Reusing the WDTK name

[Henare Degan]

Hi all,

This may be one for a mySociety list but I'm sure all the right people are here too :)

As some of you may know, the OpenAustralia Foundation[0] has been looking at Alaveteli for some time. Earlier in the year we discussed a name and we tentatively liked the idea of whatdotheyknow.org.au

My questions are: is mySociety OK with us reusing that name here in Australia? Do you think it's a good idea? Anything else we should think of?

Thanks!

Henare

[0] http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

One practical issue I can see is if each site starts getting support
requests intended for the other. It would (a) take a bit of time to
redirect people and (b) might occasionally be confusing enough that we
didn't immediately realise.

I don't know how likely that is. I do know that we get a lot of contact
from users who actually want to get in touch with a particular public
authority, despite quite explicit warnings in the various places they do
this from.

You might also find it harder to get google traction and build your own
brand, particularly given that we're whatdotheyknow.com not
whatdotheyknow.<something>.uk

Ganesh

On 10/08/2012 07:27, Henare Degan wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This may be one for a mySociety list but I'm sure all the right people
> are here too :)
>
> As some of you may know, the OpenAustralia Foundation[0] has been
> looking at Alaveteli for some time. Earlier in the year we discussed a
> name and we tentatively liked the idea of whatdotheyknow.org.au

> <http://whatdotheyknow.org.au>

[Robin Houston]

MySociety has no formal objection, I don't think. At least: I emailed a private internal list to ask, and no one raised any objection.

Sent from my telephone

[Robin Houston]

Ah, Tom says “it’s fine”, so that’s official! Whether it’s a good idea is a different question, of course. I don’t see any massive problem with it, apart from the risk that people will be confused to find whatdotheyknow.com is a UK site.

Robin

[Henare Degan]

Thanks very much for the responses Ganesh and Robin!

We definitely have the same issues here that you describe Ganesh, namely people sending OpenAustralia.org (our TWFY) ranty emails thinking we're the government :-/ Surprisingly our PlanningAlerts project has only once been confused with the UK version of the same name.

We've been rethinking the name a bit anyway to better fit with issues specific to Australia, e.g. that our laws are not commonly used by the public so the educational aspect of Alaveteli is important here. One idea so far is Your Right To Know.

Thanks again,

Henare