I'm chiming in here, as I'm living in Switzerland as well and have been using the Swiss version of FOI legislation a couple of times.
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Francis Irving <[email protected]> wrote: > Finally a couple more questions and points ... > > Do Swiss public authorities answer FOI requests reliably by email? This is an interesting point and it can't be answered in a general manner. I have experienced the following: If you send a request via email or web form (some of the web forms require you to supply a postal address), the authority will acknowledge your request by email. If access is granted, you will receive the document requested by email, especially if you asked for this in your original request. If the authority issues the equivalent of a Refusal Notice *and* you have supplied your postal address in your request, you will nearly inevitably receive the Refusal Notice as letter, and often even as Certified Letter. If you did not supply a postal address (which you usually won't in a WDTK-like system), they will email the Refusal Notice as PDF attachment to an email. Swiss authorities, especially the more "central" ones (ministries, that is) are usually very comfortable with email as medium of communication. Therefore, I think this really shouldn't be a problem. What needs to be noted, though, is that the Swiss FOI law only applies to federal (ie. national) authorities. Other than in the UK, it does NOT apply to cantonal and local authorities (including most universities, as only two universities are run on the national level). Some cantons have their own FOI laws, most of which also apply on the third, i.e. municipal level in these cantons and all of them are different from each other and the federal version... This would need ot be considered in the localisation. I can't help with the coding part but, as I already told hernani some time ago on a Swiss mailinglist, I will be glad to help with creating and adjusting templates, help documentation, authorities lists etc. Regards, Michael _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
