Documentation of the current status of openFOIA
After an extensive discovery process with students, transparency groups, journalists and other civically engaged organizations the first iteration of openFOIA is intended for first time and novice FOIA requesters.
First time and infrequent users are often unclear on which agency might have the records that they need. To help this, a user can search by: agency name (including partials), abbreviations, and also by text in the agency descriptions. For example, it's more common to refer to "ATF" instead of the "Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives".
Some offices within cabinet-level departments are agencies in their own right. For example, the 'Census Bureau' and 'FBI' are also searchable as first-level entities, even though they are part of the Departments of Commerce and Justice respectively. Our user research indicates that people are more likely to search for 'Census' than they are 'Department of Commerce' if they are in fact looking for the Census Bureau.
Providing better search and routing will hopefully decrease the number of mis-routed requests.
Here's a close up of the banner at the top (banner text updated: 20150420):
openFOIA offers an auto-complete search (across agency names and abbreviations) providing quicker routing for users who know which agency or office they are looking for.
This is what the search results page looks like, when you search for something like 'agriculture'. It presents agencies and offices that might be related (increasing the chances for a user to find the agency or office they are looking for).
For agencies such as the Department of Justice (with decentralized FOIA processing), pages like this also help users navigate the FOIA related hierarchy of the federal government.
Users unfamiliar with the FOIA process will find the most useful information on this page. Here we display:
- Information about the agency;
- Important FOIA contact information;
- Median processing time, so they have an expectation of how long a FOIA request could take;
- Links to important agency FOIA information, including its FOIA library or where its regulations are; and
- FOIA request contact information, which provides multiple avenues by which a user can make a request.
openFOIA has information for 99 agencies and approximately 331 offices, each of which has their own agency landing page. This data was validated and corrected through an extensive and exhaustive process. We are working with the DOJ to work on a solution that cleanly collects updated information. This effectively reduces the barrier of entry on making a FOIA request by making it easier to discover the appropriate agency or office and better arms the user with information that is important to making a successful request.
The developer page is intended for those with a need for access to our bulk data, or information about our Application Programming Interface (API). By offering a bulk data and API option, we're sharing our work towards ensuring accurate and validated data with others (inside and outside government). Other FOIA vendors can benefit from our contact data. This increases the reach of our efforts.
The developer page also clearly indicates this is an open source project, and welcomes feedback from anyone.
