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openaustralia / righttoknow

Theme for, and issues specific to, Right To Know.
https://www.righttoknow.org.au/
MIT License
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Acknowledge Vs. Response #708

Open benrfairless opened 5 years ago

benrfairless commented 5 years ago

We got the below feedback in an email:

In the FOI Guidelines dated May 2018, it states that: "An agency or minister has a statutory obligation to acknowledge that an FOI request has been received as soon as practicable, and no later than 14 days after receiving a request (s 15(5)(a))".

Perhaps the Right To Know Website should add this to the screen. It currently mentions 30 days, which refers to the time for a response and is different from acknowledgement.

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benrfairless commented 5 years ago

This is controlled using the "REPLY_LATE_AFTER_DAYS" variable in the general.yml. file to calculate the date.

I suspect that this is because upstream Alaveteli don't see the nuances between an acknowledgement and a response. I might ask upstream to see how this is handled.

garethrees commented 5 years ago

The UK FOI Act doesn't have any specific timeline for acknowledging FOI requests.

Even if it did, Alaveteli doesn't attempt to model the law word-for-word, so I'm not sure we'd really build this deadline in to the software itself. The main objective for users is to get information, not acknowledgements.

We actually really want to identify and minimise auto-acknowledgements (https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/2045) as they provide little value to citizens.

I think for righttoknow, I'd just add some additional guidance about acknowledgements to https://www.righttoknow.org.au/help/requesting#quickly_response, as that's linked via ("details") in the main "waiting response" status:

screen shot 2018-10-01 at 12 48 49

Hope that helps! Feel free to ask additional questions here and I should get notified.