1. This Wednesday, come and meet Henare from Open Australia

    Image by Open Source Way

    If you’ve been thinking of popping along to one of our Wednesday night meet-ups, but the cold weather has been discouraging you, here’s a little incentive.

    This week, we’ll be joined by Henare Degan, one of the directors of the OpenAustralia Foundation. In Henare’s words, “You can talk to me about civic hacking down under, but I’ve also been on the road for over seven months now, so come and chat to me about travelling too”.

    Open Australia run an Alaveteli-based RightToKnow site (like WhatDoTheyKnow) and a Parliamentary monitoring site (like TheyWorkForYou), among other projects. Come and find out how things differ in Australia.

    Or just come, as usual, for the good times.

    • When: Wednesday 6th November, drop in any time between 6 and 9pm.
    • Where: Mozilla Space London
    • How: Add your name to the Lanyrd page, so we know you’re coming.

    Photo by OpenSourceWay (CC)

  2. A different use of Crowdsourcing

    A few days ago, one of our international contacts, Matthew Landauer from the OpenAustralia Foundation, posted to the Alaveteli mailing list about a recent experiment in crowdsourcing FOI requests. It’s pretty interesting stuff, so I asked if we could share more widely.

    Matthew tells us: “It’s a project called DetentionLogs and it’s a collaboration between a small group of freelance journalists, Guardian Australia, New Matilda, The Global Mail and OpenAustralia Foundation.

    The journalists have done some FOI [requesting] to get a summarised list of around 7000 “incidents” that have happened in detention centres. Then, if members of the public are interested in finding out more they can help out by doing a further FOI request for detailed information about the incident via RightToKnow, OpenAustralia’s FOI site which uses Alaveteli.

    But what’s the history? According to the Guardian, over the past few years there’s been a sharp rise in the number of specific incidents in Australia’s two largest immigration detention centres. Elections are coming up soon (though still not confirmed) and the topic of immigration is one of the fiercest political debates around the elections. The co-founders of DetentionLogs came across a large PDF document on the Immigration Department’s disclosure log, with a summary of the incidents – and the project sprang from there.

    The idea is that people can view the visual database, see incidents and click on them to adopt them or flag them. Adopting an incident takes you to the RightToKnow website where you can submit a pre-drafted FOI request to get more details. You also have the option to edit it, but the page opens with all the incident data that is needed to match the request with the incident you clicked on. Flagging an incident makes it appear brighter on the visualisation, drawing other people’s attention to it. Global Mail asked two requesters to share their reasons for participating here. It’s interesting reading, but also quite shocking.

    So far there have been around 125 FOI requests made through this site. But it’s not all been plain sailing…

    Matthew writes this of his challenges: “This is what I’ve learned from the experience so far:

    • The government department in question (department of immigration) is clearly concerned by the crowdsourcing, so much so that each of these requests is being handled personally by the director of FOI policy for the department and they’re doing whatever they can to shut things down, including in this case, a misinterpretation of the FOI legislation. Kat Szuminska and I wrote an opinion piece on this for the Global Mail.
    • The relationship between the multiple websites involved in DetentionLogs confuses people a bit. People might start on the global mail “behind the wire” site and then get directed at RightToKnow to make the FOI request. So, we’ve had a couple of cases where people gave their email addresses to RightToKnow, we message them and then they thought that the DetentionLogs project had given us their email address without permission.
    • There is no way currently in Alaveteli to contact a group of people. What I ended up doing is taking an email that the DetentionLogs people wrote, exporting a list of email addresses by hand from the database and emailing them personally on behalf of the DetentionLogs people. This was hardly ideal, it confused people. I think I would much prefer that people who make a request in one of these FOI crowdsourcing campaigns could optionally sign up to a mailing list or a public forum where they could discuss strategy and such things.

    This crowdsourcing experiment is still a work in progress, and it will be interesting to see how it turns out. It’s great to see how the Alaveteli software can be adapted to fit a specific campaign and hopefully that can inspire others to use it in a similar way. Mail Us to see how.

    [1] Crowd by Michael Dornbierer

    [2] Fountain pen from William Arthur fine stationary

    [3] Experiment from Peter Megyri