search

mysociety / alaveteli

Provide a Freedom of Information request system for your jurisdiction
https://alaveteli.org
Other
389 stars 196 forks source link

Improve support for multi-jurisdiction installs of Alaveteli #6125

Open mlandauer opened 3 years ago

mlandauer commented 3 years ago

For the Australian Alaveteli instance we are supporting agencies at all levels of government, local, state (and territories) and federal. Each state and territory has different laws which govern freedom of information. All together we have to support 9 different jurisdictions with their own unique variations.

To support the differences we've had to do some pretty odd things in our theme and we're not able to add some relatively newer features like adding an internal email for external reviews because that again varies by jurisdiction.

The issue here is to improve support for multi-jurisdiction instances of Alaveteli by adding extra hooks in the code and templates for places where the default behaviour can easily then be overridden.

I'm keen on doing this for selfish reasons so that it simplifies our theme, making it easier to maintain.

However, I imagine that we can't be the only country in this situation and it would be wonderful if we could make it easier for others too.

If this is of interest then I can outline the places that I think some hooks could go. Furthermore I would be happy to do the work and put together some PRs.

Let me know what you think

gbp commented 3 years ago

Hi, this is interesting and does connect with some of our recent thinking. It would be good to start a discussion on the Alaveteli Dev mailing list as we might get some more input there.

I would certainly like to know more about how you've changed your theme to accommodate this and the variations between the different laws which needed changes to Alaveteli.

Up to now, in the UK, WDTK hasn't distinguish between the FOI Act and Scottish FOI Act (and the same for EIR). We also have other legislations which we can submit requests under (eg INSPIRE). WDTK is already used for to submit these types of requests but the application UI doesn't reflect this and assumes its a FOI Act request which can be misleading.

Our recent work on refusal advice is currently scoped to the UK FOI Act (although its being built so other installations can add their own advice). We don't want to offer incorrect advice on requests to Scottish public bodies or those who are only subject to EIR. So work has been done recently to start extracting out the concept of different legislations from the core of Alaveteli - this will be included in the 0.39 release. This is just the first step but sounds like its an approach that might help you too.

Right now Alaveteli decides which legislation to use based on which tags have been added to a public body. This certainly isn't ideal but in the short term I was thinking WDTK theme would override this to account for our Scottish legislations.

Ultimately I can see the legislation model could being used to determine:

  1. the request email destination address for a Public Body
  2. whether they are legally required to respond
  3. the number or days they can take to respond

and no doubt other configuration I haven't thought about yet.

Please do outline any places where you think we could add some hooks to help. We would always welcome PRs and hopefully the above gives you some idea of where we are heading.

handelaar commented 3 years ago

UK and EU jurisdictions would be better served imo if the faceting was performed against laws, rather than jurisdictions (and if authorities can have >1 such rulesets attached) , and that ought also to be as useful to Australia as the alternative. EIR/AIE regulations put most authorities into two legal realms, each of which may require both different timeframes and different contact details

mlandauer commented 3 years ago

As suggested I have also written to the alaveteli-dev group https://groups.google.com/g/alaveteli-dev/c/LNRkCcbnGWM