mySociety Calls for Application for Participation in its Third AlaveteliCon 

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Mark Cridge, Chief Executive, mySociety
Mark Cridge, Chief Executive, mySociety

mySociety is inviting journalists and campaigners who want to collaborate on Freedom of Information (FOI)-generated investigations or interested in setting up an FOI platform in their countries or want to learn how to use FOI to its fullest potential to apply to participate in its ‘AlaveteliCon’ coming up on September 23 and 24, 2019 in Oslo, Norway, a few days ahead of the International Right to Know Day, September 28

The AlaveteliCon is mySociety’s Freedom of Information (FOI) technologies conference.

mySociety is a not-for-profit social enterprise based in the UK.

Announcing the event, mySociety said the AlaveteliCon, in its third edition, will bring together activists, journalists, technologists and campaigners who use Freedom of Information laws, data and technologies to create public-interest investigations and campaigns from across the world.

The third AlaveteliCon will include a focus on catalysing collaborations on cross-border European public interest investigations and campaigns, in order to strengthen the use of FOI across the region. This focus is in part due to mySociety’s latest Transparency project, funded by Adessium Foundation, which seeks to enable journalists, campaigners and citizens in Europe to make greater and more effective use of their right to access information, in particular to generate public interest stories and campaigns that hold power to account.

Participants are expected to benefit in a number of ways from the AlaveteliCon including exchanging insights and ideas on how to run and improve open-source Freedom of Information platforms such as WhatDoTheyKnow, MuckRock and FragDenStaat; hearing how journalists and campaigners from around the world have used FOI to power high-profile investigations and campaigns; making connections with journalists and campaigners who would like to collaborate on cross-border investigations that hold governments to account; and learning about data sources available on FOI platforms around the world, waiting to be analysed and turned into public-interest stories.

The third AlaveteliCon participants will also get to hear tips from FOI activists on getting governments to release information in their countries including going to court; contribute to the further development of mySociety’s open-source FOI toolkit for journalists, Alaveteli Pro, which helps journalists and campaigners to manage their FOI investigations; connect to a global network of FOI experts and advocates; and work together to plan potential joint activities to celebrate International Right to Know Day coming up September 28, 2019.

Limited spaces are available and interested persons are encouraged to fill out this application form telling mySociety what unique perspective they can bring that is relevant to the conference themes and topics by September 2, 2019 at the very latest.

Although AlaveteliCon is free to attend, delegates will be required to arrange their own travel, accommodation and living costs in Oslo.

For further information and to apply, please visit https://www.mysociety.org/2019/05/21/alavetelicon-2019-apply-to-join-us-in-oslo/.

mySociety which also works in the UK and internationally, also builds online technologies that give people the power to get things changed, and share these technologies so that they can be used anywhere.

Support for AlaveteliCon comes from Adessium Foundation and NUUG Foundation.