Alaveteli

Software to help make freedom of information requests

Alaveteli is free and open source software by mySociety to help citizens write freedom of Information requests and automatically publish any responses.[2]

Alaveteli
Written inRuby on Rails
LicenseAGPLv3[1]
Websitealaveteli.org

Alaveteli is described as "a project to create a free, standard, internationalised platform for making Freedom of Information (FOI) requests".[3][4] Alaveteli is funded by the Open Society Institute and the Hivos Foundation.[5]

It started life as the software running WhatDoTheyKnow, a UK site that publishes responses to FOI requests. The original WhatDoTheyKnow code was written primarily by Francis Irving while working for mySociety.[6] Alaveteli is named after Alaveteli in Finland where Anders Chydenius who was an early campaigner[7] for Freedom of Information worked as a curate. Alaveteli is the name for the software rather than a public facing website or brand.

People who run sites on the Alaveteli platform are also invited to become part of a community, with support and tips shared via a message board,[8] and regular conferences[9]

Alternative free and open source software that are used to operate FOI-request portals include Froide, which[10] FragDenStaat.de in Germany and FragDenStaat.at in Austria are based on, and MuckRock,[11] which is used for MuckRock and FOIA Machine in the United States.

Sites running Alaveteli

References

  1. ^ "Alaveteli – GitHub". GitHub.
  2. ^ "About « Alaveteli – international Right to Know software". Alaveteli.org. Retrieved 2012-05-27.
  3. ^ Credits, WhatDoTheyKnow.com
  4. ^ "Alaveteli".
  5. ^ "Funding / mySociety".
  6. ^ "About". WhatDoTheyKnow. Retrieved 2012-05-27.
  7. ^ The World's First Freedom of Information Act
  8. ^ "Google Groups".
  9. ^ "AlaveteliCon 2015 / mySociety".
  10. ^ "stefanw/froide". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-10-28.
  11. ^ "MuckRock/muckrock". GitHub. Retrieved 2017-03-23.