About

Froide is a Freedom of Information portal software written in Python with Django 1.11.

Development Goals

Froide has some development goals that are listed below. Some of them are a continuous effort, some are achieved, on others development is still ongoing.

  • Internationalization (i18n): Keep the code fully internationalized and localized.
  • Flexible and Configurable: Many aspects of an FoI platform depend on local customs and laws. These aspects should be either configurable via settings or easily replaceable.
  • Easy to install: Keep dependencies to one language environment (Python) and use abstraction layers for backends like search, caching etc. to enable different setups.
  • Maintain a test suite with a high test coverage.

Features

  • Froide uses many of the built-in Django features like the Admin interface to manage and update entities in the system, the internationalization system, and the user management and authentication.
  • Freedom of Information Laws and Public Entities are connected through a many-to-many relationship. That allows for a Public Body to be accountable under different laws.
  • A Public Body can have a parent to represent hierarchies from the real world. They can also be categorized into classifications (e.g. ministry, council) and topical tags (e.g. environment, military) which can be defined separately.
  • Users can create requests without a Public Body so that others can suggest an appropriate recipient later.
  • Requests can optionally be kept private by users and published at a later point (e.g. after a related article has been published).
  • Requests are mailed to Public Bodies through the platform via a special, request-unique email address (using SMTP) and the platform will receive answers on that mail address (by accessing an IMAP account).
  • Search functionality for Requests and Public Bodies.
  • A read/write REST-API
  • Redaction of PDFs

History

Froide was designed to mimic the functionality of What do they know – a Freedom of Information portal in the UK written in Ruby on Rails 2.3. At the time when a German FoI portal was needed, the general FoI solution forked from WDTK called Alaveteli was hard to install and not ready for reuse. That’s why Froide was developed in spring 2011 as a fresh start, fully internationalized and configurable written in Django 1.3 to power Frag den Staat which launched in August 2011.

Name

Froide stems from “Freedom of Information de” (de for Germany) and sounds like the German word “Freude” which means joy.