Add optional organisation / affiliation field for users

[RichardTaylor]

On WhatDoTheyKnow many users make requests in their roles as part of organisations; for example they are acting on behalf of charities, campaign groups, or as an academic affiliated to an institution.

Sometimes users actively include their organisation / affiliation in the request body, when "signing" their request, or on their profile page. Many don't though. I suspect their omission is often not due to explicitly wishing not to publish the affiliation.

My reason for considering allowing people to enter an affiliation, and to show it on request and profile pages, is to show who is using the site, and to draw attention to the serious and impactful uses of Freedom of Information by organisations. I think it might improve the credibility and reputation of the service, and perhaps Freedom of Information users more generally.

A strong argument against adding such a feature is keeping the service / software simple.

If people don't fill in their profile on the site - would they be likely to complete an optional organisation / affiliation field?

Another way of considering this could be a snippet of the user profile to be shown on every request; but the user choosing what to put in the short "organisation / affiliation" line above the larger text box.

Administrators get to see users' affiliations via email domains and in signatures of emails when corresponding with users - this gives a different perspective on who the users are than is visible to the public browsing the site; this suggestion is to encourage sharing some of that extra information, if users choose to share it, openly.

Just a suggestion for discussion.

[garethrees]

I think the about me field serves this purpose. Maybe we could be clearer about saying that you should include your organisation there if applicable. Something to consider in #1524.

[RichardTaylor]

I think by not having this feature we're missing out on an opportunity to improve the reputation of Alaveteli sites.

WhatDoTheyKnow is used by many organisations, yet this isn't clear to those viewing the site.

Perhaps as an initial small first step an optional "Organisation" field on the sign-up form could populate the profile text?

[RichardTaylor]

Users making requests on behalf of an organisation could be encouraged to make that clear. The advantages of making a request as an organisation rather than as an individual (eg. enabling the institution to follow-up and appeal even if the individual has moved on) could be set out.

[RichardTaylor]

The use of an organisational account may be an alternative to the use of a pseudonym, enabling those who are wary about associating their name a with a request to use the service.

[garethrees]

Rather than a separate field for this (which would be better implemented by #3056), we could make a low-friction improvement by allowing the user to pre-fill their about_me on signup:

This minimises the amount of additional complexity in the application, while at the same time making it clearer that we welcome organisation affiliation.

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An alternative is to re-use the User#name attribute. We could have an "Organisation?" element which when clicked just replaces the form label. We'd still populate User#name, but it would make it clear that signing up as an organisation is possible (#3239).

We'd also want to allow a user to get back to the default of an "individual" account too.

[HelenWDTK]

This issue has been automatically closed due to a lack of discussion or resolution for over 12 months.
Should we decide to revisit this issue in the future, it can be reopened.