Gavin is a journalist whose adventure in information has taken him from using freedom of information as part of the day job to setting up TheStory.ie, which broke stories using FOI, and on to being director of innovation at Storyful.

More recently Gavin has set up Right To Know, an NGO which has an interesting mission to make FOI requests and deal with reviews and appeals itself but also to assist individuals, organisations and journalists in dealing with FOI.

Gavin shares his experience and views on FOI and also explores the need for a high-level view on access to information – why freedom of information is important, and how information “needs to be liberated”.

• Gavin’s blog
• Right To Know
• TheStory.ie
• Access Info Europe
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Digital Rights Ireland
• The Ferret
• Dossier
• Correctiv
• ECJ press release on judgment in Digital Rights Ireland, striking down the Data Retention Directive
• What the Information Commissioner can review
• An overview on the changes introduced in the Freedom of Information Act 2014 (from Mason Hayes & Curran)
• Guide to access to information on the environment (from Citizens Information)
• High Court judgment in Nama v. Ocei (from TheStory.ie)
• Supreme Court judgment in Nama v. Ocei (from TheStory.ie)
• Note on ECJ decision Fish Legal v. Information Commissioner (from Eversheds)
• Aarhus Convention (Wikipedia)
• Gavin’s new legal information startup Vizlegal
• A post on access to court filings (from McGarr Solicitors)

In this first episode of Adventures in Information, I talk to Simon McGarr, a solicitor and part-time data activist about a new government mega-database that received surprisingly little attention – from those that created it, and from almost everyone else.

This is about freedom of information, but also children, education, database creation, data protection and even child abuse claims.

You might be surprised to learn what information about our children the Department of Education wants to keep, how long it wants to keep it for and, maybe, why.

See below for links to things discussed in the podcast, and please leave any thoughts, questions or further links you might have in the comments.

Please also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or using this RSS feed. And if you have listened, feedback is welcome with your rating and comment on the iTunes page.

Episode links

• Simon’s posts about POD at the Tuppenceworth blog. Start with this one.
• Simon on Morning Ireland discussing POD.
• Minister for Education willing to examine 30-year retention of pupil data, The Irish Times (08.01.15).
• Department of Education POD page.
• Note on the ECtHR decision in O’Keefe v. Ireland from the Human Rights in Ireland blog.
• Children’s data to be kept for shorter period after climbdown, The Irish Times (27.03.15).
• Data Protection Commissioner defends action on database, The Irish Times (24.06.15).
• Decision of the Information Commissioner in Mr G (that’s Simon) and Department of Education.
• A note on the ECJ decision in Akzo Nobel about legal professional privilege.
• ECJ judgement in Bara.
• The blog of Simon’s firm at McGarr Solicitors.
• Simon on Twitter.

If you can’t hear it and have trouble subscribing or downloading it in iTunes please let me know. If it works, I’d like to hear that too!

archive.org/…d/Trailer_201602/Trailer.m4a