Would you help pay to get information from Irish Rail, the councils etc?

monument

As the title says: Would you help pay to get information from Irish Rail, such as reports on speed restrictions? Or, say, Dublin City Council's Dublin Bikes contract with JCDecaux?

First, a quick intro: A lot of you here know me from posting, I have a large interest in transport issues and I'm sure many of you know that I'm a freelance journalist. I also have a growing interest in making public the information and documents that authorities do not want to released. Making public the information that we collectively own. Or sometimes just getting answers to simple questions that authorities don't want to answer.

There's two main ways to do get this information: First, Freedom of Information which can be costly for a journalist like me from the outset. Secondly, there's the lesser known Access to Information on the Environment, the legislation is more supportive of releasing information and is free at the request stage. The problem is there's still the need for €150 for each appeal to the Information Commissioner, and the likelihood of needing an appeal is high with the kind of example requests I mentioned at the start of this post.

Access to Information on the Environment or AIE sounds quite limited, but with areas like transport, construction, waste etc, environmental covers a wide range of things. Included is what may affect the natural and built environmental, everything from water to earth to noise, it includes measures that are aimed to protect the environment, environmental policy, and cost-benefit and other economic analyses. See my quick guide to it if you want to read up on how it works, and there's links to even more information after the guide.

The joy of it is that unlike FOI, semi-State companies are included -- that means Irish Rail and the rest of the CIE group. Port companies, the Gardai and others not under FOI are also included. Companies who do work on behalf of public authorities may also be included. Nama may be included, although that's currently being disputed.

I'm not involved with them, but thestory.ie already has a good donations model set up. Donations are looked for via Paypal, and the money is used for appeals, retrieval costs and requests in the case of FOI. You may not have heard of it before, it's run by two journalists and documents they public on their site have been the source of many national newspaper stories (they have been credited sometimes and sometimes not). They are doing some great work. The point of this thread is to ask would people here be interested in the same type of model for transport issues?

To be up front, as a freelancer I would be looking to use the information first and then publish any raw documents, databases, answers or whatever I get. Requests can be time consuming.

expectationlost

erm don't have paypal account so won't give money but would like to spend some time trying to display info in usable way, help in deciphering the data you get is just as important as the money, go set up a site, think you have the trust and respect and track record to be given the donations for getting the info, mention your real name there it might not be obvious to everyone.

might be useful to gather what info is available already, have the irishrailuser guys, or transport reporters tried this kinda stuff before? (not with AIE?)

dowlingm

There's an interesting new media site called Open File which may interest the folks behind "The Story".

(Sorry if this is viewed as a slight threadjack)