Yes! That's a great site from mySociety in the UK. There's a discussion going on regarding a Canadian version on the Google Group here:
http://groups.google.com/group/visiblegovernment_atoiThe idea of the discussion group is to get input from people that file information requests on a regular basis, to understand what their needs are. To that end, there's some directors of Canadian advocacy organizations on board, as well as a political journalist.
The group will need input from people with technical backgrounds to go over feasability. There's some very key differences between the UK and Canadian systems that will have to be worked around (or -- very worst case -- agitated against).
TheyWorkForYou is a very powerful tool, perhaps my favorite in the mySociety stable, as it externally captures statistics on a government process: access to information response times. This allows:
- overall statistics on AtoI requests
- visiblility of what departments (and types of information) get the most requests
- benchmarking between departments to see which ones respond faster
And key to the system: it provides benefits to the end users, allowing them to track outstanding requests (your request has been outstanding for 3 weeks), which is often a problem for people who file multiple requests. It also provides features for sharing the results and (I think) allowing a group of people to track the same request.
The statistics that the access to information system gathers can be used to highlight which areas of government ought to be opened up, to avoid the process entirely. Perhaps, then, the rest of government will follow eventually. As I said in a blog post on visiblegovernment.ca following the announcement of the project, eventually, disclosure should be the rule, not the exception.
Even if you don't have technical expertise to contribute, please join the google group anyway to show support for the concept. You can always set your email preferences to 'none' if you don't want to be bothered with the details of planning the tool.
Jennifer
--- On Wed, 7/9/08, Hugh McGuire <
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> From: Hugh McGuire <
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> Subject: [CivicAccess-discuss] whatdotheyknow
> To: "discuss civicaccess" <
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> Received: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 12:57 PM
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