[okfn-discuss] Emails on IsItOpen

Sat Feb 20 14:19:21 UTC 2010

Hi Peter,

Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> I only just realised this might be a problem.
> 
> When mailing IsItOpen the email of the recipient appears in clear - this
> could be scraped by bots. This is different from WhatDoTheyKnow where there
> is an official FOI officer - here there is often only an assumed personal
> contact (i.e. it may not be the right person to send to). Sending public
> emails to arbitrary individuals might cause them public embarrassment,
> especially when they might simply be an arbitrary contact. For some of the
> organizations we are likely to write to the request itself may be seen as
> confrontational. These organizations may well not have an official contact
> of any sort and also where there is one it's of the form help at foo.org which
> probably isn't going to get a reply. (In a sense when we get friendly
> addresses to write to the problem will have gone away).
> 
> I suspect that we should allow the email to be hidden (otherwise we are
> effectively publishing people's emails without permission). But I'm not an
> expert here. It may be useful to list the role of the person (e.g. Editor of
> Fooics).
> 
> So far I have only sent emails to friendly recipients
> 
> P.
> 

Thanks for your considerations. I'm sure you're right. To some extent 
this is treading new ground, so it would be good to extend this 
discussion to include when it is appropriate for the enquirer to follow 
up the enquiry (how long does one wait for a reply?), whether 'thank 
you' notes should be sent to acknowledge a response from the data 
handler, whether there would be any such thing as an 'unhelpful 
response' from the data handler (and what one should then do), and so on.

At any rate, I hope you like the new features. :-)

J.