Author Archives: paulbradshaw

An investigations game

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The following is a description of a game that I'm hoping to build – if a bid to the IPI News Innovation Contest is successful. I'd welcome any suggestions for how this might be designed better – as well as potential contributors, partners and users.

An investigations game: how it works

Users register with the site and join an existing investigation – or start a new one based on a limited number of ?templates? (e.g. investigating lobbying; following the money of local government or EU expenditure, charity funding or health; testing the claims of a corporation or police investigation; etc.). Once joined, they can also invite others. An investigation must have at least two ?players? before it can begin.

Once under way, as a player you are given a challenge (e.g. submit a Freedom of Information request; analyse data; identify regulations; speak to an expert; sum up the story so far, etc.). The challenge will come with help tips and resources from investigative journalists. It also has a points value based on its difficulty.

You choose to accept, exchange or pass on the challenge. Exchanging will bring up a new challenge; passing will pass the challenge on to the next player.

Exchanging or passing come with a points penalty – but if you accept and then complete a challenge, you will gain points. These can also be used to ?unlock? parts of the game or ?level up?.

Once you have accepted a challenge you have a limited time to complete it – anything from 24 hours to three weeks depending on the challenge.?You can also choose to try to do the challenge faster for extra points.

You can add updates on your progress and edit the challenge itself, adding new resources or tips of your own. These are added to the global ?template?, allowing other investigations to benefit. They will also gain you extra points.

If you have not marked the challenge as complete as the deadline nears, you will receive reminders (one of the findings of research into Help Me Investigate was the need for more ?negative feedback?). You can ?stall? the deadline – but it will cost you points (the gamble you make is that you will earn more points if you succeed). If you fail to complete the challenge, points are deducted and play passes to the next player.

If you complete the challenge, however, you are awarded points, and rise up the leaderboard. Some challenges also come with ?badges? such as ?FOI Star?, ?Document Hound?, ?Data Don?, and so on. These can be cross-published to social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

You will also be asked if you want to add or change an investigation ?hypothesis?, and the next player must confirm that you have completed the challenge. They can ask you questions if your process is not transparent. Rejection will cost you points: trust is central to collaboration – two rejections will lead to your being ejected from an investigation.

Play continues in turn until a player decides the investigation is ?closed?, posting a link to a report on the results.

Template investigations

The following represents a selection of potential investigations that users might be able to pursue, based on existing successful examples. These are obviously subject to change in discussion with partner organisations:

  1. Local government spending – follow the money
  2. National government: lobbying – identifying conflicts of interest
  3. EU politics – follow the money
  4. Policing and crime – accountability
  5. Consumer affairs – testing claims
  6. Science and environment – testing claims
  7. Health – follow the money
  8. Charity – follow the money
  9. Education – follow the money

Making FOI requests: pre-empting the ‘commercial interest’ excuse

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Quite often Freedom of Information requests are refused on the grounds of ‘commercial interest’ – or specifically that “the commercial interests of a third party will, or are likely to, be prejudiced”. This might also be referred to as being refused “under Section 43 of the Freedom of Information Act”.

Note that this is separate – although similar to – “commercial confidentiality” which applies to information that has been provided to the public body by another company.

Sometimes the use of Section 43 will be justified. Where it is not, however, is when the public interest in disclosure overrides those commercial interests. And this is where it is useful to be proactive in your FOI request.

The Information Commissioner’s Office is very useful in explaining how public bodies must deal with your FOI request, and provides guidance on each of the exemptions.

If you expect that your request may be refused on the grounds of commercial interest, it’s worth addressing these up front as part of your request, after you have outlined the information that you require.

How to phrase your FOI request to address possible commercial interest objections

Typical phrasing might go as follows:

“Please note that Section 43 of the Freedom of Information Act states that any attempt to withhold information on the basis that it would prejudice commercial interests can be overruled if there is a public interest in releasing that information”

You can then further strengthen your request by specifying how the release of this information does indeed overrule commercial interests on the basis that it will do one or more of the following, which are specifically outlined in guidance by the Information Commissioner’s Office (PDF):
  • further the understanding of, and participation in the debate of issues of the day; 
  • facilitate the accountability and transparency of public authorities for decisions taken by them; 
  • facilitate accountability and transparency in the spending of public money; 
  • allow individuals to understand decisions made by public authorities affecting their lives and, in some cases, assist individuals in challenging those decisions; 
  • bring to light information affecting public safety

Typical phrasing, then, might go something like this:

“This information clearly qualifies as being within the public interest as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office (Awareness Guidance No.5) on the basis that it “furthers the understanding of, and participation in the debate of issues of the day”; “facilitates the accountability and transparency of public authorities for decisions taken by them”; and “facilitates accountability and transparency in the spending of public money.”

This public interest test will probably also help you focus on what information you should ask for.

Some other notes:

“The price submitted by a contractor is likely to be commercially sensitive during the tendering process, but less likely to be so once the contract has been awarded.” 

“Where a company enjoys a monopoly over the provision of the goods or services in question it is less likely that releasing the information will have a prejudicial impact on that company.” (guidance by the Information Commissioner’s Office (PDF))

The public body cannot make any presumptions on the commercial interests of the company, but should ask the company to make its own case if it wants information to be withheld. This cannot be used as an excuse for delaying a response: “Failure to respond by those being consulted does not remove the obligation [for the public body] to respond within [the 20 day] time limit.” 

It should also be noted that the public body also does not have to adhere to the wishes of the company. Any case put forward by the company for withholding information is only that: a case. If that case is overruled by the public interest in disclosure, then the public body can still – and should – release the information.

FOI: why who is requesting (shouldn’t but) can matter

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Freedom of Information requests should be “applicant blind” and “motive blind” but they are often not treated as such – David Higgerson, head of multimedia for Trinity Mirror Regional, points out in his blog post FOI FAQ.

 

This means that FOI rules are being breached if a press officer, to whom your request has been passed on by the FOI officer, asks you what you need the information for. 

 

It is important for journalists to be aware of this to ensure their FOI requests are not treated differently just because they are coming from a member of the Press. Read David Higgerson’s other post on how NHS officers are being instructed to keep an eye on ’round-robin requests’ as evidence that, in the world of FOIs, not all requests are equal.

 

A public sector FOI practitioner who blogs under the name FOI Man has posted his insider’s view on when he deems it fair to reveal the identity of the requester and when not. 

 

Double-edged sword

Until I read FOI Man’s blog, I hadn’t been fully aware of the implications of an FOI officer sharing details of journalists’ requests with the organisation’s press officer, whose job, after all, is to manage its relations with the Press. The press officer cannot, of course, ask the FOI officer to modify the FOI response but it is still rather a worrying thought that spin doctors should be able to freely see who is asking for what information and comment on a draft reply. 

 

FOI Man says he often removes the name and contact details of the requester before circulating them in-house. But authorities are entitled to know who made the request and may need to know their ID to ascertain that it is not ‘vexatious’. 

 

In practice, in the spirit of the FOI Act, transparency works both ways: just as you count on full disclosure of the information requested, there is nothing an FOI officer can ultimately do to justify withholding information on the person requesting the information.

 

Vexatious or not vexatious?

Higgerson explains in his post that the circumstances under which a request can be considered as such are restricted. More details and examples can be found in this guidance note issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office “Vexatious or repeated requests“. 

 

 Below is a summary of the four possible ‘vexatious’ scenarios. 

 

1. The requester is obsessive: if the requesters’ records show FOI requests on the same topic are being used repeatedly to reopen issues that have already been considered.

 

2. The request is a harassment: if the authority believes the request itself could constitute harassment ‘of a reasonable person’. Requests biased by complaints/accusations, use of hostile or offensive language, or an unreasonable fixation on a particular individual could all be used as grounds to classify the request as harassment.

 

3. The request is seen as aiming to cause disruption: the authority must prove the requester has got malicious intent, but the argument would hold only in the unlikely event the requester has openly stated they are out to cause maximum inconvenience.

 

4. The request lacks real purpose or value: an auhority can claim this but only as an additional argument to support points one to three above. Thankfully, for the requester, the ICO rules that “it is not appropriate to use lack of value as an argument simply because you cannot imagine what the value might be” and that the fact that the FOI request has a serious purpose can stop it being vexatious.

 

ID Protection

Section 8 of the Freedom of Information Act states that for a request to be valid the request must “state the name of the applicant and an address for correspondence”.

 

The dilemma arises, however, when someone is requesting information about their employer. In such instance identification of the requester may not be in their best interest. 

 

FOI Man says there is then no other recourse than to go undercover and use a (credible) pseudonym, though it is not a method he condones.

 

‘At your own risk’, is probably the best answer. The ICO clearly states “pseudonymous requests are outside the scope of [the Information Commissioner]’s jurisdiction”. 

 

Is it a case of right to know versus the right not to be known.

Help Me Investigate is changing

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I wanted to give you the heads-up on some big changes I’m planning at Help Me Investigate.

In a nutshell: the site is going open source. This means that the code behind the site will be released so that anyone can install their own crowdsourcing investigation platform.

However, that also means that the current Help Me Investigate site will be taken down for a while as people play with the code.

Why open source?

Going open source addresses a number of legal weaknesses and geographical limitations that the project has encountered, as well as providing an opportunity to improve the technology that we simply don’t have in our current form. We’ve had dozens of requests to join the site from people in South America, Australia, the US, Middle East and South Africa that we couldn’t comply with for legal reasons. There have also been those who wanted private investigations, or completely public ones. Now there is a way that those people can use and change the technology accordingly.

It also allows us to focus our efforts on what I believe is the most important feature of the site: its community and resources.

What next for Help Me Investigate.com?

The plan is to refocus the HMI website on continuing to build a community of users who want to investigate questions in the public interest, across a number of platforms.

The site will also further build the bank of resources for investigators, focusing further on particular areas, e.g. education, health, social care, environment etc.

We are looking for volunteers to explore these areas, so if there is an area you wish you were more expert on, and you want to learn with others, let me know.

What about my investigation(s)?

The site will be taken down or redirected in two weeks, at which point investigations will no longer be accessible. If you want to get your investigation off the site let us know and we’ll try to make it as easy as possible.

This is a huge change for Help Me Investigate. The site long ago achieved what it set out to prove: that people could collaborate to investigate questions in the public interest. It works. But based on our experiences, I know it can work better. Open sourcing Help Me Investigate, and moving to a distributed network of communities based on a shared set of resources, is the right thing to do. If you want to be involved in making that happen (we will need open source project managers, community managers, bloggers and subject experts!), please let me know.

The potential for permanently unlocking public service information…

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Freedom of Information has enabled access to information.

But sometimes, there are still issues with making this information accessible to all in usable formats, whilst still avoiding charging or licensing issues.

It’s nice to see a government-encouraged website trying to change things; the Public Sector Information Unlocking Service, although the regulator for the re-use of public sector information, is trying to encourage the copying and re-mixing of data by allowing users to essentially make mini-petitions for information.

They ask you for the problem, your ideal solution and what you will do with the information. Requests are stored by data (under each month) and adding your name and e-mail address allows you to ‘support’ a request, giving it more prominence and a greater chance of getting noticed.

It’s a good idea with potential, but at the moment, the information asked for is a bit vague and confusing (a lot of people get confused when asked for ‘the problem’, and whether or not this with regards to why the information couldn’t be easily accessed or why they are asking for the information), and it only allows access to information that is accessible under the Freedom of Information Act.

Alongside this, it seems that, for a long time, none of the requests have gained any supporters, and despite requests dating back to 2008 it seems as though the whole thing hasn’t really caught any momentum.

It is something to keep an eye on forever, and something that could make the utilisation of Freedom of Information and access to open data a whole lot easier.

Average cost of a wedding – is it really ?20,000?

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It’s become a near-cliche to say that the average cost of a wedding is £20,000. The statistic has become so widely repeated that I decided to find out where it came from – and how accurate it might be. Collaborating via the Help Me Investigate, this is what I and Martin Griffiths found:

The source:

The £20,000 figure comes from You & Your Wedding, a magazine published by Natmags. More specifically, it comes from an annual survey of their readers. 

In 2008 their survey found that “average” wedding spending amongst readers had crossed £20,000 for the first time. The magazine, naturally, marked this landmark with a press release that was very widely reported at the time. As a result, it seems the £20,000 figure has entered the popular consciousness despite another 2 years passing.

The sample:

1500 readers completed the survey, according to this Guardian report. In 2007 there were around 235,000 marriages and provisional figures for 2008 suggested the final total would be within a thousand or two. The 1500 readers – if they all married that year – therefore represent around 0.6% of that year’s brides or grooms. 

They also represent 2.5% of people who buy a copy of the magazine – or around 0.6% of their “readership” (calculated by estimating that each copy of the magazine is read by four people).

A media pack for You & Your Wedding for 2007 gives us an indication of how representative their readership are of brides- and grooms-to-be. However – it’s not clear whether these figures come from the readership survey or another source. 

The median age of readers is given as 31 – the median age of women who married in 2008 is also 31.

However, the competition does not allow entries from those under 18 – excluding a very small number of brides (1.4% of marriages were aged 16-19 in 2008)

Martin Griffiths also compared reader social class figures with overall NRS figures for same year.

  • AB – 26% of readers, 26% overall (24% of women)
  • C1 – 28% of readers, 29% overall (31% of women)
  • C2 – 30% of readers, 21% overall (18% of women)
  • DE – 13% of readers, 24% overall (27% of women)

So the biggest difference is that there are considerably more C2s and considerably fewer DEs than in the general population, and this gets even more pronounced if we assume most readers are women.

The calculation:

The average cost quoted by You & Your Wedding is almost certainly a mean, calculated by diving the cost of all weddings by the number of weddings. This sort of average is vulnerable to being skewed by very large numbers at the top end. (To give you an example, if Bill Gates walks into a bar then the average person’s earnings goes over £1m). 

As it happens The Wall Street Journal’s Numbers Guy has written about the same subject – average cost of weddings – in the US. With access to more than one set of data, he concludes that the median cost – that is, the value in the middle of all the others – is around half the £20,000 figure normally quoted.

If – and this is a big if – the pattern is similar in the UK, then the ‘average’ UK wedding would actually cost nearer £10,000.

If you have any more information on this subejct or this investigation, please let us know.

Changes to FOI legislation will prevent disclosure of royal documents

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Changes are being made to Freedom of Information legislation with the aim of increasing transparency. The 30-year-rule is to be reduced to 20 years and the number of bodies which must obey the law is to increase. But in other areas privacy is to be strengthened. Changes to the Constitutional Reform Act will mean that communication between the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and the Government is an absolute exemption and will be protected from public scrutiny. Public interest will no longer be a valid argument for obtaining these documents.

With the changes taking place from today, here’s a look back at some of the top Queen-related stories to come from FOIs.

March 2005: Information was released about the amount of subsidies going to some of Britain’s richest landowners, including the Queen and Prince Charles. It was announced that this would be made available after the Guardian submitted a Freedom of Information request on the topic. The Government rejected calls from farm groups for it to remain private, on the basis that it was in the public interest. The case was described by the Guardian as “The most radical move to be taken by ministers since the Freedom of Information Act came into force on January 1”.

March 2010: Journalists from the Independent made a Freedom of Information request into the correspondence between the Buckingham Palace and the Government revealed the Queen’s financial crisis. Details included that the Queen had asked the Government for more money for palace upkeep and that minor royals were being allowed to live rent-free.

August 2009: A Freedom of Information request was declined by Norfolk Police. It was submitted by Daily Mail journalists and asked for details of the gifts made to police officers who guard the Queen’s Sandringham estate. They refused to provide the information on the basis that it might “provide anyone intent on committing acts of terrorism with vital intelligence as to the level of police resistance that they may encounter”.

September 2010: The Daily Mail reported on how the Queen’s royal officials had spent a £15m grant from the Department for Culture. The article was based on a Freedom of Information request which revealed a spend of £96,000 on cleaning chandeliers and £14,000 on a curtain to protect wine bottles in the Buckingham Palace cellar. A Buckingham Palace spokesman defended the move by saying: “To an average person who has an average house, it seems a lot. But this is our Head of State in her headquarters and a high standard has to be maintained. People are not profligate with the spending.”

September 2010: Documents disclosed following a Freedom of Information request revealed that the Queen had asked ministers for money from a poverty intended for low-income families to pay for palace heating. This is despite already receiving £38m a year from the tax payer and her request was rejected to avoid bad press.