FOI automation—a distant pipedream

Andrew at IMPACT blog points us to this press release from the Information Commissioner's Office (my bold):

Freedom of Information is fast becoming a fixed feature of 21st century democracy and should not be seen as a battle ground between public bodies and the people, according to the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas. Speaking at the annual FOI Live conference in London on 24 May, the Information Commissioner [stated] that the transparency and accountability brought by Freedom of Information reinforce good government, and should not be seen as a threat. However, he will also stress that those using FOI must act responsibly.

Readers will know that I believe that the trend towards information transparency is ineluctable, so I quite agree with the Information Commissioner on that point.

But what of the misuse of the FOI that his last sentence touches on? Of course, if search technologies could step up to automate the resolution of FOI requests properly (which it falls so far short of doing right now), the problem of human resources in government and business being stretched by nuisance FOI requests would disappear.

However, to achieve such automation, we would need to develop search technologies that can mediate the individual, richly-structured, socially and semantically contextualised ways people think and express themselves. And even Google is light years away from achieving that goal.

In the meantime, it is hard to see how government and business—and indeed the legal system—can avoid the overhead of having human beings sort through FOI requests written in natural language in order to make judgement calls over the validity of those requests.

Amendments to the FOI - bad news

Andrew at IMPACT blog laments the impending weakening of Freedom of Information in the UK, as the Bill proposing changes to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for England & Wales and Northern Ireland looks set to progress:

Given that the Freedom of Information regime is, broadly, about the public interest in the good government of this country, it is disgusting that a Bill cutting out the very heart of the legislature from its effects could make it through. Parliament does nothing to improve its public perception by seeking removing itself from public scrutiny.

I quite agree: citizens must watch the watchers if we are to keep their power over us in check. This Bill seems designed to make sure that we cannot.

Big Blair

Tony Blair insists his government is not building a Big Brother-style super-database. But all the talk of 'perfectly sensible' reforms and 'transformational government' masks a chilling assault on our privacy, says Steve Boggan (BBC News).

Oooh dear. I might mind a bit less if they at least shared the information they gathered about me with me. I have a feeling that's where effective action might be taken—perhaps with the help of MySociety's Freedom of Information filer and archive project?

MySociety building "FOI Filer & Archive"

I just chanced upon this post on the MySociety blog about the next service they are building:

[T]he next major site we are planning to build is the Freedom of Information Filer and Archive; a searchable, readable, googlable user-created archive of FOI requests and their responses. Think of a combined TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.com for FOI requests and their responses, and you’ll have our vision.

[...]

We think that the best way to build a top quality archive is to simultaneously build the best possible “File an FOI request” tool, and then publish both the requests and the responses made through it in the archive. From the private desire to easily file FOI requests we hope that we can generate the public benefit of an easy to use archive.

This sounds like it could become an amazing tool for getting information about us held by business and government out into public. Kudos. Looks like they have some other Big Goals too!