Printed from http://dumedite.org/en/help/officers on October 12, 2024 18:08
dumeditë is a service run by an NGO. It helps ordinary members of the public make APD requests, and easily track and share the responses.
The APD request you received was made by someone using dumeditë. You can simply reply to the request as you would any other request from an individual. The only difference is that your response will be automatically published on the Internet.
If you have privacy or other concerns, please read the answers below. You might also like to read the introduction to dumeditë to find out more about what the site does from the point of view of a user. You can also search the site to find the authority that you work for, and view the status of any requests made using the site.
Finally, we welcome comments and thoughts from APD officers, please get in touch.
dumeditë is not making any requests. We are sending requests on behalf of our users, who are real people making the requests.
Look at it like this - if lots of different people made requests from different Gmail email addresses, then you would not think that Google were making vexatious requests. It is exactly the same if lots of requests are made via dumeditë. Moreover, since all requests are public it is much easier for you to see if one of our users is making vexatious requests.
If a request appears on the site, then we have attempted to send it to the authority by email. Any delivery failure messages will automatically appear on the site. You can check the address we're using with the "View APD email address" link which appears on the page for the authority. Contact us if there is a better address we can use.
Requests are sometimes not delivered because they are quietly removed by "spam filters" in the IT department of the authority. Authorities can make sure this doesn't happen by asking their IT departments to "whitelist" any email from @dumedite.org. If you ask us we will resend any request, and/or give technical details of delivery so an IT department can chase up what happened to the message.
Finally, you can respond to any request from your web browser, without needing any email, using the "respond to request" link at the bottom of each request page.
The Access to Public Documents Law says:
A public instituion must comply with promptly and in any event not later than 7 days day following the date of registration of the request.
The nerdy detail of exactly how weekends are counted, and what happens if the request arrives out of office hours, is just that - detail. What matters here is that the law says authorities must respond promptly.
If you've got a good reason why the request is going to take a while to process, requesters find it really helpful if you can send a quick email with a sentence or two saying what is happening.
APD officers often have to do a lot of hard work to answer requests, and this is hidden from the public. We think it would help everyone to have more of that complexity visible.
Please read the answer to the previous question first. Legally, authorities must respond promptly to APD requests. If they fail to do that, it is best if they show the hard work they are doing by explaining what is taking the extra time to do.
That said, dumeditë does show the maximum legal deadline for response on each request. Here's how we calculate it.
The date thus calculated is shown on requests with the text "By law, Prishtina Municipality should normally have responded by...".
To prevent spam, we automatically remove most emails and some mobile numbers from responses to requests. Please contact us if we've missed one. For technical reasons we don't always remove them from attachments, such as certain PDFs.
If you need to know what an address was that we've removed, please get in touch with us. Occasionally, an email address forms an important part of a response and we will post it up in an obscured form in an annotation.
If you haven't already, read the introduction -->
Otherwise, the credits or the programmers API -->