Thats pretty much exactly what we implemented in one quango. The people at the top were 100% behind FoI, so when the whole organisation was re-architected we implemented a central document management system, business processes were designed so no-one was permitted to work on any document that wasn't in the system. The system looks after retention and disposal (or transfer to national archives).
Yes you need tight business processes, but this should be standard for any organisation (especially public) - otherwise how can they be accountable? There has been plenty of time for all government departments to get their FoI act in order - there's no real excuse not to have. Paul /)/+) On 22 December 2011 15:40, Mark Goodge <[email protected]> wrote: > On 22/12/2011 15:07, Mark Ballard wrote: >> >> Isn't it about time there was a presumption that all these documents are >> public from the outset, that public bodies should keep documents >> confidential as an exception, > > > Yes, that's pretty much the presumption behind the FOIA. > > >> and that it would be a relatively simple >> matter of Content Management System administration to make documents >> visible to the public? > > > But this isn't the case. Really, it isn't. For this suggestion to work, > you'd have to store absolutely everything that's potentially disclosable in > a single, central document store. And that's impractical, on all sorts of > levels. For a start, institutional inertia increases exponentially with the > size of the institution (and that's not confined to the public sector, > commercial organisations have exactly the same problem), meaning that any > change to the way documents are stored becomes an increasingly significant > cost issue. And there are lots of other reasons why a centralised store of > everything isn't necessarily a good idea. Take emails, for example. Storing > everything centrally would cause potential conflicts with the DPA and data > retention guidelines. But picking and choosing what you store means you > don't get the benefit of knowing that the information exists in a single > place. > > The other problem is that the it's the Freedom of *Information* Act, not a > Freedom of Documents Act. Not all information is necessarily held in a > single document. A request along the lines of "Please tell me how much each > of your departments spent on chocolate biscuits in the past year" is a > perfectly valid FOI request, but the chances of such data already being in a > single document are remote - it will need to be extracted from the > departmental accounts and aggregated. > > Obviously, any public body can do a lot to minimise costs by ensuring that > data which is, or is likely to be, requested by the public is collated and > stored in a format which makes it easy to supply. But you can't predict > every request. And I'd guess that most of them are, in fact, unpredictable. > > > Mark > -- > Sent from my Babbage Difference Engine 2 > http://mark.goodge.co.uk > > _______________________________________________ > developers-public mailing list > [email protected] > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public > > Unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/paul%40idltd.com _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
