Mark Goodge <[email protected]> wrote: >On 22/12/2011 15:07, Mark Ballard wrote: >> Isn't it about time there was a presumption that all these documents >are >> public from the outset, that public bodies should keep documents >> confidential as an exception, > >Yes, that's pretty much the presumption behind the FOIA. > >> and that it would be a relatively simple >> matter of Content Management System administration to make documents >> visible to the public? > >But this isn't the case. Really, it isn't. For this suggestion to work, > >you'd have to store absolutely everything that's potentially >disclosable >in a single, central document store. And that's impractical, on all >sorts of levels. For a start, institutional inertia increases >exponentially with the size of the institution (and that's not confined > >to the public sector, commercial organisations have exactly the same >problem), meaning that any change to the way documents are stored >becomes an increasingly significant cost issue. And there are lots of >other reasons why a centralised store of everything isn't necessarily a > >good idea. Take emails, for example. Storing everything centrally would > >cause potential conflicts with the DPA and data retention guidelines. >But picking and choosing what you store means you don't get the benefit > >of knowing that the information exists in a single place. > >The other problem is that the it's the Freedom of *Information* Act, >not >a Freedom of Documents Act. Not all information is necessarily held in >a >single document. A request along the lines of "Please tell me how much >each of your departments spent on chocolate biscuits in the past year" >is a perfectly valid FOI request, but the chances of such data already >being in a single document are remote - it will need to be extracted >from the departmental accounts and aggregated. > >Obviously, any public body can do a lot to minimise costs by ensuring >that data which is, or is likely to be, requested by the public is >collated and stored in a format which makes it easy to supply. But you >can't predict every request. And I'd guess that most of them are, in >fact, unpredictable. > >Mark >-- > Sent from my Babbage Difference Engine 2 > http://mark.goodge.co.uk > >_______________________________________________ >developers-public mailing list >[email protected] >https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public > >Unsubscribe: >https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/a.harrowell%40gmail.com
I think the problem here is the difference between data.gov.uk and FOIA. The Act is a tool for extracting nonstructured information that may or may not exist, or may exist to a greater extent than expected, from public bodies that wd otherwise just send the letter to the round filing cabinet (like /dev/null for paper). As such it's quite complex and requires a lot of interaction at each end, and isn't adapted to non-hostile inquiries. You wouldn't expect to have to apply for judicial review in order to get a driving licence or call the police, and if you did it would render administration a real pain. I think it is a strategy of sorts to channel data requests into the FOI route in order to have a grievance about it. Certainly, I am aware that the Home Office planned to treat all requests they didn't like as FOI rather than DPA subject access requests because FOIA provides for telling you to piss off, troublemaker. We do need a better culture of proactive disclosure. Sadly I have the impression d.g.uk is considered a "labour thing" and not-invented-here. -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
