Freedom of Information - consideration for web site designers
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-03-20 19:39:20 - Graham Ellis
The Freedom of Information Act in the UK has proven very useful in some of the things I've been doing with regard to public transport services in Wiltshire - though more in an analysis after the even of what happened rather than in a more positive, forward looking way. But there's another side to the coin too.
If you're working in the public sector and designing electronic media, you should be aware of whether material contributed to something like an internal notebook / chatroom in your department may be revealed under FOI. That's yet a further consideration that web site designers and administrators need to consider on top of copyright, libel, decency, disability and other forms of discrimination, incitement, advertising and so on beyond the AUP (Acceptable User Policy) of what's posted.
As a web developer, are you effected by the admin matters? Yes - you are (or you should be, at least!). For you can provide tools and facilities in such a way that it makes sites using your software naturally easy to administer, or it makes them into a headache.
I understand [to the best of my knowledge - and I'm open to correction here] that if a chat room / forum within an office or department is non-permanent, with messages posted being automatically purged after a couple of weeks, then there's no question of there being a need to be able to produce the data months or years later under FOI. But if the data is left on the system for an indefinite period, then even the tittle-tattle is FOI-able. Curiously, think just how many chat boards there are out there, with things like invite to Old Fred's leaving bash the year before last ... which are such a potential waste of someone's time when a quick automatic purge by the web site designer could have fixed them.
And here's a further thought. If I provide a set of training notes to public sector organization "X", then it might be possible for someone to ask for, and receive, a copy of those notes under an FOI request. That's an interesting one - and I believe it has been done in the USA where a government body (NASA) had to provide information on one of their FOI request equivalents, even though the material was clearly copyrighted. This is something I kinda need to give some further thought to!