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Recruitment

Join our Board!

We're looking for new Non-Executive Directors, Trustees, and a Chair of Trustees.

These unusual and fulfilling roles are essential for our operation as a charitable organisation with a commercial subsidiary. The ideal candidates will have energy, vision and experience across one of a variety of sectors: Chief Executive Mark explains more here.

Transparency

FOI at a local level: the full picture

This week, mySociety's Research department release new findings on the quantity of Freedom of Information requests sent to UK local councils each year, a figure that's previously been hard to pin down — and which, now calculated, is really quite startling.

It's part of a fuller report on how FOI functions in local government. Alex shares an overview in a couple of posts, or find the full report here.

Calling translation superheroes

We're looking for volunteers fluent in various languages, who might be able to donate a small amount of time to help the worldwide FOI community.

This interesting task involves translating small strings of text that go on buttons and error messages, etc: find out more in Jen's post.

History repeating itself

When we heard that Brussels Freedom of Information website Transparencia.be had struggled to have emails recognised as valid FOI requests, we couldn't help experiencing a little déjà vu.

WhatDoTheyKnow went through exactly the same fight in its early days, and with the same successful outcome. Here's more about how Transparencia.be won the day.

Community

Stop right there

FixMyStreet reports are very helpful for local authorities, unless they're duplicates of reports that have already been made — then they're just the opposite.

As residents of Bath and NE Somerset will see, we're trialling a remedy for that, which we hope to be able to roll out more widely if it proves effective.

What we're reading

• It's voting day for many! Democracy Club point out that the BBC have inadvertently provided incorrect voter information, which could have been easily avoided.
• Radio: Ten years on, The Reunion on Radio 4 brought together key figures from the MPs' expenses scandal, including FOI investigative journalist Heather Brooke.
• Citizens' Assemblies are 'no longer the preserve of democracy geeks,' says Shared Future.
• Assessing the results of a Brexit poll shows just how many different ways there are to find a 'winner'.
• Twitter: Enjoy this rundown of Irish politicians sporting unusual nicknames.

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