 I'm Alex Parsons. I'm a researcher at MySociety. In the UK, MySociety runs whatdotheyknow.com and internationally develops the Out of Italy software that supports similar sites across Europe and around the world. And in the last year, our research teams focused on some questions that are a few steps removed from that software. We've been thinking about the wider regulatory context for FOI services existing, how digital tools can help with that, but also where there are problems that need to go to wider changes to address the issues. So to start with, MySociety 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 of technology. Out of Italy's use in a number of ways to try and improve the effectiveness and the impact of the local system of FOI, and this sort of works in three key ways. So it exposes the access points by making it easier to make FOI requests and so reduces barriers to use. You can help scale the public information by putting the results of FOI requests online. This means that public information becomes more widely available for search engines rather than requiring requests. And something we've rolled 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 to help produce high impact works using FOI. 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 functioning access to information regime, putting technology on the top of that can make it work better and more efficiently. But what if, hang on, what if there we go, what if the access to information system just doesn't work? And the practical reality of FOI or many countries is that especially for potentially high impact requests is information not only maybe withheld but withheld in ways that are outside either the letter or the spiritual 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 inexperienced 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 and offers 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 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 FOI law. And the other which we gained 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 trading a bit of the work we've done on the European side and then double back for work in the UK and see how it fits into that. So the area we're sort of 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 we're just going to ask 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? And if you put those in a grid we get this. So generally speaking information commissioner is a term, they're annoying to me about these terms 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 and 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's no specific thing set up. And the categories don't work entirely well because we don't distinguish often between the idea of mediating information commissioners and regulatory information commissioners like the first mostly speaking solves problems by bringing 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 new language just explain how these different systems are operating. Generally it's and 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 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 clysically independent and how effective is the overall view process? Using these three different scales we've applied a cluster in approach to identify which countries are most similar to each other and made six groups of countries. I'm not going to go too much into 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 down here we got clusters two and four which have low cliff dependence but also not high oversight bodies. Up here we've 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 you know a more effective regulator. So for instance down here there are these are independent regulators who are generally speaking that's about financial installation of decision making but that's but they're not they don't have a lot of power as up here they have a lot of power no they have a lot of power but not a lot of political independence. This one here is the UK and this sort of applies to our recommendations so is we think that 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 a 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. Bang on 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.