The FXI began its first serious discussion about the issues affected by the bill in early 1994, when there was no indication that government would even consider introducing such legislation. The talk then was around what was called a Freedom of Information Bill. A number of seminars and discussion groups were arranged by the FXI and the move was on to form a coalition of civil groupings to develop such a law and to lobby government to introduce it.
However, government pre-empted the move by civil society and in October 1994, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki announced the appointment of a task group to draft such legislation. The task group in due course named it the Open Democracy Bill. The composition of the task group didn't go down all that well and was widely criticised because it was made up exclusively of lawyers.
Mbeki's announcement coincided with a conference organised by the FXI called , "Maximising Freedom of Expression in the New South Africa". It was precisely issues such as open democracy and freedom of information that was under discussion at this conference. The proceedings of the conference, including a position paper from the FXI noting its reservations about the composition of the task group, were forwarded to the task group. The task group met with the FXI in early 1995 to discuss its criticism.
The FXI placed two proposals to the task group in order to resolve the problems. These were to:
It was decided that ODAF should be inclusive of both civil society and government representatives. ODAF's role up till now has been to arrange briefing sessions about the bill for each sector and to elicit responses.
The FXI decided to convene the conference at Mabula Lodge when it became clear late last year that the different sectors, particularly labour and business, were discussing the bill and its implications within their own sectors, but that no cross-sectoral talks were taking place. In addition, crucial issues raised by civil society were not being addressed by the task group. These included criticisms about the time frames and bureaucracy involved in obtaining information from government bodies, important issues around the scope of the Bill such as whether it should be extended to the private sector, and a perception that the Bill did not do enough to promote the pro-active release of information by government, particularly in relation to citizens' RDP information needs.
The aim of the FXI conference was thus to bring competing sectors together so that they could jointly tackle the central controversies surrounding the bill. The intention was also to make recommendations to the Open Democracy Task Group.