 Ychydigonwyd, mynd i'n rhan o'r ddweud yn ddechrau'r ddydd â'r ddweud yn y Ddoedd yng Nghymru, i ddweud yng Nghymru yn yng nghydfyrr yn y ddweud hynny yn y ddydd yn oeddig yn unrhywgol yng Nghymru yn ddweud i gael ddweud i'r ddweud yr hynny i ddechrau. Yn y rhan oes, cyfnodd am y byddwch ein perthynau byd yng Nghymru, Lucas Amin, yng Nghymru yn y ddweud, ac yng nghymru yn oedd yn y ddweud yn y ddechrau. ac ychwanegwch eich gweithio ar gyfer y gweithgawr a'r cymdeithas ac ymdweithio ar gyfer y gweithgawr i'r informatio cymdeithas yma, ac ychwanegwch eich gweithgawr. Ond ydych chi'n gwneud ymddangos, dyma'r ffordd ychydig iawn yn gweithio ar gyfer y gweithgawr, yn gweithio ar gyfer y gweithgawr, sy'n unig oherwydd ymddangos yma, ymddangos yng nghymru yn ymddiadau yng nghymru yng Nghymru. ac ydych chi'n gynnwys bod floating a roedd i fy nghasuren. Mae yma Ynnghwys wediFinallyers mateiswyr be cyfrindwyd, gyda即on ni fy mhag boundary fel Llyfrins θαreu a Feid Lord. A fyddwn pob i gynnwys traf predictedm, mynd i gyd yn oLabel o bethau cyf insane a fyddwn yn parwyrach o mynd menyn. Roedd compound y gall에서는ol o ergyseteriaeth hearsur. A oedd ohododd yn rhan omoren o gyllPr. Nhwys ddaeth y gytrach o clyрон selif i ddemaven i fourddau, a jael mae gwmunig o ddigfedd. Mae hynny gynhynbediad iddo tyfn o'r cyffredin iawn i explainu gan ôl y penlyru rhai. A oherwydd, rwy'n cael yn cael ei bod yn rhoi cyffredin iawn o'r cyffredin iawn i g weld sydd y cyffredin iawn. ëAni, ar 95 o ffincio dda ni, dweud hyffredin iawn o'r cyffredin iawn i gael fwy yma, oswn a'r cair. Felly, mae'n rhai symud o'r cyffredin iawn iddyn nhw i mwyn i gael ddwy,ddwdon fy ydy i'r rhaniaeth alfaeitt i mi extremu fedri dimRI ac yn ddod, felyd i'r rhaniaeth dimRI i os y gywda chefiwydd спقد, ac ar-gylwydd fan allu'r corpus. A dyna di nhw'n rhaid i fyf addysg byr gamonon dimRI a weithf deciding guyn y clanTT ac â'i ho iawn i sesio llTu faeth baut alw yn g widertaeth ar所有. Gwyrdd i fych ennill plural nhw rydym am y 듯iaid ysglu awr, gydwahf ysglu rawr hynny, yn oes cyflwyddol이, ond ddargen a'r gw�ishion gw 본 gyda'r cyfnod yn cyd-refwngor â'i cyd-refwngor yng Nghymru. Mae'n ddiddordebeth yma yng nghyd-dweithio'r cyd-refwngor yng nghymru. Mae yna'r sefydliadau yn ymddangos cyfnod gyda'r cyfnod cyfnod yng Nghymru, ond mae'r cyfrifiadau yn ymddangos cyffredinol yn y cyfnod yno. Mae'r gyfrifiadau yn ymddangos cyfnod ar gyfer y cyd-refwngor, yw'r cyffredinol o'r cyfnod ar gyfer yng Nghymru. Ond oed yn ysgrifennu, sydd wedi'i gweithio gael'r llyfr yn rhan i'w ffaith, ac mae'r llyfr ynynu'r Gwyrdd yn ystod y ddechreu'r cyfnod ar gyfer y ddechrau. Yn ymdyn nhw, ymdyn nhw yw ysgrifennu sy'n ei wneud ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw. Yn ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw, ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw'n ei wneud ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw, For context, the Cabinet Office has one of the worst FOI records in central government, and they really do tend to lead more towards withholding information rather than disclosing it. They do have a tendency to be secretive, and for the Cabinet Office to advise other government departments and agencies on how to respond to requests, it doesn't quite sit well with me. The advice that has been released is questionable. The Clearing House also asks government departments to send them the drafts of FOI responses before they are sent out to the requester, and it indicates a certain level of control on what can and cannot be released to the public. We also know that it is contributing to delays experienced by FOI requests, so we had one campaign that has worked very, very hard on trying to access documents about the infected blood scandal, a huge scandal in the UK, charting back from the 1980s. And he sent off a freedom of information request to one government department that got forwarded to the Clearing House, and then we managed to get hold of internal documents where one can see the Treasury interacting with the Clearing House. The Clearing House is saying, you know, actively discouraging this department not to release information, but the Treasury was saying, yes, we really do want to give this information, and that whole process lasted for five months. And we will know that, well, we know in the UK that, you know, requests to be answered within 20 working days. And very recently, actually, last week, I believe, we found that the Clearing House was interfering with FOI requests about incredibly tragic, sort of the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy that killed 72 people. We know that other journalists have their requests have been flagged to this Clearing House. A Times journalist saw that he managed to get hold of documents where it was found that his freedom of information request had been flagged to this central, this Clearing House, because he's a journalist. And there was another journalist who found that the Clearing House was working to block the release of documents to journalists, even though the Department for International Trade was very happy to release the information. So, yes, Open Democracy Investigation into the Clearing House has had a huge impact. Journalist politicians across the political spectrum, they've demanded an inquiry into this process. And in the summer, we eventually did manage to spark Parliamentary Inquirer, which is really good news. It's going to happen later this year. They are currently gathering up accepting evidence, which I have about to file tomorrow. But no, it's and we also reported that the Cabinet Office is conducting its own inquiry into the Clearing House, which is quite funny considering how earlier this year, they rubbish the reporting and they said that we were ridiculous and tendentious. So there we have it. Hopefully this Parliamentary Inquirer will lead to positive change in the way FOI requests are dealt with in central government departments. I know I've sped through those slides and yes, that's it. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much, Anna. That's really, really interesting. And yet that very, very quick tour does not do justice to the amount of wonderful work you guys are doing over there. We very much support it. We have done our evidence as well for the inquiry and encourage anyone else in the UK that is interested in this to look into that and submit their own evidence if they have any. Great. OK, moving swiftly on. We have a video next. Unfortunately, our next speaker wasn't able to join us live. But here we go. This is Lizette Humming of the Dutch Flemish Association for Investigative Journalists. And this is Lost in Europe, deploying the Albert Alley network on cross-border investigation. I've been trying to set up my laptop in a way that you can actually look at a person, which would be me now, and look at the slides as well. But it didn't work. So I'm going to switch to the slides in a second and guide you through it at the background. I'm Lizette Humming. I'm an investigative journalist from the Netherlands, relatively new in the field journalism. I have a legal background and I've been asked to help Lost in Europe with their freedom of information procedures. And we ended up filing requests in 14 different European countries this year. There's two pending at the moment, so that would make a total of 16. And six of these have been filed already via the Albert Alley platforms and one with a practice that, which is a similar freedom of information platform running with different software. I will tell a bit about the aim of our project, then the freedom of information procedure and the learnings that we can share using the Albert Alley platforms. So the aim of the Lost in Europe project that started in 2016 is gathering the stories of 10,000 missing migrant children in Europe. And missing means in the sense that they are missing from public records. In the past five years, Lost in Europe has set up seven different files and different angles to the projects. I'm working together with 20 journalists across Europe. There's been quite some publications. There's been more and more research and information about pushbacks at external European borders, pushbacks, meaning migrant being pushed back at the European border. And Geisha was in the forests at different border crossings in Europe, where she found torn pieces of paper, for example at the French Italian border. So we decided to look for pushbacks in Europe and concentrated on European countries that are part of the European Union and specifically part of the Schengen agreement, not only, but those were one of the first questions we had to ask ourselves. And Monika, one of the journalists involved in the project, dived into the existing research mostly done by NGOs on the ground and mostly done at the borders you can see here on the map she made. So we were wondering where should we start? The documents that Geisha found and also most of the documents that we found in the NGO research online were more general arrest documents. Only in France, we found a refus d'entrée. We thought at the beginning was the best way to start by asking for these refus d'entrée in France. And our first version was asking for the actual documents and then we changed that after, also after talking about it with other people, various of them by at the Alavetteli network. I'll come back to that later, that we changed it to asking for data sets and then we decided in the end to ask for the total numbers. And expecting that those numbers would be inside of data sets and not so much asking for the original documents, but also because we were not interested in the documents themselves, but more in the figures. So in the end, this is our freedom of information request. Geisha, of course, she knew that I was involved with the Dutch Alavetteli platform and I told her that there are many others in Europe that we can use to file these requests. And I told her that back then, not a lot of the platforms had the public at the pro version yet, so that we might have to file in public. And she immediately said that that was not a problem for her at all. And I think that most of us expect that for journalists in general, the preferred option would be to file a hidden that you don't need that you cannot see that on the platform. We looked at all the Alavetteli platforms and in the end decided to use as many of them as possible and discover that some of them were down there. There is no platform in Spain anymore, not in Italy at the moment and the Norwegian one was down. We started on the 21st of February 2021 filing France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia, because those were the countries that we found documents in the NGO reports. For filing the request, we needed some general freedom of information information that we gathered using the Alavetteli network. I will skip to the learnings so far and please don't hesitate to contact me if you want to know more about our project, our freedom of information procedures, experiences, the Alavetteli platforms, the differences between the freedom of information procedures in different countries. I'd be happy to tell you about this. Our learnings would be, for me, it was really obvious that it was a really good thing. I'm really happy that I've been to the Alavetteli conference. I think it was two years ago because there was a lot of the people that I got in contact with this past year were people that I met at the conference, which made it a lot easier to get in touch. And also the Google platform sort of works. Maybe it can work better if we would be able to communicate in different ways, but I did get a helpful reaction. Go public if you can, because I also noticed that it is easier to collaborate on a public request than having to give permissions or password sharing, passwords or anything like that. On the freedom of information procedure itself, it was really smart to check national freedom of information rules and regulations because they differ. I expected them to differ, but I didn't know in what way, so I was happy that we did, which also made me realise that I want to change the learning to let's set up a place where we can collect these national freedom of information rules and regulations and share it. Some more learnings are look for local national context because it helps. The fifth would be to double check whether the data is online or public already, because we found out in Hungary, for example, it's the best example. There was quite some information online already. We didn't expect that. There's more shared by the authorities than we could ever imagined. Using the Albedelli platforms, I found out that the English translation would be very helpful and the Swedish platform has it. I was thinking also for the Dutch platform, why not? Because it's there. I knew the platform by heart, so for me, also in languages that I don't speak, I was translating everything all the time, but it helped that I really knew how the platform is structured and what I could find where. That's not for everybody, of course. Also something that the Dutch platform does not have is using the space for information and explanation about the authorities that we can do in the platform. I realized if you're not so aware on how the authorities work on what, like I am in the Netherlands and that's why I didn't immediately think of using that possibility. It's very valuable, so let's use it. Eighth would be that I noticed that paid staff were quicker and more helpful in assisting. It's not against the volunteers that helped because I know as a volunteer for the platform, every hour you spend helping other people is a valuable hour and difficult to offer in a way. But it is for me running the Dutch platform, a valuable learning when combining it with requests and freedom of information procedures not felt by other platforms. It can be quite overwhelming and I'd be happy to share how we're managing that at the moment in general. Please know where to find me and I hope it was helpful. That was great. Unfortunately, as I said, Liz, that isn't actually here with us right now. But as Emma said in the chat, if anyone has any questions for her, she's very, very happy to answer those. What a lovely presentation. Isn't it wonderful to see all the love coming for Albertelli? Another presentation now on Albertelli driven exposure of the misuse of public resources in an election campaign. So this is over to Drayon Hoffman from Gong in Croatia. Thank you, Rebecca. Hello everybody. Thank you for joining in and thanks to my society for the kind invitation to this show and tell session. I'm going to take my chance is on the screen sharing function now. And I think you can see my initial slide right now. Okay, thank you. Thank you for the feedback. Okay. So hello everybody. My name is Drayon Hoffman speaking on behalf of Gong and NGO from Zagreb Croatia about something that's very close to our core activities, which often time pertain to elections and other other processes of citizen participation. And in particular, Albertelli was very helpful to us in exposing the misuse of public resources in an election campaign taking place in Croatia just this year in fact just a couple of months ago. Trying to set the stage, the context was that local elections took place in Croatia in spring that is in May of 2021. And these local elections are quite a complicated affair in Croatia is even such a small state a small country is very much fragmented in terms of territorial administration in as many as 556 local administrations. Those being cities or municipalities, and those groups into 20 counties. And when you take into account the fact that this election is a parallel action of both executive and representative bodies. That is, mayors and county prefects are elected while it on other ballots represented representatives to county assemblies or city councils are also elected plus municipal councils are elected were applicable. You can see that this election is, in fact, several thousand micro elections taking place at the same time. Our tip off was calling from a citizen who noticed that a YouTube channel named the gyr TV, which is somewhat difficult to translate, but the gyr would be sort of around trying to go around the place as in a walkabout was very intensely active during two weeks in April, which is very indicative because this is the time when the official, or rather before the official election campaign was taking place. And this channel was very proactive in offering quite really quaint footage of seaside towns and villages across several counties in Croatia. Most of very successful local projects and in something I came to build invitations to citizens for these successful trends to continue. And in each of these videos available on the YouTube channel and comment mayors were very prominently featured. This is one example of one of those lovely videos featuring this journalist on the left hand side of the photo here named Dauri Urkutys, I believe, who appeared in a number of cities, every time very standing very near to the incumbent mayors and presenting what advances were made in the quality of life in these cities in the past, in the past term of the local government. And as we would soon find out, these videos were followed or made possible by a slew of service contracts with the digital media group, which is a company operated by the aforementioned journalist. And in fact, these contracts were very formulaic. Each of them provided for the company to ensure 30 minutes of footage, including a talk with the mayor, which would be broadcast at least twice on local television, and would be promoted for 30 days on social media targeting an 18 to 65 year old audience following during and following and after the election campaign. Note that the 18 plus audience are also voters. The price was also fairly formulaic, 2,600 euro for this package of services. So, being the curious bunch that we are, we used our own national TV platform called the Mamo Prawaznati. We have the right to know.org to send out generic query to as many as 68 cities and municipalities that we found listed on this YouTube channel. So really our work was cut out for us by this business enterprise. And we asked each of those to provide us with contracts, the exact contract which covers the filming and broadcasting services provided by the company that was engaged. It's important to ask because according to our national act and financing of political activities and election campaigns, it is forbidden to fund to fund political parties and campaigns from state bodies, public companies, legal persons with public prerogatives bodies of local self governments public companies owned by local self governments. Essentially what we suspected was that public resources were being misused through these videos to effectively provide campaigns to incumbent mayors and to the exclusion of their political opponents. Given the incumbents and unfair electoral advantage because they could directly sign the contracts with this company to have a video broadcast of their successes and advertise their candidacy effectively for the next four year term. The outcome of the 68 queries was according to this breakdown below. We actually had a very successful turnout with the 54 complete responses from the citizen municipalities which proved that they in fact had contracts with this company. Several more were partially successful or never came back one of them refused was a refusal because allegedly the city had no active contract with the company, but it might be the case that the cooperation was arranged in some other way. The aftermath was fairly scarce. Unfortunately, some media attention was brought here to the case by weekly newspaper and very highly read creation language news portal, but there were no legal sections whatsoever. In fact, the state electoral commission gave us a direct answer that they cannot determine the activities of potential that is not yet confirmed candidates. So in the first phase of the electoral campaign, they weren't sure if the incumbent mayors would in fact be candidates. You could call this a cynical response, but technically it's true. This was followed by the interpretation again of the state electoral commission that they could not determine that public resources were being misused for for campaign purposes because according to their interpretation. It's entirely possible that these videos were produced by in the goal of regularly promoting the activities of local so governments the very fact that it took place during the election campaign period was not sufficient proof in and of itself. So in conclusion, our lesson, our takeaway from this case was that while our technological capabilities for ensuring FY might be formidable, they are no match for a lack of political will, which is very prevalent and plays us on a daily basis. So thank you again for listening to my talk. Thank you, blue sky timer for being such a convenient oppressor in my peripheral view all the time and looking forward to hearing the other talks. Thank you again. Thank you so much. And that was that was really interesting. And not too cynical at all. I think it's it's really important to be able to use FY for this, even if we can't immediately get a win out of it. I'm sure I'm sure it's all good evidence for the future. Right moving especially along. We've got our very own Alex Parsons next research associate my society. Take it away Alex. Cool. One second. At all up okay. Great. So, I'm Alex Parsons. I'm a researcher in my society. In the UK my society runs what they know.com and internationally developed the out of Italy software that supports similar sites across Europe and around the world. And in the last year our research teams focus on some questions that are a few steps removed from that software. We've been thinking about the wider regulatory context for FY services existing. How digital tools and help with that but also where there are problems that need to go to wider changes to address the issues. So to start with like my society is a civic tech organization and civic tech is all about finding the pressure points where existing rights or processes can be supercharged for the use technology. I was had is using a number of ways to try and improve the effectiveness and impact local system of FY and this sort of works in free key ways. So it exposes the access points by making it easier to make FY request and so reduces barriers to use. You can help scale the public information by putting the results of FY requests online. This means that public information becomes more widely available for search engines rather than require requests and something we've rolling out in the last few years is the idea of helping high impact stories. So this is a set of pro features aimed at journalists, researchers and campaigners help produce high impact works using FY. This is currently being rolled out in the UK and with our partners across Europe. The issue with this approach is it says if you have a function access to information regime putting technology on the top of that can make it work better and more efficiently. But what if what if there we go what if the access to information system just doesn't work. And the practical reality of FY or many countries is that especially for potentially high impact requests is information not only maybe we've held but we've held in ways that are outside either the letter or the spirit of law. Some of this can be addressed through technology, just as authorities learn what they can get away with the experience request will learn how best to approach refusals. And we can use digital tools to try and take that expertise and make it available to experience requesters. What do they know in the UK currently has a system of refusal advice, which takes users through a questionnaire based on the kind of refusal they got an offer snippets to help build a case for internal review. Given we know in the UK that internal review can result in more information being released, given people more ability to make appeals should and we're going to check on this in a few months time leads to new information being released that wouldn't have been without that help. So in some sense the appeal system is just another access point and we can put technology on top of that access point to help people access it. But it's also a process that varies a lot more between different jurisdictions and it's always a feature that's hard to scale internationally. In different countries and even inside different areas of the same country, entirely different processes for appeals apply. In some jurisdictions the appeal process might be quite a useful and effective tool. In others it may be hard, it's expensive to access or just ineffective. In these situations the problem is further upstream and it's hard to resolve with digital tools over the top of the system. So for the last few, no this year we've been pursuing two research projects. One which we published back in April looked at the situation in the UK and opportunities for improving the overall framework of FY law. And the other which we came to publish towards the end of the year looks at the wider European context of appeals and regulation of access to information. I'm going to start training a bit of the work we've done on the European side and then double back to work in the UK and see how it fits into that. So there we were interested in is when someone is unhappy with the response to something, how that is appealed and what the regulatory system is that ensures that the public authorities are working effectively. And there is often oversight bodies that are charged with that in different countries. So to start with just using asking two questions about these different kinds of bodies. Is it a specific body concerned with freedom of information or is it a general body? And do they have any formal powers to investigate or are they mediators? If you put those in a grid we get this. So generally speaking, information commissioner is a term that they're annoying to me about these terms that they're entirely work all the time. But an information commissioner is like a specific version of an ombudsman who is more concerned with information law. In countries where there is no specific or general one generally you can always appeal to the courts and so that is like the option of last resort if there is no specific thing set up. And that the categories don't work entirely well because we don't distinguish often between the idea of mediator information commissioners and regulator information commissioners. We're the first mostly speaking solves problems by bringing the bodies to bring the parties together in a room trying to provide advice and mediate the dispute, whereas the other has more powers to compel the release of information. And we don't really distinguish between this and terminology so it's just a new language just explain how these different systems are operated. Generally, it's and it's all it's all a bit blurry anyway because it's not that a regulatory information commissioner will always work for enforcement generally speaking they will do a lot of work for mediation as well. So this works if it's not these not clear divisions but it sort of helps shape how different countries pursue in their regulation. And to explore a bit more what differences there are between different regimes we've used access info's RTI ratings to create separate scores for free questions. How powerful is the oversight body is the oversight body physically independent and how effective is the overall review process. Using these three different scales we've applied a classroom approach to identify which countries are most similar to each other and made six groups of countries. I don't really detail on that now, but what is interesting is when you contrast the score for political independence of an oversight body with the kind of powers it has, and you get this map. And so can you see my mouse so I can. Cool. So that down here we got clusters two and four which have low political dependence but also not high oversight bodies up here we got cluster one which is quite good at both. And I think the interesting so just to give some examples on that so cluster one has got high scores for both that includes Albania Croatia Denmark and Ireland in that set. But the interesting ones are group ones in group five and ones in group three, who have different journeys to go on to become a more effective regulator. And these are independent regulators who are generally speaking that's about financial installation of decision making, but that's, but not have a lot of power is up here, they have a lot of power. Now they have a lot of power, but not a lot of political independence. This one here is the UK. A part recommendation so is we think the body in the UK should be more independent and move the oversight of it from Parliament to the government. But this is quite a special journey in the sense that very few countries in Europe have this specific problem. And so the lessons from generalizable from the UK is not the other countries have different problems, and each path to a better regulator it was going to be unique. And that is almost exactly on time. Thank you very much Alex. And yes that the report into the UK is available on our website. There's lots of really good lots of really good stuff in there. And yeah hopefully we will be putting out that that other reports, looking into regulation in Europe in the next few months. We may actually be reaching out to some of you to to talk to you and get your expertise and your input on that if if we're able to do so. Having swiftly on, we have Samuel Goethe from Madada France running an access to information platform in France obstacles and success stories. Hello. I'm Samuel. Nice to talk to everyone and I'm really glad to participate in that event and I really appreciate all the work that you do with a live Italy and I'm glad to meet over similar platforms in Europe. So thank you to you about Madada, which is now two years old. I'll have it early platform, and I will start by telling you a bit about this platform so we launched it in October 2019. We are, we're open knowledge foundation France, and it's a project that we have in mind for several years and that we are glad to make now real. We have more than 1000 requests, and it's increasing a lot since we have launched all the the pro features of a live Italy. And we have now an impact and we also have an awareness of the platform which is really good and and our figures keep on increasing and so we'll talk to you today about how we, we have managed to launch this platform as we have, and to give you and to finish to give you some success stories that we're proud of us to the two years running this this website. So, if I give you some context about open data on France I will give you the metaphor of the leaning tower of Pisa. Probably all knows leaning tower of Pisa of Pisa maybe you've been there. It's a beautiful building beautiful monument that is known for for its its leaning. But we always, we don't always know why it's so the reason it's leaning is that because it has unstable foundations, and so a bit of the same with open data in France if we consider open data as as a nice monument. And the foundation has freedom of information. So why is it a beautiful building open data in France. I mean, things are not always perfect, but it's a situation which open data is mandatory by the law since October 19 October 2018. It's ongoing this effort about an opening data. Yesterday more than 500 commitments were announced by all government departments. I don't say they're always ambitious commitments. I wouldn't say that, but it's still an ongoing effort and the government is is aware of the importance of open data and it's it's a political priority in the moment. The country if we look at the rankings it's second country in the OECD ranking it's third country in the European data maturity report. Again, it's not always perfect and I could talk during hours about all the issues that we face with open data, but I'm here more focused about the foundation of this tower, which is the, which is freedom of information. So we have a law that is that is quite old. It started in 1978. It's called the CADAS as the Commission of Axial Document Administrative. It's a quite easy procedure procedures. It has a large definition of administrative documents, which is what you can request. It's now a constitutional right so everyone can can use FOIA quite easily in France, but we have several issues. First is that awareness of the law is still weak among citizens. It's not a law that is really known and a right that people know. I'm always amazed by how many people don't know about this law, but also it's not known by many civil servants, which makes our work even more difficult. Requests, when you send your request, they are often bypassed, they are not even considered. On my data, we have more than 50% of our request that still await response and it's something, it's a difficulty that we face all the time with our request. And the thing is that if we look in government administration, FOIA officers procedures are not in place in government administration, which is also linked to the fact that they often don't answer. And too often they wait for the mediator intervention from LACADA to make a statement and before releasing any document, especially on documents where we know it's possible by the law. So we have very unstable foundation on which we build metadata and metadata is part of an ongoing movement to increase the awareness of the importance of this law and of freedom of information. So we started to make metadata more than three years ago with a small team with the help of Laurent, Pierre, Pascal, and Ida and several of us, which I cannot mention and other organization that helped us build metadata, which has mySociety, Transparencia, HelloClub, Uvreboit, and other organization. One thing we did is that we had to report a quite massive database on all the, it's called the Public Service Directorates, like 50,000 contacts, which is a difficulty was the only database that we have that was comprehensive about the French local and national government and all the agencies. We also had to request LACADA, so the mediator, about their own email database or their contact in the administration, do you follow me? So they have contact in every administration, it's mandatory by the law, it's called TRADA. It's not the people that are well dressed, it's only a person responsible with an administrative document, which means all the person that are your contact when you have a FOIA request. And we have to send a request, which is the first refuse then during more than six months, and then they approve and they send us this document that we don't want to read at first. And we also spend lots of time explaining civil servants and citizens about our approach. So we have now a website that works pretty well. So I would like to share you some, quickly some success stories. There are plenty of articles mentioning MADADA, so I will not look at that much more about civil society organization using MADADA. So one example is what Secur Catolic, so it's an NGO with ACITAS made with MADADA to look at the sanctions for welfare benefits. They talked to department councils to local council and asked how many sanctions did they release for welfare benefits and they found that more than 115,000 households each year are withdrawn from the welfare revenues each year. And they had a difficulty is that only a third of all these departments answered with an acknowledgement of receipt and only 13 on 100 actually release the data. Another example is COVID virus concentration in sewage water. We had a request from COVID tracker, which is a national website to track COVID. And it took six months to obtain this data in spite of the urgency of getting access to the data, but now it's integrated and used a lot to track alternatively how COVID is spreading in the country. There is also the quadrature, which is struggling against surveillance that is using MADADA to track many things such as how smart city project use digital surveillance. So they look at public procurement. For example, here we have Paris 2024 Olympics, so all the innovative solutions for safety that are used for the Olympics. They also look at all the locations of surveillance cameras that are approved with prefectorial orders. And so we have had success and they are actually using a lot of MADADA and advocating for its use. And we also, we have done our own investigation here on the transparency of public procurement and subsidies in France. It's mandatory in many ways to open this data. And we found that if you look only at the green department, it's only the one that released the data that we wanted. And we found that among those 188 requests, we have only received only 61 positive answer, less than 42%. So to conclude on that, MADADA is used a lot. It has now a good awareness in the public, so which is really good. It also is part of a campaign to improve the freedom of information law, which as I have shown you is quite unstable and needs really in an emergency some improvement. But we've also had some success and we can show now that civil society is using a lot foia to use in their advocacy efforts. So thanks for listening and I'll be glad to exchange with you. Thank you so much, Samuel. That was really great. And I think even though we all here want our FOI systems to be better, it's definitely important to celebrate the wins. So thank you very much for that. Right. It's already our final speaker. So this is Patricia Anderson from Give Them Time Scotland, a change in the law for school scarters in Scotland through FOI. So if, Samuel, you can stop sharing and we can get Patricia. There we go. Thanks Rebecca. Hi everyone and thanks very much for having me here today. I'm going to talk about a campaign that I co-founded which relied heavily upon FOI responses which we gained through the What Do They Know website, which is part of my society. So before I kind of go into exactly how we used FOI, I need to give a little bit of background to the campaign. First of all, I should let you know I'm speaking as a parent today who co-founded this campaign three years ago. And we were campaigning for a further year of nursery funding in Scotland for all children who were deferring their primary one start. To start like many campaigns, our campaign started because of personal experience. There was a group of parents across the country who were realising that their children were not ready to start school at this sort of designated age or the expected age in Scotland, which is usually between about four and a half and five and a half. And myself along with some other parents managed to inform ourselves through the internet that we actually had a legal right to defer our children, even if they were over five and a half, as long as they had not turned age six by the school starting date. So very quickly then this is the law in Scotland, which has actually been enforced since 1980 in the highlighted section explains that any child who's not five by the school start date, which is inevitably in August, but very slightly by each of the 32 local authority areas in Scotland. Then they don't have to start school until the following August. So as an example, just to kind of explain that further, if your child's date of birth is the 15th of August 2017, then in 2022 next year, if the school start date in that council was 14th of August, then they wouldn't have to go to school until the following year, even if it was a day before or a day after they turned six. But this is little known in Scotland. Most people know that if your child is born in January in February, that you have a legal right to defer and you will receive the all prize nursery funding for a further year. When mid August to December born cohort who are still four at the school start date, then it wasn't very widely known a research survey we did nationally in 2018, which had nearly 700 parents in every single local authority area responding, showed that only 16% of parents knew that in August you could defer a child. So we started to get quite anxious about the fact that it was very difficult for us to find this information. And then once we found it, we realised that actually, even though we have a legal right to defer our children who we think we don't want them to start school until they're older, that was a relief. But we don't have an automatic entitlement to continued nursery funding and for many families that is absolutely essential to enable them to both parents to work or to meet around family life. And in Scotland you have a 99% uptake rate at the moment for age three to five year olds in nursery places. So what inevitably this meant was that there was a discrepancy between the actual legal right to defer a child who hadn't turned five by the school start date and the entitlement to automatic continued nursery funding. And really that was down to individual councils, whether they would grant that or not. No parent has ever said to us, yeah I don't mind if they grant it or not because obviously there's a lot of money involved in that, the expense to the parent. Another issue was that if the council refused it, that they could oust your child from that council run nursery so that you would have to then move them to another nursery, a private one, all the unsettling of that for the child and the family, and then the additional cost because private nursery was much more expensive than council nursery. So there's a lot of issues here. So we established that there was these discrepancies from anecdotal evidence given by parents, but then we really wanted to prove it and that's where FOI came in. Initially we sent FOIs to the 32 local authorities by private email and my goodness it was hard. We are all lay people. Some people had processed FOIs through their work, but suddenly in our free time when you get young children on a job and everything else to juggle your 32 FOIs to process and process the jargon that came with them and then sort them all on your email inbox and just all the additional time requirements of that. And then, for me, one thing that I hadn't expected but which became pretty scary actually, I'm not a journalist, I'm not trained in data processing. One of the things that I find very hard is knowing what I could share and what I couldn't share. So for example, this was the tale of an email signature that I got from a local authority and the number one it says this is sent in confidence for the address you only it may contain legally privileged information and I'm sorry that word legally just sets off alarm bells for me. J to protection GDPR. I thought the freedom of information when it was free. I thought the onus was on them to decide what to share and suddenly me as a private citizen with no training suddenly had to have this Uber sense of what I could share or not would I be liable if I shared information that was sensitive or official. Some of these emails were labeled with those terms, and it became this, you know, I was going in this, you know, vortex of going around my head and analyzing it what could I do, what could I not do and actually, you know, if I hadn't found the what do they know website, it would have been prohibitive to what we actually managed to achieve in the campaign in the end and, you know, actually getting that information out there. So here's some of the information that we found sending through the what do they know website was brilliant because it took the pressure off any individuals to decide can I share this or not because everything's public. Everything's got a web link. The authorities that respond know that it's going into the public domain and therefore the onus is on them as it should be to be transparent to provide what they can provide or not. So you can see here that we established across all the 32 local authority councils in Scotland the rate of approving these requests for funding over the last three years. We've used a sort of traffic light system without the amber to identify different local authorities and their rates of approving these or not. And you can see that there's discrepancies there while we've gone up from 13 councils approving all requests in 2018-19 to 19 now. You know, if you live in one of those unfortunate authorities that doesn't, you know, have the automatic funding policy then it's a very difficult time for you as a parent to decide whether to move your child nursery, can you afford it. But in good news, we lobbied using the information that we established from the what do they know website or FOIs and we've successfully lobbied for the law to be changed. So in Scotland, from August 2023, any child taking up that 1980-43 year old right to defer their school start will automatically be guaranteed a further year of nursery funding by ticking a box. And that is just such peace of mind for us as campaigners to know that other parents won't have to go through what many parents have suffered and experienced over the last few years and to have to potentially make a decision about their child's based interest and conflict with what they can afford. Thank you. What do they know in my society? Three seconds to go. Thank you so much for that. That was a really lovely illustration of using FOI to achieve a specific goal. Again, lovely to know that there are great successes in the world. Okay, well thank you everyone. Thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you to all our speakers. The last hour has gone by really quickly. We really appreciate you joining us. As I said at the beginning, we've got an exciting new programme of work attached to TicTac labs. I will get it right one day. And as I said before, if you stay on the mailing list, we'll be sending information around about that very soon. We're just in the process of finalising the programme with the newly set up steering group. So we will be in touch shortly. Sign up for updates. As I said, if you have any questions for any of our speakers or if you just want to reach out and make connections with them, that's fine. We can arrange all of that. By the way, thank you very much, FOI enthusiasts, and have a great rest of your right to know day. Bye.