Hi there,
Thank you for subscribing to FOI Weekly. If you've subscribed, you already know a huge amount of what Australian governments do is public in theory but invisible in practice: buried in portals or PDFs few check, or website changes that are rarely noticed. We're building tools to fix this, and having you here means the work is reaching the people it should.
We're getting ready to launch two new tools, and we'd love your feedback. This week we're launching two tools in small closed betas. This just means we're opening up access to small groups first so we can fix any issues and make sure they're as useful as possible before wider release.
There will be limited places to ensure we're as responsive to the beta feedback as possible. The ~1 minute sign-up survey is here, and more context is below.
Quick background for newer subscribers
FOI Weekly is powered by ANI, a software that tracks changes to text, PDFs, links and pages on Australian government websites, and transforms these into easy-to-understand alerts.
Many of you provided feedback on the broader ANI output as it evolved. This led to our first, very focused offering: FOI Weekly. The next two are slightly more complex.
What's next?
- AusTender Weekly: a weekly newsletter similar to FOI Weekly, but for procurement. ANI catches every change to federal government tenders and contracts, triages them, and surfaces the ones worth knowing about. It will be more curated (i.e. the top 15 changes) as there are more changes than new FOIs.
- ANI Alerts: a regular summary of changes to major federal department and agency websites, so you can see what's being updated, added, or quietly removed. It will also be curated, as there are so many changes across the departments and agencies we’re currently tracking.
An example for the ANI Alerts beta: help us work out which departments and agencies; what the most useful output is (newsletter/spreadsheet/Slack alerts/Telegram updates) and how frequent the updates should be (weekly, twice a week, daily).
If either (or both) new tools sound interesting, we've put together a very short survey where you can request to join the closed betas. You can also feedback on four other product ideas so we know what to prioritise next.
Thank you for being part of this.