Ideas for the Community & Activism Call - 2023-03-30

[HelenWDTK]

This is a place to leave any suggestions that you have for things you'd like us to discuss at the next meeting.

I'll look to circulate the draft agenda on 2023-03-23 and the final version at midday on 2023-03-29

[WilliamWDTK]

I'd just note that I've tagged Lewisham Borough Council with response_link due to their consistent use of Egress Switch when responding with larger files, which is a particularly awkward solution.

[garethrees]

Should note / talk about progress on https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/6589 to trailer how it will work

[garethrees]

UK Government Retained EU Law bill – anything to be concerned about wrt EIR?

1 million public requests – how to celebrate / use as hook? Couple of thoughts:

• Democracy: Laws are all well and good but what matters is the local execution – coordinate it with a campaign on public authority performance? "a million requests and they still can't…"
• Climate: 1 million FOIs… now 1 million EIRs (gather datasets? campaign for some improvements to it like extend dataset provision, remove fees (https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/issues/1243#issuecomment-1319985129); expand to companies/who we list?);
• Supporters: Get serious on social – youtube/insta/tictok/podcasts/patron – telling the stories of requests and their requesters (why? build human connection to org to seed supporters mission) (TicTec Conf → TicTec Labs → TicTec Stories)
• Community: "put community at the centre of data", fragmented public data; could use FOI somewhere here?

[garethrees]

https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/pull/1633 – open for review; now's the time for any further thoughts before it gets megred