So far today @WhatDoTheyKnow volunteers (assisted by @mySociety staff) have dealt with around fifty different matters related to the running of the service. Issues will keep coming in into the evening and overnight. Could you volunteer to help? mysociety.org/2018/10/19/hel…
Today four volunteers have been active, and we’ve worked directly with around four members of @mySociety staff (other staff will have been working on keeping the organisation running, sysadmin, etc. developing the software which runs the site, which all helps too).
@mySociety In addition to the “active” volunteers, as we operate internally transparently, other volunteers, including trustees, will have kept an eye on what’s happening, ready to comment/nudge/question/discuss if necessary.
@mySociety We maintain our database of public bodies every day. We respond to requests to add new bodies, remove defunct ones, and update contact details. We’ve added a couple of new schools today; and advised some users who asked us to add bodies which didn’t meet our criteria for listing
@mySociety Often we get asked to add “bodies” which are actually part of an organisation we already list; we advise the user and where appropriate update the public notes on our site to help others thinking along the same lines.
@mySociety We’ve provided advice to users on a wide range of topics from who to make a request to, to helping people use our service - many of our users are not very confident using computers, emails and websites but they have identified information which they want released by public bodies
@mySociety No new accidental releases of personal info by public bodies or legal issues today - they can be hugely time consuming to deal with. We did have a number of cases of people struggling to contact @ukhomeoffice resorting to misusing our service deal with. whatdotheyknow.com/body/home_offi…
@mySociety @ukhomeoffice We’re always catching bugs and discussing potential improvements for the site; most of that goes on in public at github.com/mysociety/alav… and github.com/mysociety/what…
@mySociety @ukhomeoffice This morning four #FOI responses came in to mangled @WhatDoTheyKnow email addresses. Volunteers matched them to the correct threads. This has happened since we started running the site. We suspect some public bodies manually type addresses into correspondence management systems.
