 My name is Stefan. I work at the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany on a project called Fraktin Start, the German FY portal. Similar to my societies, whatdotheyknow.com. I'm sure you're all aware of how an FY portal more or less works. You make FY requests through it and the requests are transparently published online. You can see the correspondence there. And we are as a project more focused on campaigns, so not only being a platform or portal for the citizens, but also running our own campaigns and trying to move certain areas of information forward. And one of our biggest campaigns last year was a campaign for access to food safety reports called Top Secret, which translates to pot secret and amazingly is a bad pun in both English and German. So that worked out quite well, I must say. So what are food safety reports? This is a food safety report from Denmark. And in Denmark, you can find these reports at the restaurant store and also in an online database. So offline and online, they are quite available. And it has some detailed text and some grades, but it has also this so called smiley system. And so you have like these little faces on the side that tell you if you should eat there or not. And this one actually has an elite smiley as well. And I learned that an elite smiley is if you have like lots of smileys in your history, then you get an elite smiley as well. So the system we don't have like a system like this in Germany, we have no smiley system and works a bit differently. So since 2003, we have a special federal consumer information law that allows access to food safety reports if they contain deviations from the rules. This law has not been used a lot. And we wanted to change that. So we partnered with Foodwatch, an NGO, a consumer advocate around, you guess it food, to make access to food safety reports a bit easier. And the idea was that you ask the authority for the report of a specific business and the authority will send it to you. Quite simple actually. And the campaign goal was to convince authorities and politicians that an active transparency approach to publishing these reports or and making them a bit better and easier to access like the smiley system in Denmark might be more efficient and answering lots of requests. So instead of, you know, having to request them, they should be published. That was the campaign goal. And this is like the user interface, the main user interface of our little application that sits on top of our FYI portal. So we imported over 300,000 restaurants, supermarkets and other food related businesses from OpenStreetMap and then we build a map interface. And people can browse around in their neighborhood and click on the venue that interests them and then make a request to that. And the request interface that looks like this, we automatically find the right authority for that venue by geolocation. And then we draft this request for them automatically and it is has more legal stuff hidden behind this ellipsis you can see there. So we already send a lot of other stuff with it, like references to the law, current rulings and also counterarguments actually already to the most common refusals that a public authority might come up with. And then the problem is I forgot to mention a little weird detail of this process. The business can by law ask for the requesters name and address. Super weird. We've totally didn't understand why this was in there but the laws from 2003 it predates GDPR and lots of other privacy related things. And as a request of government information about a third party, and you are always in kind of a whistleblower kind of situation. So you, you ask something about a business from the government, and suddenly the government gives that business your name and address is it's very, very weird. And giving this business access to the data about request at the food safety report is so it's at best unnecessary and at worst it's dangerous we heard some stories that is actually had some blowbacks on the requesters and this is really not how a law should be designed. And so you have to do FOI laws around the world, and you see a capacity like this a section that works like this be very wary of it. And so unfortunately, this is part of the law and this is currently how it works, even if it may be incompatible with actual current GDPR. But we still have to find out and go to the court to change that. In reality, they need your name and address because they need to give it to the business if they request it. So, and suddenly, they also don't reply by email anymore they reply by postal mail, because obviously they want to verify that you actually send them the right name and address. And suddenly this problem doesn't is so it's suddenly not a email conversation anymore, but the request that they get postal mail and need to upload it to the portal in order to keep the correspondence online. So we tell users about this caveat that they may that their name and address may end up with the business, but to our delight and they still requested a lot of food safety reports. And then we have with over 446,000 requests made by 25,000 users since January 2019. And this is roughly a third of all requests we have on the platform in total, and we started nine years ago so this is usually popular. So it turns out food safety is really popular and certainly more popular than most of our other government transparency topics we have going on. So I explained that to myself with this pyramid right the pyramid of needs. And at the top is like self fulfillment and at the bottom is you know, safety and nourishment and food safety fits right in there so it's very popular people. But we also noticed that authorities came up with interesting ways of handling these requests. And that means our little diagram here becomes a bit more complicated again. So there are 389 authorities that handles food safety in Germany at different levels, sometimes it's the status responsible sometimes boroughs of a city state like in Berlin, but most of the time the district or county level is responsible. Now, a lot of authorities who possibly have never received a request under the consumer information law before get a lot of these. And we kind of overestimated the expertise in cooperation. So they are often badly informed about the legal situation, they're facing with this request, and they have to answer by law but they have very different interpretations of the law. And now we need to make sure that our users still get a good, a good like help from us. And so we started classifying these authorities, these authority reactions. And it's a long spreadsheet was with 389 authorities. And we looked at their responses and then we classified them according to like problem areas. And we did this with the top most authorities or those that got the most requests in order to help the most number of users. And as you can tell, it's not a unified reaction. But they do talk to each other. So it's quite, it's quite similar. So these the answers they they use a similar kind of templates to answer. And that makes it easier for us to cluster them, which is quite handy. And what we do then is the following. So they may be our users made the request through our foi portal. So we actually have the answers there if they are made by email from the authorities. And here you can see what response looks like on our platform. And since we have classified the kinds of responses by authority. We can easily take a certain kind of response. And here we detected a sentence that says that the original request for the food safety report by the user cannot be made by email. They must be made by postal mail. That is wrong. I request another consumer information law does not adhere to any kind of form, you know, you can make it in any form you like, and email is totally fine. So we show the user a little hint on the side and of a button that pre fills a reply with a template suitable to the situation. So we give them a little snippet, and that they can send back to the authority explaining how the legal situation works and convincing the authority to in this case, continue working on this request, despite it being sent by email. And this recently we introduced something even more complex and we integrated a feature where you can actually appeal request and appeal in Germany has to be signed. And so you actually have to write a letter to the authority. And what we generated is like a little hint on the side that lets you then go to a form generator that generates a PDF for you. So you just have to fill in the date of the decision of the authority and their reference number. And then we generate a PDF letter that you can print and sign and then send to the authority. And we also sent this PDF as an email to the authority as like an advanced copy, let's say. And this we will use in more and more circumstances. So this this example letter is written by our lawyers and they went a bit overboard they sent like 10 pages or something of like legal argument why in this case the appeal here is about that the authority only wanted to allow that you can come to them to look at the food safety reports so they will not send copies you have to come into their offices and look at them and you need actually under the law you need a good reason to do that and a good reason is actually not that you might publish the report online if you get a copy. And this legal argument has been expanded by all lawyers to 10 pages and now the our requesters need to then send a 10 page letter and which actually costs a bit more than just seven or six page letter something. But alas, our lawyers went overboard, but writing an appeal letter, and we will use it now more often if now like a tool that can generate these and because this is like the next step in a legal proceeding under foi we want to make it as easy as possible. And this is like one kind of a bridge technology before actually people in the future, hopefully they will not have to sign it anymore but right now they do, and we can email and fax these documents, and we'll use any kind of technology necessary to help our users in this regard. Unfortunately, our little diagram here is how to get a food sector report is still not complete and it gets more complicated. So the business gets a notice from the authority about the request and because the business needs to know about it because by law they can ask the request for the name and address, but also because they can go to court and against the authority to stop the release of information. This is like a normal administrative procedure in Germany. If you are part of an administrative process, you always have the ability to appeal to a court. Also, the business has that and since there are no rules about proactive transparencies and it's not published, this is not really regulated, and the business can go to court. But what kind of business would go to court? Certainly only the most desperate where you know the food safety report is really bad. Turns out, no, there are a lot of businesses willing to go to court and why is that? Well, I stylized it here as a flaming eye on top of a condiment bottle, but it is the hotel and restaurant lobby and they have been outraged by our campaign since our launch and since I've commissioned lots of legal reports by multiple professionals declaring our platform unlawful. So they are the ones that tell the businesses to oppose this transparency and also give them guidance on how to fight it. The hotel and restaurant lobby is quite weird in Germany in that regards that they say, okay, the food safety reports are too complicated, you know, consumers wouldn't understand them. So that's why they can't be released. But they also say a smiley system is too simple and couldn't possibly capture the intricacies of food safety. So you can't have it both ways really and looking at the food safety report in Denmark, it seems very well designed actually is breaking a nice balance between like detail in the text and the grades and an easy form is an easy summary in form of the smiley so you can quickly tell you know it's safe to eat there. But still lots of these court cases started and as a platform you're not really involved in these court cases and neither are the requesters. The cases are between the businesses and the authorities, the requesters are informed about these court cases and they get all documents that pertain to the case as a copy, which is quite nice. But still it's difficult, sometimes difficult for us to know how many cases there are in Germany, but there are certainly more than 100. And we've already collected lots of decisions. And most of these decisions are actually in our favor. So there are preliminary rulings where, you know, they the court hurries to a decision. And most of these are actually not in our favor, but in the main proceedings, all of them are in our favor so far, and three of them actually are at the highest court level, and there's a final decision that the food safety reports can be released. And the requesters are informed as an interested third party, and we are also involved in some strategic lawsuits ourselves where we sue authorities, or making a request in a certain area where we know that the business will try to fight it in order to get the information. And getting this information is super important. So this picture shows someone who has received documents from court informing him that the business request of the food safety report form and has gone to court. And the documents actually included two legal reports with about 100 pages by two professors of law arguing that our platform breaks EU level laws. Interesting viewpoints that we hadn't seen before, and we wouldn't have known about them if the request I hadn't come to us. So this guy he scanned these pages for us and sent them in five emails because it wouldn't fit into one. And, and we are very happy about it, because it's very important to stay in contact with this with our community, otherwise we wouldn't know about these developments. And return we try to connect them online so they can talk to each other and we have a forum, and we also write our own legal reports that we sent to them so they can use them and submit them into the court cases they're involved in. So our lessons here are twofold. So go broad and possible go deep and necessary what I mean here is, and we, we could have included only for example Berlin values and just focus on on a specific region, but technology has actually allowed us to scale our support infrastructure in a way that we can have more people use the right to information. And so that is actually quite hard and we cannot fight all these authorities and businesses directly. So having a community of supporters really did the tricky. Without them, we only wouldn't have the at the impact we have now. And we do have our own strategic lawsuits in place to move the legal story along with like, you know, lawyers and very expensive lawyers but you know it's important to fight these steps up the ladder until the final decision. But we have to choose where to do this, we just hired a full time lawyer for our platform, and we're looking to scaling our legal support infrastructure as well. But it's definitely more difficult to scale that and because lawyers are expensive and you have to really choose where to fight the fire the right fight there. So what about our campaign goal, you know you wanted a smiley system, and there is actually an upcoming legislation in Berlin. And it's not yet in the local parliament I think they're busy with other things now, but it has been announced and the boroughs of Berlin. I think they're also more or less convinced because they're quite burdened by all the requests they have gotten. And Berlin wants to move forward here and actually have some kind of transparency legislation around food safety, which is great. However, on the other side, our federal council recently proposed a ban to our national parliament about the ban on mirroring of food safety reports. So they actually want to forbid copies of these reports that can be then found online. It's quite targeted at us we would think has kind of a Lex pot secret. And we're not quite sure what to think of it. It's, it's very weird because you know information really wants to be shared and trying to have like a ban on copies, like a digital rights management of something it really never really works and not quite sure where they want to go there. But if I had to apply a smiley system to these two items, I would use these ones here. So happy face for the upcoming transparency legislation but confused, scary face for the other one. And that was it. Thank you. And stay safe with the food and you know the virus.