Guide to contact an agency

[Ainali]

We have talked about this in a couple of collab hours, and made an application but I noticed we don't have anything here on GitHub yet, so let's start a discussion. The general idea is to build a guide for normal people on how to best make contact with a public body in order to achieve the results they want.

The guide should be possible to adjust for different jurisdictions and types of contact. For example, different guidance is needed if you make a Freedom of Information request in Sweden and in the United Kingdom, as well as for a Freedom of Information request, if you want to start a Citizen's initiative or just make a general complaint within a specific country and so on.

Therefore, we need to build up an adaptable guiding framework, basic templates for common contact types and build a user-friendly front end to it. There are a number of things to discuss, from what framework/platform we need to build this, what kind of contacts we want to guide in to how it should work for the user and more.

Please share any thoughts this sparks for you!

[Ainali]

I'll start with a list of contact types that I have been collecting. This is meant as a starting point, it is obviously missing a lot and probably is not structured in a useful way, but perhaps this gives more ideas of what we are trying to help with:

• General complaints
• Formal appeals
• Reporting errors
  • whistleblowing
• Request services
• Schedule appointments
• Lobby and influence
  • public consultations
• Ask for information
  • permits
  • subsidies
  • registrations
  • applications
  • formal Freedom of information requests
• GDPR
  • retrieve copy of personal information
  • ask for correction
  • ask for deletion

[Abbe98]

Data reuse requests: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/open-data-and-high-value-datasets-step-step-access-guide