Our Freedom of Information toolkit for journalists, WhatDoTheyKnow^Pro, will have its official launch very soon — and we’re glad to see that it’s already beginning to help generate high-profile news stories based on FOI requests.

During development, several journalists have been putting it through its paces and offering us invaluable feedback which has helped us shape the service — and meanwhile their activity is also uncovering stories of genuine interest. These give a taste of exactly what kind of investigative stories can be supported by WhatDoTheyKnow^Pro, which makes requests to multiple bodies simpler, as well as organising the responses so that they’re easier to manage.

Here are the WhatDoTheyKnow^Pro-generated stories we’ve heard about so far:

Student Brexit campaign received ‘as much funding as necessary to win’

Open Democracy and the Ferret uncovered how Vote Leave used a loophole to funnel hundreds of thousands of pounds through a student’s small-scale campaign. The story was subsequently run by multiple other news outlets and legal proceedings towards a judicial review have begun.

British police trained officers in repressive regimes

Scrutiny of documents from the College of Policing revealed that much of its income was coming from countries where there is concern about human rights. The story, by Lucas Amin, was run by the Guardian in September.

Public servants and Scottish ministers paid thousands of pounds to dine with Obama

Investigative journalism platform the Ferret uncovered this story in July, detailing how much public money was spent on senior staff attending a charity dinner with Barack Obama.

Links between Mark Hoban and Price Waterhouse Cooper

The Times and the Daily Mail both ran this story from Patrick Hosking, which revealed the former financial secretary’s ‘forgetfulness’ over prior links with Price Waterhouse Cooper.

Infighting in UKIP over the name Patriotic Alliance

Both anti-far right activists and UKIP officials tried to stop Arron Banks from registering a new political party called the Patriotic Alliance, another story run by the Ferret revealed.

Where British holiday-makers get arrested most often

Back in June, this story by Claire Miller and James Rodger analysed figures from the FCO on where Brits had been detained and obtained consular support, allowing them to state which countries had the most arrests, and how figures had changed over time. The story ran in the Birmingham Mail and was also picked up by other publications in the Trinity Mirror Group.

We’re delighted to see such good use being made of WhatDoTheyKnow^Pro, and we anticipate many more stories emerging once it has fully launched.

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Image: Michael Pittman (CC by-sa/2.0)

If you’ve been watching the progress of our Freedom of Information toolkit for journalists, campaigners and activists, you might be interested to know that we are now accepting applications for pre-launch access.

Successful applicants will have an early opportunity to put the service through its paces. WhatDoTheyKnow^Pro will launch as a paid-for service, but as a beta tester you’ll have up to a year’s access for free, because we’re keen to see how you’ll use it — and to hear your feedback on which features are useful.

What’s WhatDoTheyKnow^Pro?

WhatDoTheyKnow^Pro is our first launch of Alaveteli Professional, accessed via the WhatDoTheyKnow website and specifically for UK users who utilise FOI in their work or campaigning.

It’s the first instance of the service we plan to make available to other Freedom of Information sites running around the world on our Alaveteli platform.

What you’ll get

Since we last caught up with Alaveteli Professional, we’ve made really concrete progress with several of the features that, at the time of that blog post, were just entries on our long to-do list.

Here’s what users will access:

• The ability to keep requests private until your story has been published
• A powerful private dashboard that helps you track and manage your FOI projects
• A super-smart to-do list that makes it easier to follow the progress of your requests
• Action alerts that nudge you when it’s time to take the next step in a request

Batch benefits

And very soon, we’ll also be carefully rolling out the batch request features, which will allow you to:

• Make one request to multiple authorities
• Manage large volumes of responses and easily keep track of the status of each request
• Get regular updates as the responses come in, without overwhelming your inbox

We’re excited about the batch feature in particular, and we know that many of our prospective users are, too. At the same time, we’ve heard some concerns that it might encourage a scattergun approach that wastes authorities’ time.

Our planned development will ensure that people use this feature responsibly, and, consequently, get the best returns from it. This will include a prompt to send a smaller batch initially, so that the remainder of the requests can be refined based on the quality of information that is returned — there’s nothing worse that asking every council in the country for information and then realising that you’ve worded your question in a way that means you can’t use the resulting data!

At the moment, batch requests can’t be made on WhatDoTheyKnow without help from the site administrators. We’re aware that many journalists and activists already make many batch requests outside WhatDoTheyKnow for this very reason. We’d like more of these requests to be released in public (we estimate that around 15% of UK FOI requests are made via our site): so by including this capability in WhatDoTheyKnow^Pro, we hope we’ll not only be steering people to use those powers sensibly, but that much more information will also end up in the public domain — maximising its usefulness.

Apply for free access

If that all sounds exciting, then apply here. We’d love to hear how you plan to use WhatDoTheyKnow^Pro.