Consider commercial use policy for WhatDoTheyKnow

[RichardTaylor]

WhatDoTheyKnow currently permits unlimited commercial use of its free public service.

Often commercial users make heavy use of the service, resulting in significant work for staff and volunteers.

Our position to-date has been that we're happy to support this use on the grounds we're largely getting prompted to keep our bodies database up-to-date which is something we want to do anyway, and published FOI responses are of use to all.

We also support commercial use of FOI and WDTK as being something which we think can lead to public benefit.

We do see examples of poor commercial use, and sometimes commercial use which breaches our house rules and has led to bans/suspensions. Often commercial users will use multiple accounts, perhaps to spread work between individual staff, but also perhaps to evade rate caps.

Often, but not always, commercial users aren't very helpful when it comes to researching what has gone wrong and eg. finding out if a body still exists or proposing a new email address for a body.

Elsewhere at mySociety on the TheyWorkForYou and MapIt APIs a free tier of service requiring registration is only made available to "registered charities, or individuals pursuing a non-profit project on an unpaid basis", and those eligible for that free tier are given 50% off higher level access. The public websites are freely available to all.

A commercial user with a £10 WhatDoTheyKnow Pro account can easily make use of the service costing many tens of times what they are paying to support.

Linked closely to: https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/6806

Noting commercial users are often seeking public sector contact details so https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/10 is related.

We do want to promote the service to commercial users: https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/issues/941

There are many potential features which might attract / be of use to commercial users including https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/issues/985 and https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/2500