In our latest online webinar, we convened three experts to tell us about how Freedom of Information works in practice – in other words, how does the law work when it comes into contact with the real world?
You can rewatch the video on our YouTube channel.
Speakers were:
Toby Mendel, founder and Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Democracy, who have run the Right To Information rating since 2011. This makes it easy to see at a glance which countries are performing well across a number of different indicators around transparency and FOI, and which not so well.
Toby explains how a ranking can have interesting effects – not least encouraging countries to compete against near neighbours to do a little better! For us, of course, it’s interesting to see this in the light of the Council Climate Action Scorecards, where this race to the top is also one of the positive outcomes.
Giovanni Esposito from the Université Libre de Bruxelles described a set of field experiments he conducted in collaboration with the Belgian Alaveteli site Transparencia.be, to see what factors make a difference to responsiveness when putting in a request for information. This involved asking for the same document from several different municipalities – and you can find out the results by watching the video.
Then finally, Mária Žuffová of the European University Institute shared her research into what the UK public actually want to know, based on analysis of WhatDoTheyKnow requests – as one might imagine, this was of great interest to all of us here at mySociety, as it will be to everyone with a curiosity about humankind!
Enjoyed this?
We’ve put on a lot of online webinars and events recently, all with the aim of sharing knowledge among our global networks of civic tech organisations, and beyond to anyone who has an interest in our topics of democracy, transparency, climate and community. If you’d like to be kept informed about upcoming webinars, sign up for our newsletter and be sure to check the box marked ‘conferences and events’ (or just tick the topics you are most interested in, and then we’ll let you know everything we’re doing in those areas, including events).
