ODI Fridays: Opening up the UK’s public authorities

The UK’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was enacted at the start of the century, and is a central plank of the UK’s openness agenda. Arguably if FOI hadn’t happened, there would be no open data. One aspect of FOIA that is often ignored though is how it works behind the scenes: who is involved in answering FOI requests? What resources do they have? How do they organise the logistics of dealing with what can be thousands of requests a year? What are the challenges of doing so successfully? Paul Gibbons is a former FOI Officer and has written a handbook for those who do the job of coordinating FOI compliance, for which he carried out research into the way that the job is done and what constitutes good practice in a relatively new profession. Anyone who has to answer FOI requests, who makes them, or is interested in the logistics of openness will want to attend this ODI Friday.