For most of its history, freedom of information was exercised in private. A requester wrote to an authority, the authority answered that requester, and nobody else ever saw either side of the exchange. A generation of web platforms changed this by making the request, the reply and everything in between public by default — and in doing so changed how the right itself is used.
How open request platforms work
The model is simple. A user drafts a request on the website, the platform sends it to the authority from a unique email address, and every answer the authority returns is automatically published on the same page. The complete correspondence — the request, acknowledgements, refusals, released documents and any appeals — becomes a permanent public record that anyone can read, cite and build on. The requester still holds the legal right; the platform simply removes the privacy that once surrounded its exercise.
WhatDoTheyKnow and the Alaveteli lineage
The best-known example is WhatDoTheyKnow, launched in 2008 by the UK civic-technology charity mySociety. It has carried hundreds of thousands of requests to British public bodies, and its archive of answered requests has become a research resource in its own right. Reporting connected to the site is collected under the WhatDoTheyKnow topic page.
In 2011 mySociety generalised the code behind the site into Alaveteli, an open-source platform that any group, anywhere, can deploy for its own jurisdiction. The name honours Alaveteli in Finland, the home parish of Anders Chydenius, the eighteenth-century clergyman whose campaigning produced the world's first freedom-of-information law, the Swedish ordinance of 1766. Alaveteli installations have since appeared in dozens of countries, each adapted to local law, language and appeal routes.
FragDenStaat and AskTheEU
Germany's FragDenStaat, started in 2011 by the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, applies the same publish-everything principle to requests under the federal Informationsfreiheitsgesetz and related statutes. It runs on its own free-software codebase rather than Alaveteli — a reminder that the idea travelled faster than any single implementation — and has broadened over time from request-hosting into campaigns and litigation around access rights.
At the European level, AskTheEU.org, operated by the Madrid-based organisation Access Info Europe and likewise launched in 2011, channels requests to the EU institutions under Regulation 1049/2001. It is built on Alaveteli and serves requesters across all member states. The mechanics of the EU regime itself — deadlines, exceptions and appeals — are set out in the guide on how to use European freedom of information.
What publishing in the open changed
The first effect is deduplication. Once a question has been answered publicly, nobody needs to ask it again; the archive answers it for them. The second is precedent. Refusals, the exemptions invoked and the outcomes of appeals sit side by side, so requesters can see how an authority has treated similar requests before drafting their own, and can quote an authority's earlier reasoning back to it.
The third effect is behavioural. An authority answering through a platform knows that its reply — its tone, its delay, its choice of exemption — will be read by more people than the requester. Missed statutory deadlines are visible and countable, which has allowed platforms to publish systematic response-time statistics rather than anecdotes.
Openness also lowered the barrier to entry. The platforms supply address books of authorities, request templates, automatic deadline reminders and plain-language guidance on appeals, turning a procedure once dominated by lawyers and specialist journalists into something a first-time user can complete in minutes.
There are trade-offs. Requesters' names are published alongside their requests, which not everyone is comfortable with, and released documents occasionally contain personal data that platforms must then handle responsibly. Some authorities have argued that platform-borne requests arrive in unmanageable volumes. But the direction of travel has been one way: in the jurisdictions where these sites operate, a substantial share of all access requests now flows through them, and the public archive they generate has become part of the infrastructure of accountability.