Czech FOI site is up and running!

[FOI Czech]

Hi everyone

Here is an update from Prague.

We are now well into public beta and have a press launch scheduled for March 7. Those of you we met in Oxford may be asking "What kept you?" and basically the answer is, the quite ridiculous requirement in Czech law that demands the address and date of birth of the requester - which of course must not be visible on the website. I'm afraid this defeated Josef, who had been our main tech guy, but with the help of Seb and especially Louise we got over the line and went live at the beginning of December.

Our main issue is the private data - authorities often want to reply using attachments and include the private data there - we are discussing this in the dev. group. But this aside, we are quite encouraged by the beta testing. To our great surprise, authorities are readily answering, and on time. As of this moment we already have 134 requests. A lot of these are coming from two people in NGO's in related areas, one of them has used the site to ask for the same info from some 70+ authorities. She has saved herself a lot of time and some money by using the site.

It may be early days, but as a foreigner here, I suspect that our site starts to show the Czech State in a different light to that of common public perception. Not surprisingly most people in this post-Communist country still regard State bodies with suspicion and a little fear. But of course State bodies are full of decent and conscientious people who actually welcome the chance to provide information which shows that they know what they are doing, and are trying to do it well. So when we go public we are going to emphasise the point that our site is going to help authorities explain to people that a lot of good things are actually going on.

Perhaps the most startling example of this glasnost came on Friday when co-founder Martin gave us some news of support from perhaps the last place we expected. Two years ago Martin and I were part of an angry demonstration which invaded Prague City Hall in reaction to the exposure of more and more corrupt affairs. But after that there were political personnel changes which appeared to be taking City Hall down a better path. On Friday Martin announced that unofficially City Hall like our initiative, and may well be ready to provide their public endorsement for our press launch on March 7. That is something I never expected to achieve so soon in even my wildest dreams. 

So it looks good, after a long hard road to launch last year, and I hope we will be able to provide inspiration for others, especially in post Communist Europe.