On 19 January 2012 11:58, Sam Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 19 Jan 2012, at 11:46, Francis Davey wrote: > >> 2012/1/19 Francis Irving <[email protected]>: >>> My hypothesis would be that a simple reply is completely within the >>> act. >>> >> >> Absolutely. There's no "in the Act" - at least not in any obvious >> sense. In particular, the Act does not impose any formality on a >> positive response. If you ask a question and the answer is supplied, >> that is all notionally within the mechanism of the FOIA but need not >> actually advert to it. > > > We probably have a set of really good examples of how a simple reply would > have been clearly as informative and cheaper than a complex one. > > There was that reply from a VC of a university to an FoI request which was > one of the best examples I've seen recently.
On this subject, here's a fascinating example of an authority using WDTK to reply to a request via Twitter: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/business_rates_received_and_gran Obviously it's fantastic that they're embracing the principle of openness, and using WDTK as a disclosure log! But relevant to this conversation about overly formal response: does a question over Twitter really a Word document acknowledgement that says "thank you for your request which, was received on 18 January 2012 for information held by the Council under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. In some circumstances a fee may be payable... " etc?! Seb _______________________________________________ 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
