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Anders Chydenius
The world's first freedom of information law came from a country parson in the Finnish part of the Swedish kingdom. Chydenius, a member of the Riksdag's clergy estate, chaired the committee behind the Freedom of the Press Act of 1766, which abolished political censorship and gave the public a legal right to read and print official documents. He wanted farmers and merchants in remote Ostrobothnia to see how the government spent their taxes and regulated their trade. The principle of public access to official records still underpins Swedish and Finnish government today.
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John E. Moss
Born
Moss, a Sacramento Democrat, spent eleven years on the problem before the US Freedom of Information Act passed. Starting in 1955 he chaired a House subcommittee that collected thousands of examples of agencies refusing records, and he kept pressing even when presidents of his own party resisted. The act finally passed in 1966 with a young Republican co-sponsor, Donald Rumsfeld, and Lyndon Johnson signed it on 4 July with no ceremony and private misgivings. It gave anyone, not only journalists or litigants, the right to request federal records and to go to court if refused. Congress strengthened it over Gerald Ford's veto in 1974.
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Scott Armstrong (journalist)
A former Senate Watergate investigator and Washington Post reporter, Armstrong founded the National Security Archive in 1985 to do something individual reporters could not: file FOIA requests systematically, pool the declassified results and keep them in one public library. It now holds millions of pages on nuclear policy, Latin American coups and intelligence history, used by historians and truth commissions alike. Armstrong also led the 1989 lawsuit, Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President, that stopped the Reagan White House deleting its Iran-Contra era email and established that government emails are records to be preserved.
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Joachim Gauck
Born
When East German citizens occupied Stasi offices in 1989 and 1990 to stop files being shredded, the question became who should see them. Gauck, a Rostock pastor and civil rights activist, became the first federal commissioner for the Stasi records in 1990, and under the 1991 Stasi Records Act his agency let ordinary people read the files kept on them, learn which friends or relatives had informed, and have their names cleared. Millions of requests followed. Few other post-communist countries opened their secret police files so fully or so early. Gauck later served as Germany's president; the files now sit in the Federal Archives.
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Maurice Frankel
Britain got its Freedom of Information Act in 2000, but the campaign behind it had been winning smaller rights for years. Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information since 1987, drafted and steered a run of private member's bills that gave people the legal right to see their own social work and housing files and their medical reports, then spent the late 1990s fighting to stop the government's draft act being watered down. Since the act came into force in 2005 he has defended it against repeated attempts to restrict it and run training to help journalists and members of the public use it well.
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Carl Malamud
Born
Malamud's method is to publish first and argue later. In 1993 he bought the US Securities and Exchange Commission's company filings and put them online free, a service the SEC took over itself two years later. Through Public.Resource.Org he has since posted court opinions, government videos, and safety and building codes that private bodies sold for hundreds of dollars despite their force of law. The state of Georgia and several standards bodies sued him. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that the state's official annotated code could not be copyrighted, so citizens could read the law they must obey.
More about Carl Malamud7
Aruna Roy
Born
India's Right to Information Act of 2005 began with day labourers in rural Rajasthan who suspected they were being cheated on public works wages. Roy, a former civil servant, and her colleagues in the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, among them Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh, started holding jan sunwais, public hearings where official muster rolls and bills were read aloud in the village, and workers named the dead people and ghost projects on them. Their demand for copies of those records grew into a state law and then the national act, used by millions of people a year. Dozens of people using it to expose local corruption have since been attacked or killed.
More about Aruna Roy8
Brewster Kahle
Born
Public information that disappears from a website is as lost as a burned file. Kahle founded the Internet Archive in 1996 and opened the Wayback Machine in 2001, which has since saved more than a trillion web pages. With libraries and universities, the archive captures US federal websites at each change of administration, and journalists, researchers and courts use those copies when agencies remove reports, data or guidance. Its book-lending programme lost a copyright case brought by publishers in 2023, upheld on appeal in 2024, a reminder that its access mission has legal limits.
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Tom Steinberg
Steinberg founded the charity mySociety in 2003 with a simple test: would an ordinary person with no expertise find this useful? Building on volunteer projects, it launched TheyWorkForYou, which turned Hansard into searchable pages for every MP with their speeches and voting records, and later WhatDoTheyKnow, which lets anyone send a freedom of information request and publishes the request and reply for everyone else to read. Hundreds of thousands of requests have been made through it. The model, credited to a whole team of volunteers and staff, has been copied by civic groups in dozens of countries.
More about Tom Steinberg10
Ellen S. Miller
Campaign finance disclosure in the United States existed on paper long before most people could use it. Miller founded the Center for Responsive Politics in 1983, which turned Federal Election Commission filings into the searchable OpenSecrets database of who gives to whom, now a standard tool for reporters and voters checking a candidate's backers. In 2006 she co-founded the Sunlight Foundation, which pushed Congress and agencies to publish data online in machine-readable form and funded the tools to read it. Sunlight wound down in 2020; OpenSecrets continues.
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Heather Brooke
Born
Brooke, a journalist who had used American public records laws, started asking for details of MPs' expenses as soon as Britain's Freedom of Information Act took effect in 2005. Parliament refused, and fought her and two other journalists, Ben Leapman and Jon Ungoed-Thomas, through the Information Tribunal and the High Court, which ordered disclosure in May 2008. The receipts were being compiled for publication because of that ruling when a full copy leaked to The Daily Telegraph in 2009, setting off the expenses scandal, prosecutions and a new independent regulator.
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Rufus Pollock
Pollock, a Cambridge economist, founded the Open Knowledge Foundation in 2004 and did two unglamorous things that made open data workable. He helped write the Open Definition, a short test of what counts as genuinely open, so governments could not label a locked PDF as open data. And the foundation built CKAN, free software for running data portals, which became the engine behind data.gov.uk, the US data.gov and many other national and city portals. Anyone downloading a council's spending file or a national dataset has a good chance of using a tool his project started.
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Hans Rosling
Born
Rosling, a Swedish professor of international health, was less interested in collecting data than in getting people to look at it. With his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund he founded Gapminder in 2005 and built the animated bubble charts that made decades of health and income statistics readable in a few seconds. He also lobbied international bodies to stop charging for their statistics, and in 2010 the World Bank made its development indicators free to everyone. His book Factfulness, completed by Ola and Anna after his death in 2017, carries the method on.
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Aaron Swartz
Born
US federal court records are public, but the PACER system charged by the page. In 2008, during a free trial at selected libraries, Swartz downloaded about 2.7 million documents and handed them to Carl Malamud's project to publish free; the FBI looked into it and brought no charges. His later bulk download of academic articles from JSTOR at MIT led to federal felony charges, and he died by suicide in January 2013, aged 26, before trial. Supporters and critics still argue over his methods, but his case gave new momentum to campaigns for open access to publicly funded research and for cheaper court records.
More about Aaron Swartz15
Vivek Kundra
Born
As the first federal chief information officer of the United States, appointed in 2009, Kundra launched data.gov in May that year with just 47 datasets and a mandate for agencies to add more in open formats. It grew to hundreds of thousands, covering everything from hospital quality ratings to weather and crime figures, and gave app developers, journalists and researchers one place to look. He also launched the IT Dashboard, which showed how federal technology projects were running over budget. He had tried the same ideas first as technology chief for Washington, DC.
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Tim Berners-Lee
Born
The inventor of the web is here for a later and more political piece of work. In 2009 Gordon Brown asked Berners-Lee and the computer scientist Nigel Shadbolt to help open up British government data, and in January 2010 they launched data.gov.uk, publishing thousands of official datasets for anyone to reuse. The coalition government then made departments and councils publish spending over set thresholds. His five-star scheme for open data gave officials a plain ladder from scanned PDF to linked data, and in 2012 he and Shadbolt co-founded the Open Data Institute to keep pushing.
More about Tim Berners-Lee17
Audrey Tang
Tang came out of g0v, a Taiwanese civic hacker community founded in 2012 that rebuilt government websites in readable form, starting with the central budget, by swapping the "gov" in their addresses for "g0v". Appointed Taiwan's first digital minister in 2016, Tang published transcripts and recordings of nearly every meeting held, and backed vTaiwan, an online process for drafting regulations in public. In early 2020 the government released real-time pharmacy stock data, and volunteers turned it within days into maps showing where face masks were available. Tang served until 2024; the volunteers deserve the larger share of credit.
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