Please weigh in to this vital thread to encourage collaboration, not competition with Alaveteli

[Tom Steinberg]

Hi everyone,

The Knight News Challenge has picked a brand new FOI tool to consider funding as one of it's 40 finalists. This means that a totally parallel, disconnected FOI project might be about to be started that could and should be an extension or variant on Alaveteli. This would be a terrible waste of time, money and energy.

So, please do what I just have which is to leave a comment explaining why it is better to join thriving open source projects than use scarce resources to set up competition:

http://kng.ht/ZDdC0a

This could be really important for the future of Alaveteli as a truly shared, global, flexible open source project for FOI users everywhere. Please chip in now to try to steer things in a good direction. It'll only take you 1 minute. And, of course, be friendly and polite!

best,

Tom

[Andrei Petcu]

Thank you Tom for sharing, I also added a comment.

Andrei Cristian Petcu

[Richa Agarwal]

Hi Tom,

I'm not involved in the Knight News Challenge FOI tool you've referenced, but am engaged in the public records space with the city of Oakland for this year as a Code for America 2013 fellow. Totally agree that disconnected projects related to public records/ FOI would be a waste of time and energy (not so much money in the case of being a fellow ;) ). We have started building a prototype that in the long-term, we absolutely hope to feed back into the work being done around FOI globally. My questions/concerns currently are:

1) I'm a python developer. Do you have thoughts on cross-language collaboration?  

2) Is there any work that has been done/ is currently being done in terms of solving internal routing of a request / getting it into the appropriate hands (given a perhaps vague request, or large siloed organizations that don't know where records live?). Our research with the city of Oakland surfaced a lot of larger process issues around who is actually responsible for fulfilling a request. 

Thanks!

Best,

Richa

[Louise Crow]

Hi Richa,

Sorry for the delay in responding - in response to your questions, I'd say that we have a pretty stable and mature codebase in ruby now, and are not planning a rewrite in python, but we're always happy to work with complementary external software using language independent APIs. We haven't done any work in Alaveteli on internal routing of requests and I don't know of any significant other work on this, but perhaps other people on the list do.

Cheers

Louise