Home

This is an open source project to create a standard, internationalised platform for making Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in different countries around the world. The software started off life as WhatDoTheyKnow, a website produced by mySociety for making FOI requests in the UK.

Alaveteli is essentially a system for storing and cataloguing FOI requests in public, to ensure maximum transparency for the process and maximum exposure for information released under FOI. Because the process happens in public, it is also an advocacy tool for activists who wish to highlight how the system is (or isn't) working.

The features of the software include:

• Search for public authorities which are subject to FOI laws (by text search, tags, etc)
• Search previous requests, clearly marked by if they were successful or unsuccessful
• Set up email alerts for requests on specific topics, made by specific users, addressed to specific public authorities, etc
• A permanent, threaded archive of all email correspondence between two parties regarding each request
  • All emails between the two parties are automatically routed via the website, with identities protected where necessary
• Track which requests are beyond their legally-defined must-be-responded-to date
• Ability for users to annotate requests with supporting information
• Back-office moderation features, including censor/redacting rules, facility for assigning incoming emails manually to authorities, etc

Partly funded by the Open Society Institute, we are now working on a version of the software than can be deployed in multiple countries. Currently, the project is only suitable for developers, as the code is quite hard to install (we're working on that!)

Project orientation

• We're working on an adminstrator's manual which describes how a typical Alaveteli site is run. It takes a fair bit of moderation, customer support and policy development to maintain a successful FOI site.
• The software would currently (Jan 2011) require a lot of work to get it running in your own jurisdiction. Getting a running system is quite hard work (but get on the mailing list and we'll try to help!), and there's no localisation features yet.
• In order to produce software that will work in different contexts, we need to support different jurisdictions and different languages. A single country may have several jurisdictions and/or languages. To understand what's needed, we are maintaining an overview of legislation in different jurisdictions. Please add notes about your country here.
• Here's what we think needs doing to support multiple languages and jurisdictions:
  • an FOI request can go through several different states, which may vary by jurisdiction. This is currently hard coded. It should be configurable through an admin interface. See rules engine for statuses for a discussion. (est. 6d work)
  • We need to support multiple languages, often within a single country. See i18n approach for a discussion. (est. 20d work - see I18n progress for a progress report and I18n guide for notes about deploying and developing i18n further)
  • We need to make sure it's easy to skin a site, i.e. give it your own branding, etc (est. 4d work)
  • To make the software easier to run and support:
    • Upgrade to Rails 3 (est. 10d)
    • Document the system better, especially caching, email, hosting etc (est. 3d)
    • Consider migrating document storage and conversion to DocumentCloud (est. 7d)

Developer orientation

• The software is written in Ruby on Rails. We support postgresql as the backend database. A configured MTA like exim, postfix or sendmail is necessary to parse incoming emails. We've deployed successfully on Debian and Ubuntu (10.1). We use memcached and we deploy behind Varnish.
• Installing the software is a major task at the moment. The best documentation is currently in INSTALL.txt.
• There's also a page about Understanding the code
• A standard initial step for customising your deployment is Writing a theme
• When deploying for production, you may find that the software experiences quite a few performance issues. There are things that can be done about this in the software, given some developer attention. You can see some WhatDoTheyKnow data on our page about Site usage.
• proposals for enhancements
• notes about internationalizing the code