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Fully in favour of this and we are making efforts to publish as much of our data publicly as we can. We have set up an open data portal for this purpose. My co
by Markomancer 3mo ago
Fully in favour of this and we are making efforts to publish as much of our data publicly as we can. We have set up an open data portal for this purpose.
My country differs from Germany in that our Freedom of Information laws are much broader and allow anyone to request virtually any record held by a public organisation, with the grounds for refusal being narrower. For example, generic day to day email exchanges between low level public officials are requestable and we have to argue why it is against the public interest to prevent releasing them.
While we're trying to publish as much data that is of public interest ad possible, it's proving very difficult to anticipate many of these requests.
In my organisation in particular - we're receiving requests from consultation firms outside the EU on costings for certain services. So we(The taxpayer) are essentially doing their research for them.
- CrimsonRain 3mo agoRequests from outside of eu, the requester should pay the full cost of compilation and then some. Why not make those emails public to begin with? There's no need to compile/publish if all data is public to begin with.
- Markomancer 3mo agoUnfortunately, not all data held by an organisation is generated and held in a publishable format. The data in this example is created incidentally within email chains as part of a broader process. It's really not cost effective to publish real-time data that's been requested by these firms. So in principle, I agree that where there is substantial data held that the public are interested in, it should be published. However, it's not feasible or cost effective to publish all data or records held by a public organisation.
- fsflover 3mo agoCould those email chains be turned into a mailing list available by default, like lkml.org ? Then nothing would need to be done to make it "cost effective to publish".
- Markomancer 3mo agoThanks for your suggestion, but unfortunately not. The email chains containing this data could never be published without significant redaction as they centre around services provided to members of the public and contain their personal information. Publishing any of that would result in a breach of GDPR and litigation
- fsflover 3mo agoThank you for the explanation!