A Note About Freedom of Information

As you can see there's been a bit of a flurry of stories originating from Freedom of Information requests.

The important thing to note here is that I would not have known about any of them were it not for the 'What Do They Know' website.

As I mentioned before the site is building into a handy database for FoI data concerning Nottingham City Council but the rub is they only include requests made via their website. My own earlier FoI request about about Discretionary Housing Payments has disappeared into the ether as far as everyone except me is concerned, for example.

So how much better would it be if there was a central point where ALL FoI data on NCC could be accessed in one handy place online? That's what we're asking for in our petition which says -

"We believe that Nottingham City Council should publish all Freedom of Information requests it receives along with the responses on its website. We therefore call on Nottingham City Council to implement this simple act in the interests of openness and accountability."

You can sign it here. Please do so if you haven't already and what's more, please tell everyone you know about it, link to it on your own blogs, Tweet it, Myspace it whatever.

Thanks to those who have signed it and/or publicised it in some way already, lets keep it up.