If you make more than one or two requests for information to public authorities, the background research and correspondence soon starts to build up.
Keeping track of the dates you send your requests, receive a reply from the authority asking you to clarify your request, or are notified that it is extending the deadline for making a decision on your request, can quickly get complicated.
I’ve created a spreadsheet to help people keep track of their requests, under either the Official Information Act or the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act. It can also help you keep track of any complaints you might make to the Ombudsman about the public authorities’ responses.
While I’ve incorporated feedback from experienced users of the OIA, this is only the first version of the request and complaint tracking tool. If you encounter any problems, or have suggestions for improvement, please send them to me, using the email address shown in the spreadsheet.
Clicking on the button below will download a zipped folder containing a ‘Read Me’ file and an Excel template file. Please read the ‘Read Me’ file for instructions on getting started.
P.S. If you find this tool helpful, please consider buying me a cup of coffee – link on the right!
Copyright
The template spreadsheet and the Read Me file are my copyright. They are published with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Details of what this means can be found in the ‘Read Me’ file. More details about the licence can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Further explanation of what the ‘Non Commercial’ part of the licence means can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#does-my-use-violate-the-noncommercial-clause-of-the-licenses