{"id":820,"date":"2013-04-04T19:16:01","date_gmt":"2013-04-04T19:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/?p=820"},"modified":"2021-10-22T07:03:30","modified_gmt":"2021-10-22T07:03:30","slug":"making-the-most-of-whatdotheyknow-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/2013\/04\/04\/making-the-most-of-whatdotheyknow-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Making the most of WhatDoTheyKnow"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\" id=\"internal-source-marker_0.7568834496802999\">The Independent recently got a great story from citizen FOI website <a href=\"http:\/\/whatdotheyknow.com\">whatdotheyknow.com<\/a> about MPs <a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/uk\/politics\/its-thirsty-work-being-an-mp-as-their-bar-bills-reveal-8513657.html\">running tabs in the bars at parliament<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">It just goes to show what a great resource whatdotheyknow.com is. If you haven\u2019t used it yet, have a look at it ASAP.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The site allows you to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Make requests to any public authority in the UK<\/li>\n<li>Browse past requests made through the site<\/li>\n<li>Get FOI advice from its large community of users<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I\u2019ve been using it quite a lot recently and have a couple of tips to help you make the most use of it.<!--more--><\/p>\n<h2 dir=\"ltr\">1) Remember it\u2019s public!<\/h2>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">If you have an especially sensitive FOI, you might want to <strong>consider sending it directly<\/strong> to the body you are dealing with &#8211; all responses to requests made through WhatDoTheyKnow\u00a0are put on the site.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Just remember that you should have a good reason for doing this &#8211; an open archive of FOI responses is a great asset for an open society and a key part of citizen journalism, allowing others to find you and suggest questions and tactics.<\/p>\n<h2 dir=\"ltr\">2) Finding contacts<\/h2>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">It\u2019s not just the other users that you can get in touch with on WhatDoTheyKnow. The site publishes the email addresses of every information office it sends requests to &#8211; especially useful for those public bodies that don\u2019t like to publicise their FOI contacts.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">To find these addresses search the site\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.whatdotheyknow.com\/body\/list\/all\">list of public authorities<\/a> and go to the homepage for the one that you want.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">On the right hand side of the page is a header saying \u201cMore about this authority\u201d. Under there is a tab to view the email address that WhatDoTheyKnow.com sends its requests to.<\/p>\n<h2 dir=\"ltr\">3) Using Google search<\/h2>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">It\u2019s worth using Google to search for information on WhatDoTheyKnow.com. This allows you to really get a handle of the WhatDoTheyKnow\u00a0archive, giving you ideas for new requests or data that you can combine to make a new story.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">To do this use a specific site search in Google like this:<\/p>\n<pre dir=\"ltr\">site:whatdotheyknow.com<\/pre>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Follow this with the information you need.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">For example, I was recently researching the Territorial Support Group, the Met\u2019s riot squad. To do so, I Googled:<\/p>\n<pre dir=\"ltr\">site:whatdotheyknow.com \u201cterritorial support group\u201d<\/pre>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The inverted commas meant that Google looked for all pages on WhatDoTheyKnow.com where the words territorial, support and group appeared consecutively as a single phrase &#8211; so pages where the words were spread across a page weren\u2019t returned. This saved me from wading through piles of irrelevant results.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">If you want to know more about advanced searches on Google, BBC journalist <strong>Paul Myers<\/strong> has a <a href=\"http:\/\/researchclinic.net\/study\/googletips.html\">good tutorial<\/a>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"tweetthis\" style=\"text-align:left;\"><p> <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\" class=\"tt\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=Making+the+most+of+WhatDoTheyKnow+http%3A%2F%2Fhelpmeinvestigate.com%2Fhealth%2F%3Fp%3D820\" title=\"Post to Twitter\"><img class=\"nothumb\" src=\"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-content\/plugins\/tweet-this\/icons\/en\/twitter\/tt-twitter.png\" alt=\"Post to Twitter\" \/><\/a> <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\" class=\"tt\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=Making+the+most+of+WhatDoTheyKnow+http%3A%2F%2Fhelpmeinvestigate.com%2Fhealth%2F%3Fp%3D820\" title=\"Post to Twitter\">Tweet This Post<\/a><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Independent recently got a great story from citizen FOI website whatdotheyknow.com about MPs running tabs in the bars at parliament. It just goes to show what a great resource whatdotheyknow.com is. If you haven\u2019t used it yet, have a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/2013\/04\/04\/making-the-most-of-whatdotheyknow-com\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88890,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[133,9,427,428],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88890"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":928,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions\/928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}