ANALISIS DE RESULTADOS DE LA DISTRIBUCION DE TIEMPOS

This is a term used by the SIC to describe when an authority (deliberately or otherwise) does not respond to a request for information within the twenty day deadline. Their silence (muteness) is taken to indicate they refuse the request.

It was Colin’s job andhisresponsibility to provide information in a manner that would not expose either his authority or colleagues. Yet the full, adequate and, hence, slower response that people such as Colin’s boss Derek preferred, in order for him personally not to stand out, seemed to be in conflict with the rapid response that Colin preferred, which itself was also intended to make absent the social relations (and hard work) that informed it.

It seemed those working for public authorities, concerned about appearing individually different, considered only what was at stake for them in disclosure. Given this, culture change was neither straight- forward, nor easy. While in principle it addressed the division between citizens and government, resolving this division only led to a division emerging elsewhere—between public authority employees themselves. As the ‘devolved’ practices of the legislation placed Colin in a position analogous with the SIC, Colin found himself taking sides with the Act. The form of the relationship between the public and public authorities was thus reiterated within the authority itself.

It soon became apparent that a division between citizens and civil servants might rapidly become one that emerged between Colin and his colleagues as he fulfilled his obligations under the Act. The Act, here, seemed being put to workbeyond its own realm, between civil servants themselves rather than between civil servants and citizens. As Colin went about persuading colleagues to release information, culture change lay in the migration of the secrecy divide from being between public organizations and the public they served to being within the organizations themselves.

Implementing and enforcing FOISA, here, entailed Colin managing his relations with others, and controlling whether or not those relations were apparent. It was through making social relations that were crucial to the information that was gathered and disclosed, invisible to those receiving this information, that knowledge took the form of information and Colin the form of an independent entity, or thing, whose actions were not informed by his relations with other people. This seemed crucial to the effective operation of FOISA and ‘compliance’ that required persons not to act in their own capacity, but in the capacity of the organization—or ‘decision-maker’. Yet social relations, as the passage below shows, were integral to FOI.

Among the colleagues with whom Colin regularly liaised to gather information and provide an applicant with a response was Margaret, an FOI Officer working for one of the hospitals in the West Glendale Hospitals Division, some thirty minutes away from the Health Board by train. Colin and Margaret often spoke on the telephone and corresponded by e-mail. As part of my work with the Health

Board, and offering a spare pair of hands, I was asked if I would visit Margaret and help her prepare for an internal FOI Audit that would take place in the following weeks. It was nearing the end of the first year that FOI was in force, and the authority was reviewing how FOISA had been implemented and the manner in which FOI requests were managed and recorded.

Margaret was a well-dressed, middle aged woman with two sons in their twenties who, she said, she continued working to support. Her husband was a successful builder, and Margaret drove a black BMW to and from work. Margaret had worked for the authority for over ten years, in the same office with many of the same people. She had been a Personal Assistant to one of the Senior Managers before he relocated to a larger hospital and she now worked as a Complaints Officer, and had recently been given responsibility for FOI. She regularly met with friends and colleagues in her own building to talk over her weekends, personal dilemmas and upcoming events such as her father-in-law’s recent visit to the hospital. She also discussed complaints and FOI requests with colleagues. She might discuss how to interpret a request, what information the hospital held, and who held information and might even bring a request up in conversation with colleagues over lunch or morning coffee, people with whom she was good friends and would spend a weekend away once a year.

On one occasion, Margaret received a forwarded FOI request from Colin as an e-mail that had been sent to NHS Glendale by an MSP’s assistant on behalf of a well-known MSP. The applicant had requested copies of all e-mails that the authority held to and from a particular group of ‘.gov.uk’ e-mail addresses. It seemed that the applicant, working for the opposing party, wanted background information on the government’s decision to change the way in which the NHS in Scotland was organized, one that had been controversial. Margaret and her colleagues speculated that the MSP was going to use the information to present a counterargument to the changes. On collecting, to her knowledge and that of her colleagues, all the information that the applicant had requested, Margaret passed it as an e-mail to Colin for him to provide the applicant with the information along with a written explanation.

Although Margaret forwarded the information that she had collected to Colin in the cold form of an e-mail attachment, the information that Colin and the applicant received was as if far from cold. It was the consequence of hot and detailed social exchanges over coffee and lunch and by telephone. Attached to information was knowledge born out of regular exchanges between colleagues, something considered neither by Colin nor the applicant as they received information as cold fact. No relations between information and persons were apparent.

Knowledge and persons, in the above case-study of NHS Glendale, appeared in two forms: in one moment as knowledge and as persons dependent on the network of relations integral to FOI, and another as entities that operated independently of these relations. The form of knowledge and people here depended on the manner in which practitioners made visible, or invisible, the social relations on which they and knowledge depended. Colin found that making knowledge appear as information, and himself as an independent entity, was often crucial to its transfer, and also his own compliance.

Applicants sought to receive information, not social knowledge (the perceived outcome of very particular relationships). Colin considered that providing an application with a speedy response would make these relationships invisible. Yet relations once again became visible in light of divisions disclosed by that information; differences between colleagues, different authorities, and an authority and the public. It seemed through these differences, people’s particular motives, interests and above all the social ties they sought to conceal, were made visible. In an effort to make the social relations that were integral to FOI disappear, the trick for practitioners seemed to be to actively appear the same—replicate the social form that the SIC, other practitioners and authorities took.

This method of replication—constituting a particular kind of ‘culture change’—was most apparent in the FOISA conferences and meetings described in the following section. Indeed, the practice of information dissemination, between practitioners and applicants seemed replicated amongst practitioners as they passed advice about dissemination, openness, and culture change in conversations between them at conferences. FOISA appeared both a model fordissemination between civil servants and citizens anda model ofdissemination since FOI practitioners’ own practices replicated the very information sharing practices that the FOI Act endorsed.