Project updates

I have been quietly working away on a few things. Firstly, I soft-launched the FOISA advice/guidance site that I was working on. It is not yet how I would like it to be due to GDPR issues. It’s tricky to sort out the proper lawful basis when doing AI enhancement on disclosure log data, as you don’t properly know in advance what data you will have. I got some advice about it in late May and am currently mulling over whether to proceed with that part of the project at all, or to stick to what I have now. Currently, I don’t even log analytics.

In the meantime, I’ve started working with my partner on a second project around charity shops. I’ve collated the refuse/accept lists for donations of goods for 150+ charities so far. Remarkably, nobody has yet built a central item search for these. Charities spend hundreds of thousands a year on disposing of goods they can’t sell that have often been donated by well-meaning people, so I think it might be useful. I’m halfway through the data verification stage, and once that’s done, I’ll run something once a month to check the original sources and see if anything has changed.

I’m also working on an FOI project about Copilot agents in use by the public sector. We’re in the test batch stage at this point, but have already had some data back. Once we’ve mapped what these are, we can dig into the interesting ones in a bit more detail. I suspect we’re not going to find many in active use, rather the shadows of experimentation. This has been the case so far.

Beyond that, the garden has needed tending to. In exchange for the destruction, the foxes have brought wild strawberries, which have been some of the sweetest I have ever tasted. I failed for many years to get the cultivated strains to take in the beds, so these are a real gift.