Hello, and welcome to the site.
We are student journalists from the UK, wanting to make information more accessible to all. We are part of the team behind the Conservative Leadership Contest 2022 tracker, which was also aimed at improving the accessibility of information from an insular political world, for the public.
Why this?
In attempting some investigative journalism about the impact of the new Voter ID policy, we quickly realised how convoluted it was to find all the email addresses of relevant local authorities (in our case, to find out if they used greeters, and the effect these had): we navigated through pages of (often, badly designed) websites, online contact forms and email addresses, and ended up combining them into one long, messy text document.
There had to be a better way. Now there is.
Who is it for?
The short answer: anyone.
But the slightly longer answer is that OpenContactUK is designed by journalists, for journalists, to make the often laborious process of finding the relevant press contacts a little easier. However, we believe that accountability is for everyone, and to that end, it is free of charge and open to anyone.
Are you a journalist working on an investigation and need to collect data from all of England’s Unitary Authorities?
Do you want to submit a freedom of information (FOI) request on behalf of yourself or your community?
Do you frequently contact politicians for comment but find it time-consuming to dig out their addresses?
We hope that OpenContactUK can help you with these, and other, uses.
What actually is it?
Fundamentally, it’s a database.
OpenContactUK is built in Notion. We harnessed its powerful database tools to create the site complete with:
