way was helpful for making comparisons. Could they find a story in there that aligned with GONG’s mission or advocacy?

By organising the data in this way, the pair could easily see which data wasn’t really strong enough to take any further, and which lent itself to storytelling and visualisation. At this stage they rejected some of the angles they’d begun with, narrowing their projects down to local referendums, Spads, and lowering the voting age to 16 for the EU elections (this last project is pending; they’ll be launching a campaign in late Spring).

3. Storytelling and visualisation

Two pieces of software were used for the visualisations: Canva and Flourish. Sara was already familiar with Canva, as she uses it to create social media graphics; but Flourish was new to her, and she says she is very happy to have these new skills under her belt.

Flourish allows you to create many different types of visualisations: you upload your data and it is fairly intuitive to create maps, charts, etc. Once these were in hand, they added a call to action for each story, encouraging people to use their FOI site and especially Pro.

The visualisations

Local referendums

For the story on local referendums, GONG had requested from each local authority the number that had taken place; the topics under discussion; their outcomes; and the number of referendums that were suspended due to not being valid for whatever reason.

They received more responses than expected, and this was also the first time nationwide data had been collected on the subject.

The first angle that GONG wanted to support with their data and visualisations was ‘Croatia needs a referendum law that recognises the importance of local democracy’. 

The data showed that out of 47 local referendums that had been held, just 25 met the minimum turnout for the decision to be valid. Jubo and Sara mapped these, and paired their visualisations with the argument that a lower bar for turnout would encourage better participation in local democracy – demonstrated with human figures.

A local press outlet picked the story up, using the data to make their own story: they were the area that had had the highest number of referendums, so that was their focus. 

Special Advisors

The FOI requests returned the names of Special Advisors, the areas they were in charge of, and the fees they were receiving. As Sara explained, in Croatia Spads are not straightforwardly employees of the government, but they have a lot of influence, and in some cases receive huge fees.

It became clear that there are two different types of advisors, under two laws; while each type has different functions, both are called Spads. First, there are external advisors who may or may not receive compensation; and secondly there is another class of Spads who are employed internally. Neither is subject to Croatia’s legislation on conflict of interest.

A pie chart was put to service to clearly show how much compensation Spads had received. This varied widely from Spad to Spad, but the criteria dictating who received how much is still unclear: it appears to be at the discretion of the individual minister.

In collecting this data, GONG unexpectedly unearthed a scandal, as they revealed one Spad who was abusing public funds. He was fired, along with the minister concerned; this resulted in nationwide coverage for the data; albeit again with the media’s own preferred focus.

Lowering the voting age

Sara says that it was a lot of work to find data to support the argument for lowering the voting age to 16 in Croatia. They wanted to show that, while young people see voting as the most efficient political action, it is denied to a large portion of them.

Proving the absence of something is always tricky, and in this case they were uncovering that there isn’t any research to show that 16 year olds lack the cognitive abilities to vote responsibly. So they focused on other angles: in some EU countries, 16 year olds can vote, and they demonstrated that those countries are doing well in democratic processes: they score highly in the democracy index and have good voter turnout.

Like many countries, Croatia’s population is ageing, so the young are in danger of being totally ignored. GONG plan to share their findings on social media in a simplified form with graphics cards, and a call to action to show support for the campaign.

Questions and answers

Once Sara had finished her presentation, members of the audience were invited to ask questions.

Q: How did GONG and ForSet work together?

A: At the beginning, they had lots of online video calls, and later on when the data had come in, they communicated a lot via comments on the spreadsheets.

Q: It feels like each of these the topics would be applicable almost everywhere: perhaps it will spark other people’s interest to do something similar for their own country. Any advice if so?

A: The questions asked in the first two sets of FOI requests were straightforward, which led to straightforward answers. The third topic was less so; Sara and Jubo had to go through lots of reports, and often the data from one source contradicted another. Also, an uncontentious topic is likely to result in more responses: something like referendums is politically neutral, unlike spads where the authorities may have reasons not disclose information.

Q: When you put the requests together, were you already thinking about the format it would be best to receive the data in?

A: In that respect, the best question is one with a yes/no answer. The reason for excluding many of the initial topics at a later stage was that the answers varied so widely that it was hard to pull out statistics or a simple throughline: you’d be comparing apples with pears. So, for example, when asking how much of a local authority’s budget is reserved for supporting civic education, and how civic education is delivered, the responses could range from “We are in favour of civic education, but leave it to schools”, to “We provide money for civic education and produce our own textbooks”. Meanwhile, some authorities wrote two pages of waffle in the free text box. 

Q: Did you narrow down the topics before or after you had submitted the FOI requests?

A: Both. There were 12 topics at the start; they decided which of them were best suited to FOI, then sent requests for five of them. One the answers had been received, they narrowed it down to three.

Q: Could one make data visualisation about the other two? It’s hard to find ways to show that there’s no information. Saying that 80% of authorities don’t reply is not a very exciting way of showing things.

A: While it might not fit in with the initial aim of the project, this sort of thing can be a great way to show how well or badly FOI is working in your country. Journalists often can’t get the information they need, so build stories around the fact that there’s no data about such an important issue.

Q: We’ve seen how much GONG has benefitted from this mentorship. What, if anything, did ForSet get from this?

A: Sara was so quick and flexible, she was great to work with. ForSet also learned from the project: for example, that it is better when requesting a large amount of data, that is sorted by the public institution, so it’s easier to work with. You can request it sorted in the way that you need for your story, which might be different from how it is in public.

Also, Canva is such a great tool for visualisations. They’ve now merged with Flourish, so the have advanced data visualisation features. You just have to make sure you choose the right format: the type of charts or graphs that will show your findings the most clearly. 

Finally, ForSet didn’t know about the topics that Sara suggested, so there was plenty to learn there, plus it was great to see the ways GONG employ to publish their stories on both social media and mainstream media. 

We’re big on open source: much of the software we create at mySociety is freely available for anyone to use, and there are sites all over the world underpinned by our code. 

While we try to ensure that our codebases are as easy as possible to self-serve, in practice installation can be complex enough that those wanting to use them often get in touch with questions. 

Not so much with AskGov.ge, the Alaveteli-based Freedom of Information site for the republic of Georgia. Yes, there had been an email in the Alaveteli Developers Google Group seeking a developer, but the first we knew that a brand new fully-formed service had successfully launched was when Teona Tomashvili, from NGO ForSet, emailed to say she was planning a trip to the UK and would love to meet up for a chat.

And so it was that we spent a happy couple of hours in London, finding out more about AskGov and the context in which it is providing an FOI service for the citizens of Georgia, as well as offering as much advice and experience from running the UK site WhatDoTheyKnow as we could cram in without overwhelming our visitor.

A fragile democracy

Talking FOI may not be the obvious way of learning more about a country’s history, culture and politics, but it’s a surprisingly effective one. Teona explained that Georgia joined the Open Government Partnership in 2012, and the country is keen to do all it can to improve transparency.

They’ve actually had an operational FOI Act since 2000, five years earlier than ours came into force in the UK. But as an ex-member of the Soviet Union, she says, the country is not used to democracy and open government.

“Georgia had never been a fully democratic state”, she explained. “It’s only 30 years since we were part of the Soviet Union and our democracy is still very fragile. There’s a new impetus towards teaching people that open government and open data are important, but citizens are not used to these things. They have never felt like that, ever!”

With the site relatively newly launched, ForSet have seen their main task as increasing public understanding of FOI and normalising its use. This is something we were interested to talk about: over time we’ve come to the conclusion that while some people here in the UK are ‘super FOI users’ who might put in several requests a month, the majority of the population are unlikely to feel the need to use it more than a couple of times a year, if that. 

Even so, there’s always room for awareness-raising and we agree that everyone should know they have a right to information, for the times when they do need it. 

Bureaucracy woes

Whenever we’ve been able to gather together an international group of people who run FOI sites, we often find that the core challenges they face are very similar — though they may come embellished with some unique local colour.

When Teona told us of their woes with bureaucracy, it was definitely a story we’d heard before: authorities required not just a name, but personal details such as the address and phone number of the person making a request before they would process an FOI request.

For an Alaveteli site, the problem with that is, of course, that both the request and the response are made publicly available online, and this information would publish out too.

While the issue might be familiar, we don’t think we’ve previously come across the particular solution that ForSet put in place: when someone makes a request, they can fill in all their personal details in a form on the website. This is used to create a PDF which is attached to the email that the authority receives; meanwhile the personal data is automatically destroyed at ForSet’s end — desirable both for users’ privacy and to avoid any worries about data retention.

Teona said that they’d only had this system in place for a couple of weeks, so it’s too early to know if it’s really working. As Gareth pointed out, in Alaveteli we always try to model the law as we believe it should work — for example, when WhatDoTheyKnow started out, some authorities didn’t accept FOI requests by email; eventually, things changed enough that official ICO guidance now states:

“Requests made through the whatdotheyknow.com website will be valid” 

and 

“we consider the @whatdotheyknow.com email address provided to authorities when requests are made through the site to be a valid contact address for the purposes of Section 8(1)(b).”.

On the other hand, not all countries have an overseer, and even if they do, change may not be quick to come, so we are keeping an eye on Georgia’s method to see if it’s one we might recommend to other sites. 

Data visualisations

ForSet is a social enterprise like mySociety: their commercial activities support their charitable ones. They started life as a data visualisation organisation, and that provenance informs much of their activity. This gives them a different angle to come at FOI from: it’s a data collection mechanism, the results of which can feed into infographics and visualisations that inform the public, often with an ‘expert’ in the middle to transform the raw data into something the public can follow at a glance.

Knowing all this, it’s understandable that when they started thinking about how best to promote their new site, ForSet landed on the idea of competitions, asking entrants to create a data visualisation from one or more FOI responses.

The regular contests have had an enthusiastic take-up. Topics vary, but, Teona says, “Of course, thanks to current events, there have been lots of stories regarding Russia in the last couple of months: how dependent the market is on Russia; what authorities’ electricity consumption is; lots about defence. 

“Before the war broke out the topics were more varied: there were visualisations on domestic violence, economics, socially important issues. One nice one that we hadn’t foreseen was on the grape and wine history of Georgia!

“We found that out of all the authorities, the National Statistics Bureau and the Ministry of Internal Affairs are the most responsive — they always send lots of data.” 

Because ForSet have such relevant experience, once a contestant has decided which data they’re going to use, they can tap into advice from the organisation’s designers and analysts. So these contests are creating a new generation of data visualisers and journalists who can use FOI in this way – win/win!

Some examples of the data visualisations: click to see each one at a larger size.
You can also find an interactive visualisation here.

And ForSet are not stopping there: they’ve also been thinking of running focus groups for FOI officers and citizens — again not something we’ve done very much of at WhatDoTheyKnow, but further proof that there’s always plenty for FOI site runners to learn from one another.

Making connections

And one final thing: why did we hear nary a peep about AskGov until Teona made contact? 

We would love to have believed her first explanation, that the site documentation is so clear that there was no need to enquire about anything — but there was another factor at play, too, as Teona explained:

“The first challenge for us in installing the site was that it’s written in Ruby. There aren’t a lot of Ruby developers in Georgia and they are in high demand — they tend to work for private US companies, and we couldn’t afford to hire them.

“But as an NGO, you never have enough money anyway, so we can always think of ways to get around things. We looked around our neighbouring countries Moldova and Ukraine, and saw that there was an existing Alaveteli site in Ukraine.

“We sent them an email and introduced ourselves. It turned out that the organisation Internews was giving them tech support, paying for a web developer – and they offered to share that resource with us! They said they’re always looking for partners.

“We never got stuck at any point because the developer knew what she was doing, and actually we benefitted from the fact that she’d learned from prior mistakes setting up the dostup.pravda site for Ukraine. And Ukraine and Georgia are very similar countries in terms of the legislation etc, so it was simple.”

So in other words, ForSet had done what we would have encouraged them to be doing if they had got in touch – networking and learning from others in the Alaveteli community!

Talking of community, we weren’t the only organisation that Teona would chat with while she was in London. We introduced her to several other civic tech and transparency organisations in the UK, so she had a busy few days ahead of her, and no doubt plenty to discuss, all of which, we hope, will feed into the success of AskGov.ge.