WhatDoTheyKnow is a site by

mySociety mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that t ...

designed to help people in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

make

Freedom of Information Freedom of information is freedom of a person or people to publish and consume information. Access to information is the ability for an individual to seek, receive and impart information effectively. This sometimes includes "scientific, indigeno ...

requests. It publishes both the requests and the authorities’ responses online, with the aim of making information available to all, and of removing the need for multiple people to make the same requests. The site acts as a permanent public database archive of FOI requests made through it. Around 15% to 20% of requests to UK Central Government are made through WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Over 45,000 public bodies have been added to the site, mainly by volunteers. More than 800,000 requests have been made using the site and more than 4.5 million people visited it in 2014 WhatDoTheyKnow has been described by

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

as "an idiot's guide to making a freedom of information request." The

Information Commissioner's Office The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is a non-departmental public body which reports directly to the Parliament of the United Kingdom and is sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). It is the independe ...

has stated that it believes "the most up-to-date informal list of all public authorities is held on the website". Information released through the site has given rise to serious and less serious news stories. The site is used by a number of MPs. The site was originally available only in English but a partially translated Welsh version was added in 2013.

Finances

In 2011, the site cost around £12,000 a year to run.WriteToThem research report, year=2011
Tobias Escher The server costs are partly sponsored by

Bytemark Hosting Bytemark is a UK-based server hosting and datacentre provider, headquartered in York, United Kingdom. It was founded in 2002, and was the first provider of virtual machines and cloud hosting through User-mode Linux in 2003. In 2012, the compa ...

History

WhatDoTheyKnow started life as the winning idea for mySociety competition in 2006 for ideas for public interest websites to build. Both Phil Rodgers and

Francis Irving Francis Irving is a British computer programmer, activist for freedom of information and former CEO of ScraperWiki. Francis Irving developed TortoiseCVS. He co-founded Public Whip with Julian Todd and became a developer of the affiliated T ...

entered the idea of a site to make it easy to make Freedom of Information requests. Francis Irving later became the main developer of the site, which was launched in 2008. The site was nominated for a number of awards: *

Daily Telegraph Daily or The Daily may refer to: Journalism * Daily newspaper, newspaper issued on five to seven day of most weeks * ''The Daily'' (podcast), a podcast by ''The New York Times'' * ''The Daily'' (News Corporation), a defunct US-based iPad new ...

best green websites - ranked number 2 * New Media Awards - Democracy in Action Finalists 2008 * New Media Awards - Innovation Winner 2008 WhatDoTheyKnow volunteer Alex Skene gave evidence to Justice Committee related to Post-Legislative Scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on 21 February 2012. As with other mySociety citizen-to-government software, mySociety sells WhatDoTheyKnow as a service for councils. In April 2012,

Brighton and Hove Brighton and Hove () is a city and unitary authority in East Sussex, England. It consists primarily of the settlements of Brighton and Hove, alongside neighbouring villages. Often referred to synonymously as Brighton, the City of Brighton and H ...

councillor Jason Kitkat announced: “We

he council He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...

are working with mySociety to adapt their WhatDoTheyKnow system to support a better workflow for freedom of information requests and proactive publishing of everything we release." WhatDoTheyKnow was developed as

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

software. It now runs on the

Alaveteli Alaveteli is free and open source software by mySociety to help citizens write Freedom of Information requests and automatically publish any responses. Alaveteli is described as "a project to create a free, standard, internationalised platform f ...

platform, which is itself an adaptation of the original code written to power WhatDoTheyKnow. Alaveteli was developed to make easier the process of setting up a site like WhatDoTheyKnow in other countries.

References

{{reflist, 3 MySociety Internet properties established in 2008 Freedom of information in the United Kingdom British political websites