April news

WhatDoTheyKnow is 15

Fifteen years ago, our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow was launched. Since then, half a million pieces of information have been released via the service — with more coming out every day.

Helen, a long-time request-maker, WhatDoTheyKnow volunteer and now its Service Manager, looks back on all that our flagship FOI service has achieved.

Tell us about it!

If you've used WhatDoTheyKnow to uncover information, we'd really love to know more. Please fill in our short survey with some details.

Equally, if you remember the site's launch back in 2008, have feelings about its place in UK society, or ideas for its future, do share. Whatever you want to tell us about WhatDoTheyKnow, we're all ears.

You can fill the survey in here, or read more about it in our blog post.

Great thanks

We'd like to thank Mr John Cross for making a major gift to our Transparency programme. John has also volunteered his time to support the running of WhatDoTheyKnow, and his generous donation will enable us to make substantial improvements to the service.

Reflections on TICTeC Labs

It was a whole new way of working for us: discussing issues faced by the global civic tech community, and then commissioning solutions - and all in public. So, did it work?

That was the question at hand during our Reflections on TICTeC Labs event, which you can rewatch here. You can also see presentations on the six outputs of the programme, from online tools to training courses.

The final outcomes

Talking of outputs, there are three more to explore. The final projects to be released are an Election Violence Tracker from PolicyLab Africa, media training from Fundación Multitudes, and a broad set of resources around water from the Demography Project. 

As with all the TICTeC Labs resources, these are open source, and can be adapted or reused wherever they are useful.

It's getting hot in here

The concept for our latest project, Neighbourhood Warmth, came about through one of our climate prototyping weeks — we mocked up a site to show how a 'conditional commitment' model might encourage neighbours to take the first steps towards making energy improvements in their homes.

Well, things have moved on, and we're taking this one further. But we won't be working alone; we're partnering with the brilliant Dark Matter Labs, as you can read in the first of our monthly updates.

What we're reading

• Recent changes to Twitter have impacted the 'deleted tweets from politicians' service Politwoops. But all may not be lost - the site itself is displaying a banner to say that they are "working to restore service soon".
• Converting election PDFs to spreadsheets? That sounds like the kind of thing we'd do. But we weren't prepared for this dramatic story!
• The Alan Turing Institute has some interesting datasets and wants creative people to work with them.
• We suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that we've never been jailed for publishing parliamentary proceedings on TheyWorkForYou.
• Over in the US, Freedom of Information site Muckrock is giving awards for the 'worst in government transparency'. We enjoyed the photo story of the officers searching for documents, not to mention the weirdly-redacted prisoners' artwork from Guantanamo. 
• Worried about the rise of AI? Yeah, us too - but aww, look at this friendly clock.

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