 Hi, I'm Gareth from MySociety and this is a talk about how freedom of information can be used for impactful journalism and campaigning and some tools we make to help you do that. Freedom of information or FOI laws allow citizens to request access to information held by public authorities. While the laws and performance of the countries around the world differs, the idea is roughly the same in most countries. So let's start off with some examples of how FOI can be used in different ways. The first is Public Interest Journalism. Because the information that's available through FOI is held by public bodies, there's usually a strong public interest in what the data is used for. At LATSO used FOI to obtain local government audit reports of a sewageworks company. Five years of reports found that raw sewage was being pumped into a nearby river and the story led to the company being fined. NETSPOLITICT requested internal emails that highlighted that the EU may have covered up conflict of interest with a corporate lobbyist. An open democracy used FOI in the UK to uncover significant revelations around government activities through dark money financing and lobbying. FOI is also a really powerful tool for collecting large data sets. The Bureau of Local in the UK pieced together a nationwide dataset revealing how much public property had been sold off across England in response to austerity measures. And they combined this crowdsourced data with traditional reporting of the stories of the people affected and this made national headlines. Citizens also use FOI themselves to make change. A citizen in York used FOI to investigate cycle barriers that did not comply with equality regulations, which forced several councils to replace them with more inclusive alternatives. All of these stories and hundreds more like them have been enabled by our freedom of information platform called Alavatalli. Alavatalli is an open source FOI platform to help lower the barriers to asking for public information. It's installed in over 25 jurisdictions around the world and has helped citizens make over 800,000 freedom of information requests. Alavatalli makes it easy to submit FOI requests to public authorities. It's a database for the authorities who are subject to FOI and contains the correct contact details for sending requests. The simple interface makes it less intimidating to write a request because public body websites are often full of legal jargon. Once the request is sent, the correspondence between the citizen and authority is all handled in one place with helpful formatting and metadata and help along the way during the process. The requests are made in public so that authorities are encouraged to respond rather than claiming they've never received them. And the benefit of the request being published means that Alavatalli acts as a public archive of released public information and citizens and journalists can search the site for interesting data. Users can also follow individual requests or request the specific authorities or request mention in specific search terms as a way of keeping up to date on the information being released. And of course you can have these email these updates email straight to your inbox. Alavatalli also includes features for professional users of freedom of information like journalists, campaigners and academic researchers. A key feature of PRO is the ability to create batch requests, so picking from a list of authorities and sending the same request to each. The same simple interface is retained and all requests in the batch are neatly grouped together. PRO users can keep their request private for 3, 6 or 12 months so that they can work on their story before publishing the raw data. Managing lots of FOI requests can be difficult, so we've built a dashboard specifically designed for handling large scale use of FOI where all the data can be exported to analyse in your data journalism tools of choice. And it comes with a smart to-do list for promoting or helping you take action only on the requests that have received an update. And PRO users also receive a daily email digest instead of having an overloaded inbox. And users can also link the source data to the published story to add weight to the reporting by giving readers confidence that the story is based on factual information. And there are several other features that help make PRO an all-in-one toolkit for professional users to get information from public authorities to use in their work. And as well as making it easier to make and manage requests, Alavitalie sites have their own user communities who can be activated for journalism around FOI requests. The simplest way is to just follow the public requests. Many stories are discovered from journalists just following their local authorities or topics of interest. So a request on what do they know, the UK version of Alavitalie, was picked up by a local newspaper around the top books borrowed from the library last year. And this might not be world-changing journalism, but these small stories help create a heartbeat of local news that can encourage a less political audience to become more engaged, which may then lead them to becoming more interested in slightly deeper topics. Alavitalie also allows users to create pre-written requests, and this can be used to crowdsource the request for information themselves from several bodies, or as a way of making it easy to ask the same question over time. Access Info Europe used this to great effect to start a three-year battle to get EU commissioners to release their travel expenses. This essentially is a crowdsource batch request, but it allows journalism organisations to activate their readers to contribute in the investigation process. And this particular investigation resulted in 50 European Union agencies making their presidents and directors travel expenses public. The Alavitalie network can help support larger cross-border investigations. Loss in Europe, which is a team of around 24 investigative journalists from 12 European countries, used several Alavitalie sites to make FYI requests to immigration and border enforcement authorities. My society helped introduce the journalists to the wider Alavitalie network, who helped then translate the requests into the country's language and also understand the relevant authorities and what data they held. And in April this year they won a first place in the Investigative Journalism for Europe Impact Award. And similar to following requests, there's a real opportunity for journalists to make use of the Alavitalie network to follow an investigation in one country and then perform the same investigation in their own country so that policies and decision making can be compared. Journalismfund.eu's local pilot used FYI to test this out. A Rotterdam hyper-local group and a Flemish investigative news site used FYI to receive documents related to the collaboration between the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp in fighting drug crime. And they discovered how administrators and entrepreneurs kept sand in the alarm, but the government struggled to collaborate internationally to solve the problem. I hope these stories have inspired you to think about using FYI in your investigations, campaigns and research. If you'd like to find out more, visit alavitalie.org to find FYI sites near you and share your experiences with our community. We'd love to hear about how we could make FYI easier, so feel free to get in touch. Thank you very much.