ryanpitts
commented
7 years ago Journalism accepting this session.
Open mozfest-bot opened 7 years ago
ryanpitts
commented
7 years ago Journalism accepting this session.
[ ID ] 9bdb55c3-b73a-40d5-b27f-40ad3e73f2eb
[ Submitter's Name ] Louise Crow [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] mySociety [ Submitter's Twitter ] @mysociety
[ Space ] journalism [ Secondary Space ]
[ Format ] learning-lab
Description
Alaveteli is a powerful open source platform for making public Freedom of Information requests to public sector bodies, in use by over 9 million people each year in over 20 countries. In the UK, Alaveteli powers WhatDoTheyKnow.com, which has helped users make over 340,000 FOI requests and published the responses online in a permanent archive.
Over the next 18 months, mySociety, the charity behind Alaveteli and WhatDoTheyKnow, is building Alaveteli Professional, a toolset for journalists, campaigners, activists – and anyone who uses Freedom of Information in their work. We’re looking for journalists to help us understand the challenges they face around using FOI, so that we can build the most useful possible toolkit for making and managing FOI requests. We’ll showcase our in-progress alpha service and will be aiming to recruit new users for our public beta that will be in development until April 2017.
Agenda
For the development of our alpha service we have run workshops with a small group of early users, drawn from national, local and online media organisations. This session at MozFest will be our first opportunity to open this up to a wider audience of potential beta users.
We’ll give an overview of the alpha prototypes and basic introduction to submitting an FOI request. We’ll talk through the hypotheses we began with and how we’ve adapted these as we identified initial users needs and built prototypes against these.
For this session we have a specific requirement to test these prototypes with a larger more diverse group of journalists and other potential users from campaigning and activist groups. In particular we’re keen to identify barriers to uptake and enter into discussions how we can best guide the development of the service to cater to the real world needs of journalists.
Participants
This will be a practical session that will aim to showcase the work done to date, but more importantly a chance to identify what features and user needs we can cater to more widely. A small number of experienced and engaged journalists will be just as useful as a larger group.
Alaveteli Professional is fundamentally about helping journalists of all levels of experience make more and better use of FOI to generate original news stories. With a smaller group we’ll work through the whole process of using the service, with a larger group we’ll focus more on a service overview and discussion on what new features would be most useful and why.
Outcome
Alaveteli Professional is a work in progress with active development continuing up until April 2017. MozFest is perfectly timed to give a mid-project review for an engaged and informed audience of potential service users, whilst still having the opportunity to contribute into the ongoing development of the service.
We’d hope that many people we meet on the day will go on to sign up to be beta users of the service, and start using FOI to generate real news stories within their day to day work.