FOI Fest skills session: WhatDoTheyKnow and Alaveteli
mySociety’s own Julia Cushion and Gareth Rees talk us through the basic principles of our FOI website WhatDoTheyKnow, and the open codebase that allows others to run similar websites around the world, Alaveteli – all in ten minutes.<br>If you would prefer to watch this session as a video, you can do so here.<br>Sign up for our newsletter or drop us a line.<br><br>Please fill in our short survey to help us understand more about why and how you listen!<br><br> <br>Transcript<br>0:00<br>[Gavin Freeguard:] Welcome to FOI Fest 2026!<br>0:04<br>[Julia Cushion:] We are from mySociety, makers of WhatDoTheyKnow, but actually wanted to start us today thinking about the code that is behind WhatDoTheyKnow, which we call Alaveteli, and reminding everybody that that is an open source codebase, which means that anybody around the world can run their own Freedom of Information website, and lots of people do. (more…)
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Transcript
Welcome to FOI Fest twenty twenty six. We are from mySociety, the makers of What Do They Know. I actually wanted to start us today thinking about, the code that is behind, What Do They Know, which we call Albertelli, and reminding everybody that that is an open source codebase, which means that anybody around the world can run their own Freedom of Information website, and lots of people do. We have around 25 to 30, Freedom of Information websites around the world, and it's an open source platform that has helped citizens make over 1,500,000 freedom of information requests. And it was really nice to hear earlier two people talking about, making requests around the world, and yeah, our, software and websites mean that not only can you make those requests, but obviously, crucially, you can view other people's as well. One nice little feature that you might not have seen, we've recently launched this new page that we're calling, the showcase, which is a kind of Pinterest style scroll where you can look through all sorts of exciting examples of uses of FOI around the world. And trying to get across that principle that there is loads and loads of exciting, interesting, positive work going on through FOI. And so, yeah, you'll get these slides afterwards and can have a look through that as well. Again, I did just mention this, but just to run you through the basics of Alaveteli, it is a database. It is, at its heart, a database of authorities who are subject to FOI and includes the correct contact details for those authorities. We obviously try really, really hard with our amazing team of volunteers to keep those contact details up to date. And, yeah, we try to make a nice, simple, nonthreatening interface for people to help them write their request. And, yeah, when you're, looking at public body websites, it might seem kind of daunting or there's a lot to process. And so we try to keep that more simple and give a bit of basic advice. And then, yeah, once the request is sent, the correspondence is handled through the platform and the response is made public. So what they know is now an archive of millions and millions of well, over a million requests. It will also keep the disclosure and email logs so we can prove that, the correspondence was sent, rather than public authorities claiming that they didn't receive them. So we can show that that is the case. And then, yeah, the key benefit of this means that so many requests are published and that you can go and through and find out, what people ask for, what they got back, whether it's successful or what, rejections they received. And, yeah, that is our tally of the code base. As I said, it's used in 25, different places, but I'll hand over to Scaros to talk more specifically about what do they
know. So, yeah, you'll all probably be familiar with our UK site, What Do They Know, which is, run by a small team in my society and a group of, really dedicated volunteers. It was launched in 2008, a couple of years after the FYI Act, and has grown to over 1,250,000 public requests on the platform. And we estimate it, makes up around 15% of requests made in The UK. But as well as helping with the mechanics of just sending requests, we really try to use what they know, to help improve the wider FYI system for everyone. So, for example, we write guides to help people understand FOI, and how to write effective requests and understand the technical jargon around refusals. So, yeah, we're always trying to help requesters make better requests and, always interested to hear how we can make, the requests in experience, better for public authorities as well. So do feel, that we do encourage you to reach out and talk to us. What you might be a little less familiar with is What's They Know Pro. So back in 2016, we started designing additional sets of tools aimed at journalists, campaigners, and researchers, or, like, anyone who uses FOI more than just occasionally. And some of the key challenges we were trying to solve with Pro are being able to do FOI investigations in private, making it easier to get comparable information from several authorities without having to wade through loads of different websites, find contact details, and, use, a a random array of forms, and then more, like, make it easier to manage these, requests without, an overflow in inbox and a spreadsheet from hell. Pro adds some really great features on top of the basic account, that helps tackle some of these challenges, of using FOI more professionally. So I'll hand off to Julia to talk through some of these highlights.
Cool. Thank you so much. So, yeah, the first one is that you can make private requests. Now through WhatDoTheyKnow Pro. So that means that you can embargo your request. The default is three months, but you can go up to a year. And then, if it, is running out, you can then refresh that and continue to keep it embargoed. Or you can, of course, publish it, which we do encourage because we are trying to create, as we say, this public archive of requests. And then batch requests, another one, which I think is really, really helpful. And we've heard a lot today also about the the value of kind of creating your own dataset by asking the same question to multiple authorities. So that is one FOI request to multiple authorities. And, yeah, it's about building those datasets that have never been curated in one place before. So the features within WhatDoTheyKnow pro allow you to do this with, you know, a click of a button, which we think is really powerful. Obviously, we do, you know, give advice to make sure that this isn't, used vexatiously, but I think it has created some really brilliant results that I will talk through in a little bit here. And, yeah, one more thing just to chat through quickly is this enhanced dashboard. We've heard a lot about the power of a super, successful spreadsheet to manage your FOI requests, and that's the sort of thing we are, trying to look at here. So it's kind of a to do list. And yeah, it tells you, like where your requests are at and then it will also tell you, within your batches, kind of what's going on. You can classify them as, whether they've been successful or not. And it gives you kind of searching and filtering so you can see, where your requests are at. And yeah, that kind of asset class view of how much information you've got, where your, where your total set of information is. But one of our newest features of Pro, I'm gonna hand back to Garak to walk through.
So, yeah, we shared earlier about, like, this standardization problem. So even if you make a batch request, you know, even if you ask the a group of authorities, like, the same for the same data, it's rare for it all to come back in the same way. You know, that you might track it over, like, different financial year, calendar year, etcetera, or just take these, or respond with these figures in, like, really different formats. So, it like, managing the batch is quite difficult, in its own right, and then you've got a got a load of work to make that data actually usable. So something we've been prototyping for a while and released fully at the end of last year, now built into Pro, is our collaboration tool around FY investigations. So the idea of projects is you take batch request and you can bring in people, so either members of your team or people in your community or volunteers, like, climate emergency use, to help with some key parts of that process. So when you set up a project around a group of requests, you can create, a set of structured questions, for the information you are looking to pull out from the requests. And then you get, like, a home page which collects, all those requests together with progress, for the key, key tests that these contributors can help with. So, task one is classifying requests. So, you know, did they release the information? Did they refuse? Am I still waiting? And then the second, stage is, extraction, so pulling out that data from the request into a more structured data format. So then you can just download that as a CSV, to work with and, you know, actually use that data and compare in a more consistent way.
Yeah. Absolutely. And it'd be nice to tell you some success stories from, What Do They Know and What Do They Know Pro. And, yeah, it's worth, noting that we have this part of the website, FOI in action, which allows you to add a citation to, your request or somebody else's request. And we now have them on a huge variety of topics as you can see here, all sorts of important ones. And it's really important that's to show how, as we were saying earlier, FOI works in practice, how people are making change using this. And yeah. So, please do, if you're ever using WhatDoDoKnow, or can link, a request to a story that's really helpful for us and for people learning the value of, f o I. And, yeah, there's a few different examples here. This top right screenshot is from, climate emergency k from the school cards that you heard, Isaac talk about earlier. But there's all sorts of, different ones here, and we do try to track them. And, yeah, it's we just think that there's so much power in this idea of, like, getting raw material, but bringing the end together. And, yeah, going from really what we would call fragmented data, to something really powerful. And, Isaac was talking about the impact of the scorecards earlier, so that's another exciting project that we contribute to. And, just to say, as well as making What Do They Know and Alitali and keeping those sites running, we do what we call some, like, kind of upstream work to try and make sure that FOI is working for everybody. And so, obviously, you know, Alex has been talking today. He's written a lot of these great publications, but, we do a lot of work to make sure, that we can, yeah, monitor how things are going. Alex recently gave, evidence in the Scottish Parliament for the new FOI bill, which was exciting. And we're always trying to make sure that we are reacting to how things are working in, in practice. And yeah, taking the sort of stories that we see through the platform, and making them known. An example of this is, yeah, we're not just trying to run a transactional service, but, we call that bad practice when we see it. And so we have seen a pattern of some authorities refusing, requests through email, and instead trying to encourage requesters to use specific portals that are less accessible. And we, call that out. And so, yeah, there's a example here where, we highlighted some of that. And, you know, one of, something we're really proud of is our relationship with the ICO where we can, take these things and, try to get guidance changed and and advice so that, the the system works really well for everybody. I'll hand back to you, Garris.
So a little bit about what's next for what they know over the next year. We're really focused on, trying to get more out of the information, that's on what they know. So, as we heard earlier, each request is viewed, like, about 160 times to minimum. So, you know, we know there's so much value already there on what they know. So what we wanna do is improve search, so make it easier to, actually find information, that is relevant to your interest and your investigations. We're also looking at improving the statistics that FOI can generate around the FYI, process. So things like, response times, exemption usage, and, you know, overall performance, like, on a quite granular level. We're also exploring topic extraction, so being able to, group, similar requests around a topic. So for example, you know, green infrastructure or, being able to kind of identify that, requests about bike lanes are similar to, requests about, you know, bus routes, like, all around, sort of greener transport, and then meshing that up with the statistics as well. So we'd be able to see, like, you know, whether those requests are more successful or not, for example. So, yeah, we'd love to hear from you about what would be specifically helpful in these areas, because, yeah, I really wanna make the, the information released from what they know, as actful as it
can be. Cool. I think we are actually out of time. Yeah. Please do, join our mailing list and, yeah, email Gareth or I directly. We're really keen to hear people's feedback. We're also on Blue Sky and those sorts of places. So, yeah. Thank you so much.
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