FOI

[Tyler Battle]

Is anyone doing something like http://MuckRock.com in Canada? I seem
to remember some discussion on it at some point but I can't recall any
details.

-Tyler

[James McKinney]

It's come up before - the main issue is that FOI sites require a lot of constant maintenance and administration! See here: http://www.alaveteli.org/2011/07/you-need-volunteers-to-make-your-website-work/ I think in past discussions some particularities of the Canadian process came up as obstacles (e.g. the $5 fee at federal level).

If I were to do it, I would go with http://www.alaveteli.org/, an open-source project that grew out of mySociety's WhatDoTheyKnow and that now has deployments around the world including EU, Brazil, Kosovo. Its mailing list is quite active and useful https://groups.google.com/group/alaveteli-dev

If there's interest in doing something for Canada, let me know, I've already worked with the Alaveteli software.

James

[Michael Mulley]

What James said: there are enough tricky parts with the Canadian
situation that I think the project would need some kind of
institutional support, or at least stable funding. The $5 federal fee
is a pain, and in general -- I'm not too familiar with the different
rules in each province -- requests need to be sent on paper and you
can't require that responses come via e-mail.

But, yeah, I'd love to see this happen too (and have had chats with a
few people about it, but have no current plans to build anything). I
know visiblegovernment.ca spent a while looking into it a few years
ago too.

[Herb Lainchbury]

I was thinking seriously about putting up an Alaveteli instance but the code seems to be in quite a bit of flux still so I thought it would be better to wait a bit.  I like the idea though and if someone wanted to do it I would be supportive.  We do have a vibrant FOI community here in BC so partnering with that community for such a project would probably be the way to approach it.

I wonder what journalists would think about it.  Would it make their situation even worse?  Somehow I think there is a hack in here somewhere to improve the situation for all, including journalists.  Not sure.

--
Herb Lainchbury
Dynamic Solutions Inc.
www.dynamic-solutions.com
http://twitter.com/herblainchbury

[James McKinney]

Yes, Seb Bacon is working hard on Alaveteli now that the project has secured funding. But the code is not so much in flux that it should deter deployment.

Journalists don't often use WhatDoTheyKnow or Alaveteli-type sites. These projects tend to be used by the general public only. A question came up on the Alaveteli developers list re: private requests. MuckRock has this feature, but Alaveteli doesn't, though it may be added later. It's not urgent, though, because most journalists want more control over the entire FOI process than any site can offer.