Froide

 

 

Froide is a Freedom Of Information Portal, to drive better policies in a context of COVID-19 recovery.

Froide is a Freedom of Information (FOI) portal written in Python using the Django Web framework. It manages contactable entities, requests and much more. Users can send emails to these entities and receive public answers via the platform. It was developed to power Frag den Staat – the German Freedom of Information Portal, but is internationalised, localised and themeable.


Highlights

  • Froide uses many of the built-in Django features like the Admin interface to manage and update entities in the system, the internationalization system, and the user management and authentication.
  • Freedom of Information Laws and Public Entities are connected through a many-to-many relationship. That allows for a Public Body to be accountable under different laws.
  • A Public Body can have a parent to represent hierarchies from the real world. They can also be categorized into classifications (e.g. ministry, council) and topical tags (e.g. environment, military) which can be defined separately.
  • Users can create requests without a Public Body so that others can suggest an appropriate recipient later.
  • Requests can optionally be kept private by users and published at a later point (e.g. after a related article has been published).
  • Requests are mailed to Public Bodies through the platform via a special, request-unique email address (using SMTP) and the platform will receive answers on that mail address (by accessing an IMAP account).
  • Search functionality for Requests and Public Bodies.
  • A read/write REST-API.
  • Redaction of PDFs.

Use Cases

  • It is used by the German and the Austrian FOI site, but it is fully internationalised and written in English.

DOWNLOAD THE TOOL

BACK TO DIGITAL TOOLKIT