William Summer is launching an FOI request about the census outtage. Was it a deliberate strategy or a mess-up to add to the entire debacle? Instead of waiting to find out the answers through the media, Mr Summers decided to act, submitting a freedom of information on August 11. "I basically asked then for all of the emails to do with the strategy for Twitter, what the messaging was that they were trying to send out of to people." The Bureau of Statistics responded 11 days later, saying the information would take 60 hours for staff to compile and cost $1020.

"If I had to pay $1000 every time I wanted to know something, I would be an even poorer man than I am now," he said. The dual British-Australian says he has previously lodged multiple freedom of information requests in Australia and Britain and says he has never before been slapped with such "huge costs." "I know the system well … in this one I purposefully thought about the scope and thought: 'Will they try and hold me back by saying it's going to take lots of time?', so I narrowed it down specifically to only discussion about Twitter on one day," he said. "For me that shouldn't be a huge job … how much correspondence could there have been? It seems ridiculous to me," he said. "It's in the public interest that all of this information about what went wrong comes out in public," he said.

The cost of submitting FOI requests ranges and can sometimes be as much as tens of thousands of dollars depending on their scope and often the department, but the ABS has traditionally not demanded huge sums for simple inquiries. For example, it did not charge James Smith for his FOI query into what the ABS wanted in retaining the names of Australians for three years longer than the usual 12 months. And Fairfax Media journalist Peter Martin has, on multiple occasions, lodged FOI requests at zero cost. Mr Summers says he didn't want to appeal the cost, as is his right, as that would only delay and release of information by several more weeks. He says his brainwave came in the shower that night.

"There's a a lot of people on Twitter that I've seen who are very angry about the same thing, I'm going to go out and just see if anyone else wants to chip in," he said. He calculated that if 200 people contributed it would only cost each person around $5. In reality, the donations have ranged from as much as $100 to $1. At the time of publication, Mr Summer was just $100 short of his target. "There's a huge range of amounts and its trickling in every hour which has been great, it's clearly struck a chord with people." Mr Summers says he is a member of the Greens party but says respect for statistics and not politics motivated his action. "I have a lot of respect for statistics, I previously worked in the UK for the Royal Statistical society," he said.

"I don't see the ABS as a political football," he said. "It's nothing to do with trying to running down the ABS, far from it, I want them to do a better job than they are doing, particularly with regards to the census and the communications around it." Follow Latika Bourke on Facebook