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mysociety / whatdotheyknow-theme

The Alaveteli theme for WhatDoTheyKnow (UK)
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/
MIT License
31 stars 26 forks source link

Implement technical changes to reduce volumes of personal correspondence sent to key bodies #722

Open mdeuk opened 4 years ago

mdeuk commented 4 years ago

Although the majority of our users utilise WDTK to make transparency requests to public bodies, there are occasions where users are utilising WDTK as a method of contact for personal correspondence, e.g. to request information about their own social security benefits, their driving licence, or their biometric residence permit.

We have already implemented changes under #554 which adds questions to the request form for the Home Office. This has been moderately successful, however there are still a good number of requests which have to be manually removed by WDTK administrators afterwards.

A reasonable mitigation may be to include, where possible, a contact address for the public body, so that the user is signposted elsewhere.

mdeuk commented 4 years ago

Suggested bodies to look at:

Department for Work and Pensions (dwp - 24) HM Revenue and Customs (hmrc - 592) Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (dvla - 719) Driver and Vehicle Agency (Northern Ireland) (dvani - 3300) HM Passport Office (hm_passport_office - 590) Social Security Scotland (social_security_scotland - 89236) Student Loans Company Limited (slc - 1011)

We should also look at adding the email address for the Home Office (home_office - 7) into the existing codebase.

mdeuk commented 4 years ago

We should also look at adding the email address for the Home Office (home_office - 7) into the existing codebase.

Added public.enquiries@ email address in d88e588; I'll PR this in due course.

garethrees commented 4 years ago

Added public.enquiries@ email address in d88e588; I'll PR this in due course.

Merged in 5f630c5.

mdeuk commented 3 years ago

Suggested bodies to look at:

Department for Work and Pensions (dwp - 24) Social Security Scotland (social_security_scotland - 89236)

I suggest we add the Department for Communities (Northern Ireland) (dfc - 57878) to this grouping.

Proposal at https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/issues/745#issuecomment-954411024 for body 24.

We can look at recycling a simplified version of this for 57878 and 89236 once we're happy with how it looks. This will need to be setup as discrete question sets, as there are a number of local nuances in the devolved benefit systems.

Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (dvla - 719) Driver and Vehicle Agency (Northern Ireland) (dvani - 3300)

I suggest we add the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (dvsa - 52347) to this grouping - with some careful writing we should be able to use the same question set for all three.

HM Passport Office (hm_passport_office - 590)

HMPO is an agency of the Home Office - can we recycle the question set for Home Office and add a few options for Passports, Birth Certificates, services from the General Register Office and such?

mdeuk commented 2 years ago

Of note, our colleagues over in Australia have a nice generic "stop and think" speedbump that they deploy. The technical implementation is in /views/requests/new.html.erb and appears to be based on how many hidden requests a body has - nicely done!

@FOIMonkey has suggested reaching out to find out if this seems to be effective at reducing takedowns.