The more you know!

I love the website www.whatdotheyknow.com .  If you haven't been there then you should.  Basically you can make ANY FoI to any public authority and the information is available to ANYONE to have a little look at.  An amazing idea!  The collective power of people making all these different request and the collective knowledge available.  It’s run by volunteers who do an amazing job and they really make sure that the requests get the the right places.  major shout out to everyone at www.mysociety.org (Who run the website).

So why am I bringing this up to you?  Well this is about my adventures in a FoI wonderland and sometimes I like to browse other people's requests.  You see, people are amazing and stupid at the same time.  FoI provides us with an amazing tool for seeing what people want to know and, sometimes more importantly, why they want to know, so it is good to see what other people find interesting.

This is Britain, and one of our main advantages is our ability to mock and ridicule people and authority.  So every now and then you find an FoI request like this one.  As stated before this is an apolitical blog and my own personal opinion about the Queen and its role in society is irrelevant. Read the request and learn what passionate dissonance feels like.  So funny!  I mean, they have taken this to an internal review.  All fairness, it is rather offensive, so I don't think that they are going to get a response, but think of how angry that man was when he wrote that FoI request!

So another look through the FoI pile and I find this.  Now for the vast majority of you, this really doesn't matter, but to this guy it means the difference between the freedom of movement and stuck with public transport. This is why it is good to look through other people things.  I didn't know that there was an agreement between countries for driving licences!  Being honest I think the vast majority of people wouldn't have even thought about things like this.

So this leads to the question.  Which countries does the UK have agreements to exchange driver's licenses with?  It’s an interesting question to know because a way of seeing what one country thinks of another is to see what relations they have.  So this brings up another question, What is the process that the UK government goes through to develop a driver's licences exchange with another country?

This is a time when you realise how much your government does for you, because these are the things that we would NEVER think of.   Donald Rumsfeld once said “There are things we know, things we know we don't know, and there are things that we don't know that we don't know”.  The more I do this blog, the more I realise how little I know!