The eCase FOI Awards will be awarded in four categories: Practitioner of the Year, Team of the Year, Rising Star and Performer of the Year. You can read the criteria for each award below, and learn more about the judging process.
Practitioner of the Year
To be eligible for for this award the practitioner must:
- Work in the UK public sector, or work as a consultant/trainer concentrating their activities in the area of FOI, with 50% or more of their activities taking place in the public sector.
- Have been present in their department or role for at least the last 9 months prior to nomination
- Have worked in Information Rights (including IG, FOI and DP) in some form (not necessarily same role, department or organisation) for at least the last 18 months prior to nomination.
- Be nominated by a colleague or self-nominated
- Demonstrate some of the qualities identified in at least 3 of the 4 areas (a to d) outlined below
a) Proven best practice and performance
Desirable qualities
- Be a role model for best practice
- Have improved/maintained/delivered performance through working practices / demonstrated good practice / excellence in processes / working practices
- Improved or maintained consistency and good results in a specific area of operation / improved collaboration / demonstrated excellence in collaboration or an area of operation
- Innovation in approach - have introduced creative/innovative approaches to the management of FOI or encouraged others to do so.
- Demonstrated rigour in information management through review, quality assurance, data control and redaction practices.
b) Understanding and commitment to transparency
Desirable qualities
- Have a strong commitment to FOI principles of openness and transparency
- Demonstrated an understanding of the EIR
- Proactively shares FOI information with colleagues to raise awareness and improve practice
- Promoted FOI awareness within own organisation with a view to embedding a transparency culture
- Shown awareness of current challenges to FOI, such as the growing use of non-corporate communication channels
c) Great services to requesters / stakeholders / customers / the IR community
Desirable qualities
- Shown excellent requester/customer service, really fulfilling the duty to ‘advise and assist’
- Have proven results of timeliness / improvement in timeliness
- Have delivered services to their stakeholder and/or the wider Information Rights community which may extend beyond their organisation and have inspired good practice in others
- Have improved communications/ information flows / relationships with stakeholders and knowledge within their organisation
d) Commitment to proactivity
Desirable qualities
- Demonstrated proactivity, for example in approach to stakeholders / making improvements / proactive publication
- Where possible, nominations should provide evidence of success/attainment in the areas above.
- Where one individual is nominated on more than one occasion in this category, the nominations will be addressed as one, using the strongest application.
- Individuals are only able to win one of the individual awards.
- Individuals will not be penalised for entering in more than one individual category.
- In the event that an individual is nominated for and is highest scoring in, subject to checks and evidence, both Rising Star and Practitioner of the Year awards, they will be successful in this, the Practitioner of the Year category and their entry will be withdrawn from the competition in the Rising Star category.
Team of the Year
- The team must work in the UK public sector
- The team must have been in existence for at least the last 9 months (not necessarily with all the same members)
- You can nominate your own team
- The team must demonstrate some of the qualities identified in at least 3 of the 4 areas (a to d) outlined below
a) Proven best practice / performance
Desirable qualities
- Worked in best practice way
- Improved/maintained/delivered best practice collaboration
- Improved/maintained/delivered best practice work in a specific area
- Improved/maintained/delivered best practice working relationships
- Improved/maintained/delivered performance in a measurable way
- Innovation in approach - have introduced creative/innovative approaches to the management of FOI
- Demonstrated rigour in information management through review, quality assurance, data control and redaction practice
b) Understanding/commitment to transparency
Desirable qualities
- Shown commitment to FOI principles of openness and transparency
- Demonstrated an understanding of the EIR
- Promoted FOI awareness within own organisation with a view to embedding a transparency culture
- Shown awareness of current challenges to FOI, such as the growing use of non-corporate communication channels
c) Great services to requesters / stakeholders / customers / the IR community
Desirable qualities
- Have proven results of timeliness / improvement in timeliness
- Excellent requester/customer service, really fulfilling the duty to ‘advise and assist’
- Have delivered services to their stakeholder and/or the wider Information Rights community which may extend beyond their organisation and have inspired good practice in others
- Have improved communications / information flows / relationships with stakeholders and knowledge within their organisation
d) Commitment to proactivity
Desirable qualities
- Demonstrated proactivity, for example in approach to stakeholders / making improvements / proactive publication
- Where possible, nominations should provide evidence of success/attainment in the areas above.
- Where one team is nominated on more than one occasion in this category, the nominations will be addressed as one, using the strongest application
Improvement commendations
The judges may, in addition to Team of the Year, choose to award commendations to those nominated for Team of the Year in recognition of the improvements that they have made. The types of improvement elligible for commendation might be improvement in FOI stats, improvement in processes, or a new initiative which facilitates performance improvement, access to information or citizen satisfaction.
Rising Star
To be eligible for for this award the practitioner must:
- Work in the UK public sector, or work as a consultant/trainer concentrating their activities in the area of FOI, with 50% or more of their activities taking place in the public sector.
- Have been present in their department or role for at least the last 9 months prior to nomination
- Be nominated by a colleague or self-nominated
- Demonstrate some of the qualities identified in at least 3 of the 4 areas (a to d) outlined below
a) Improvements, innovation, best practice and performance
Desirable qualities
- Be a role model for best practice
- Helped improve or maintain service area to ensure practices and processes are working coherently / worked in a best practice way
- Helped improve a specific area of operation / improved collaboration
- Innovation in approach - have introduced creative/innovative approaches to the management of FOI
- Demonstrated rigour in information management through review, quality assurance, data control and redaction practices.
b) Understanding and commitment to transparency
Desirable qualities
- Have a strong commitment to FOI principles of openness and transparency
- Learned fast in terms of case law and demonstrating knowledge
c) Great services to requesters / stakeholders / customers / the IR community
Desirable qualities
- Shown excellent requester/customer service, really fulfilling the duty to ‘advise and assist’
- Have delivered services to their stakeholder community which may extend beyond their role and have inspired good practice in others
- Have improved communications / information flows / relationships with stakeholders and knowledge within their organisation
d) Commitment to proactivity
Desirable qualities
- Demonstrated proactivity, for example in approach to stakeholders / making improvements / proactive publication
- Where possible, nominations should provide evidence of success/attainment in the areas above.
- Where one individual is nominated on more than one occasion in this category, the nominations will be addressed as one, using the strongest application.
- Individuals are only able to win one of the individual awards.
- Individuals will not be penalised for entering in more than one individual category.
- In the event that an individual is nominated for and is highest scoring in, subject to checks and evidence, both Practitioner of the Year and Rising Star awards, they will be successful in ‘Practitioner of the Year’ and their entry for Rising Star will be withdrawn from the competition .
- In the event that an individual is ‘highly commended’ in Practitioner of the Year, but is highest scoring in ‘Rising Star’, their entry will be withdrawn from the Practitioner of the Year category and the award of ‘highly commended’ will go to the next highest scoring nomination in the Practitioner of the Year category.
Performer of the Year
All nominations for Team of the Year will be considered for Performer of the Year; this is in addition to the Team of the Year award. To be elligible for this award, all the organisation needs to do is provide their FOI stats for the last 3 years. The judges are looking for solid, consistent performance.
Award eligibility
All FOI practitioners are eligible for the award(s), providing that they fulfil the criteria, as described, for each award category.
Nominees must, upon request, be able to provide evidence of any assertions made within the nomination.
Those working as a consultant/trainer agree to provide details of the organisation(s) they have provided services to, that form part of this nomination.
Nominations that do not meet the criteria will be removed from the judging process.
The judging panel, in concert with the organisers (eCase), reserve the right to withdraw awards and entries from the competition at any stage.
Should it transpire that any nominated organisation is underperforming or is undergoing enforcement or intervention action then their entry(s) will be be withdrawn from the judging/awards process.
The judging process
You can nominate yourself, someone else or a team using the nomination forms linked under each category above. If you're nominating someone else, you must contact them to get their consent before you nominate them. We will also seek their consent to process their data.
The eCase team (Fivium) will then sift the nominations and may contact you to request further, more detailed information to support your nomination. We'll review this for completeness and anonymise your nomination for presentation to the judges.
The judges will then use the nomination criteria to score each entry, using an agreed set of scoring criteria for each category. Each judging organisation will score nominations separately. The judging organisations will then come together to review the scores, and the shortlist and winners will be determined by an amalgamation of those scores.
Prior to shortlisting, we will contact you to confirm your permission to share your data in the context of sharing your name and organisation with the judges after scoring.
We will also confirm your permission to share your name, and the name of the organisation you represent on our published list of nominations for the awards. Entries will be withdrawn where this permission is not granted.
It will only be possible to present awards to those that have given us their permission to announce their name / the name of their team and the organisation they represent. Those that deny permission to do this will have to have their entry withdrawn.
Publicity
We want to celebrate the shortlist and your success. We will ask you to provide us with picture of the nominee/team and permission to use these on social media to promote your organisation and their shortlisting. We will request this and your organisation’s handle on X (formerly Twitter)
We want to celebrate all of those who have taken the time to complete a nomination. Making a nomination is considered to be consent to name your organisation as having been entered/nominated.