The Alaveteli Community
If you are running an Alaveteli installation — or are thinking of setting one up — let the community help.
We actively help people set up and run Alaveteli instances all around the world. Alaveteli is more than just software, it’s also a community of people who care enough about Freedom of Information (FoI) to build and run sites to benefit the public.
If you’re just starting out, or you’ve already got your site up and running, this page points you at the places you can find out more, ask questions, or just say hi.
Project mailing lists
We have two mailing lists (actually Google Groups). It’s OK to sign up to both!
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The Alaveteli user group is where those of us already running FoI sites ask questions, make announcements, encourage, sympathise, and welcome newcomers into the community. It is also where you can read the Community Update newsletter from the mySociety team.
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The Alaveteli mailing list for devs where the technical things about Alaveteli, its codebase and related software get discussed. If you’re planning on contributing to the codebase or are involved in maintaining the systems your site is running on, jump in here!
In both cases, feel free to ask questions. Lots of helpful people are on these lists — not just mySociety staff but also people (like you!) running their own sites.
The archives are a good source of information too. If you’ve got a problem, it’s always worth checking to see if someone has already solved it.
So if you’re just starting out, saying hello on the mailing list is a great way
to begin. 
Alaveteli for developers mailing list
Code and issues on github
The Alaveteli software is on github and we actively use github’s issues — sometimes there’s discussion on specific issues in there too, which can be handy (especially if it’s an issue you’ve raised).
Documentation
Although asking a human is great, often what you want to know can be found in the documentation:
- this documentation — always the first place to look
- the dev wiki — informal or specific notes
- docs in the repo (although we’re slowly phasing these out in favour of the docs you’re reading now)
Conferences
Every few years we bring together people with an interest in online Freedom of Information technologies.