Dear Department for Social Development (Northern Ireland),

There is much public interest in the good work done by government grant makers in NI. I am working on '360 giving' a philanthropic project to help people make better grants, by giving them more information about grants others have made as open data. See http://threesixtygiving.com/ I have worked with BIG Lottery to help them publish their grant information.

I am grateful to you for publishing online such a comprehensive service as the Government Funding Database also known as 'the website for Government Grants to the Voluntary and Community Sector'. However, this seems only to be available as web service with limited ability to download data for people to reuse.

I should be grateful if under FOIA you could publish the underlying database for download. Either here on this FOI service as a CSV file or on data.gov.uk and provide the link or on your own web service with a link to download. I should prefer it if you could publish this as open data.

I should be only too happy to answer any questions you might have that might make it easier to respond to this request.

If you can respond to this request in part then please do so rather than blocking the request in toto.
Yours faithfully,

william perrin