I manage the BI department for a medium sized charity. We had to let staff go during covid and we were lucky to get volunteers to do some of the work needed to survive. My CEO wants me to add all of the open data our volunteers find to our corporate data, in case of future emergencies like covid happening again.

I can cross reference docs and pdf's with SQL for qualitative research easy enough. But one of our volunteers who does quantitative analysis refuses to share any of their workings out with me. All I get are summary tables in Excel, which are great for the funding staff who only want the main numbers, but it's not helpful for me and the covid recovery BI integration.

One of the major pieces of work our charity uses for everything needs to be updated next month. Only this volunteer can do that complicated work, because yes it is complex, but even the interim files have got no formulas in cells, everything is always copypasted to hide how it's done. If ever this volunteer left, we could lose hundreds of thousands of pounds in funding. The IT person has said it's against the IT policy to install a keylogger, even in circumstances like this because of GDPR.

My CEO doesn't want to intervene and says it's my problem to sort out. I've tried asking this volunteer many times but they won't change their mind. They say it's done like this so our charity can get it for free. If I want to see how it's made, this volunteer expects to be paid saying it's intellectual property and they are under no obligation to share with me how they make any computer files. Can this volunteer actually do this? It's open data for crying out loud!