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Which people made WhatDoTheyKnow? #

Oh, nearly everyone (and maybe you too)!

• Heather Brooke (vampy!) has been pushing the idea of a UK FOI archive for years now.
• Both Phil Rodgers and Francis Irving entered it in a mySociety competition for ideas for public interest websites to build.
• It won, and then Chris Lightfoot (RIP :() thought up the wheeze of intercepting email responses to requests and automatically publishing them.
• Tom Steinberg got the cash to pay for the site from a dead chocolate mogul (thank you!) ...
• ... so that Francis Irving, Angie Ahl, Tommy Martin, Louise Crow, Matthew Somerville and Tom Steinberg could do the complex mixture of design and coding to build what you see today.
• Thanks particularly to Julian Todd (great blog!), Francis Davey, and Etienne Pollard for using the site early on and giving feedback (and/or legal advice!), and also to all our other users and testers.
• The amazing team of volunteers who run the site, answer your support emails, maintain the database of public authorities and so much more. Thanks to John Cross, Ben Harris, Adam McGreggor, Alex Skene, Richard Taylor.
• Volunteers who have provided patches to the code - thanks Peter Collingbourne and Tony Bowden.
• Everyone who has helped look up FOI email addresses.
• We couldn't do any of this without those crazy people who volunteer, amongst many other things, to do the accounts and fill in our VAT return.
• Finally, all the officers and servants who have answered the many requests made through the site. Their diligence, patience and professionalism is what has actually made the information that you see here. Thank them for helping make Government more transparent.

You're all stars.

Can I help out? #

Yes please! We're built out of our supporters and volunteers.

• You can make a donation. We're a registered charity.
• Help people find successful requests, and monitor performance of authorities, by playing the categorisation game.
• Find out FOI email addresses of authorities that we're missing.
• Write a blog post about either WhatDoTheyKnow or an interesting request that you've found. Post about it on a forum that you frequent. Tell friends about it.
• If you're a programmer, get the source code for our parent project, Alaveteli and tell us about patches we can pull. It's made in Ruby on Rails.
• Read more about volunteering with mySociety.