How about keeping the information public from start so a request is not even needed?

Fully in favour of this and we are making efforts to publish as much of our data publicly as we can. We have set up an open data portal for this purpose.

My country differs from Germany in that our Freedom of Information laws are much broader and allow anyone to request virtually any record held by a public organisation, with the grounds for refusal being narrower. For example, generic day to day email exchanges between low level public officials are requestable and we have to argue why it is against the public interest to prevent releasing them.

While we're trying to publish as much data that is of public interest ad possible, it's proving very difficult to anticipate many of these requests.

In my organisation in particular - we're receiving requests from consultation firms outside the EU on costings for certain services. So we(The taxpayer) are essentially doing their research for them.

Requests from outside of eu, the requester should pay the full cost of compilation and then some.

Why not make those emails public to begin with?

There's no need to compile/publish if all data is public to begin with.

Unfortunately, not all data held by an organisation is generated and held in a publishable format.

The data in this example is created incidentally within email chains as part of a broader process.

It's really not cost effective to publish real-time data that's been requested by these firms.

So in principle, I agree that where there is substantial data held that the public are interested in, it should be published. However, it's not feasible or cost effective to publish all data or records held by a public organisation.

Could those email chains be turned into a mailing list available by default, like lkml.org ? Then nothing would need to be done to make it "cost effective to publish".

Thanks for your suggestion, but unfortunately not. The email chains containing this data could never be published without significant redaction as they centre around services provided to members of the public and contain their personal information. Publishing any of that would result in a breach of GDPR and litigation

Thank you for the explanation!

What service should be cut or tax increased in order to pay for it?

Data is there. Bundle it up in torrent and let community handle it. Cheaper than current system.

I think implying it's that simple is naive

In reality every public department would need more data staff to collate, prepare and publish data and maintain ownership of it, as a bare minimum. They'd be responsible for accuracy and any mistakes.

Not disagreeing with the idea but it does need funding. So I repeat my question