[euopendata] Looking for summer reading? Sink your teeth into these documents!

Mon Aug 4 16:20:10 UTC 2014

[apologies for crossposting]

To all open data and access to information advocates!

Worried you do not have a book ready to read for when you hit the beach?

Well, worry no longer - Access Info has released the documents it 
received from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office for you to read, 
scrape data, and do whatever you want with it. See message below for 
more details.

-------- Original Message --------

  Open data to get your teeth into! Access Info invites open analysis of
  UK FCO documents

/Madrid, 4 August 2014 /– Access Info Europe 
<http://www.access-info.org> has called for fellow freedom of 
information activists to help analyse and discover the information and 
data held in the tens of UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office documents on 
negotiations in Brussels to revise the European Union's transparency 
law, in a crowdsourcing initiative launched today.

*Download the documents here 
<http://www.documentcloud.org/public/search/Group:%20accessinfoeurope/p4>!*

These documents, obtained as a result of a four-year legal battle, are a 
unprecedented insight into the debate around the right of access to EU 
documents that has been going on since 2008, and could prove which EU 
countries are, and are not, transparency champions.

Dive into the data and help shed some light on the relations between the 
EU and Member States and the so-called "policy-laundering" phenomenon, 
whereby citizens are told the EU is to blame for certain decisions which 
actually involve full and proactive Member State representatives' 
participation.

What are you waiting for? There are over a hundred documents with 
until-now unknown information, including: e-mails, meeting notes, papers 
for specialised committees, different proposals with their corresponding 
amendments etc.

Access Info Europe can't go through all this information alone, and 
because we believe these documents carry not only interesting but 
relevant data that should become public, we call on open data and 
freedom of information activists to collaborate by analysing, 
visualising, and making the information public!

All help is welcome; the more we are, the richer the analysis, the 
better for transparency!

All documents obtained from the FCO are available in DocumentCloud here 
<http://www.documentcloud.org/public/search/Group:%20accessinfoeurope/p4>.

Please note that these documents describe in detail the proposed 
amendments article by article, so those with a background in law or 
expertise in right of access to information may find it easier to 
analyse the data and would be particularly welcome.

      For more information, please contact:

*Andreas Pavlou | *Access Info Europe
andreas at access-info.org +34 913 65 65 58

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/euopendata/attachments/20140804/4284b26f/attachment-0002.html>