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STILL NOT CONVINCED? WHAT IS FOIA AND WHO ARE THESE CLOWNS ANYWAY?
Well, in case you don't want to click on the link, here's an huge quote from their site that explains it all:
"FOIA became law July 4, 1966 – and it’s been fighting for its life ever since. Presidents and Congress have tried to make it harder to use. Sometimes they’ve been successful; sometimes they haven’t. State sunshine laws frequently come under attack as well. CIR and FOIA Machine will help keep the laws strong by using them tenaciously and teaching others how to do the same. Now that you’ve celebrated the Fourth of July with sparklers and picnics, declare your independence from government secrets – help us launch FOIA Machine.
Some of America’s top investigative reporters are building a sophisticated and open online platform to give people a legal way to get these secrets from the government. It’s called FOIA Machine, it's almost ready to launch and needs your help!
"Free" information is not always free
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), called “FOY-ah” by journalists, is at the heart of public demands for government accountability. This federal law says anyone can make a freedom of information request. Many states have similar legislation, often called sunshine laws.
Sounds easy, right?
But there’s a catch: FOIA is riddled with exceptions, its rules differ widely from agency to agency and state to state, it often requires legal expertise to surmount bureaucratic brick walls, and “free” requests can end up costing a bundle of money. Those who have abused public trust often are able to hide behind all of this bureaucracy. Their secrets, held in millions of government documents, simply won’t reveal themselves.
An open online solution
Meet FOIA Machine, an integrated web platform developed by veteran investigative reporters and technology pros. It's sponsored by the award-winning nonprofit The Center for Investigative Reporting.
It’s like TurboTax for government records. We’re streamlining the complicated process of filing and tracking public record requests, putting all of the steps, rules, exceptions and best practices in one place and allowing users to track requests on dashboards, receive alerts, share request blueprints and get social support and expertise from the FOIA Machine community.
This new platform is open and free for anyone, from citizen groups to reporters, the public, commercial media and educators. And it can be used to extract documents no matter the issue – human rights, the environment, political reform, public safety, privacy and more.
If this sounds like a smart idea to you, you’re not alone. At last count, almost 800 reporters have signed up to start using FOIA Machine when it launches publicly. The seed money for the project ($47,000) was provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
“FOIA Machine will aid journalists and private citizens in accessing millions of important governmental documents around the world that are covered by freedom of information laws which exist in more than 90 countries.” – The Knight Foundation, announcing its 2012 funding for the prototype “to advance innovation in media and journalism”
So what's left to do before launch?
When we started this project in late 2012, it was called BirdDog and we thought it was only going to collect statistics on government response times to public records act requests. With the support of the Knight Foundation, we were able to expand our scope to include sending and generating information requests.
Over the next few months, we built out new features and tested them in the newsroom of CIR until we had a workable prototype, now called FOIA Machine.
Today, FOIA Machine can generate, edit and send requests to government agencies fairly well. It's useable but it's not ready for the general public.
FOIA Request screen shot
Starting a FOIA request
Picking a topic
That's where Kickstarter comes in: we're asking for your help to finish development, improve design and pay for servers and data curation.
We have 15 users currently sending real freedom of information requests through FOIA Machine, but almost 800 people are still waiting to use it. And when we launch, that number will grow.
Here's what we need to do to open this up to everyone:
We need to build a notification system to tell users when an agency responds to a request and to notify users when they need to follow up on outstanding requests.
We want to better track requests sent using FOIA Machine, allow users to override the status of a request, and then add data if they choose to follow up with an agency outside of FOIA Machine.
We need to expose more permissions so users can share their requests with whomever they want to.
Our designer will help smooth over some of the user interface quirks.
FOIA Machine lives on data and we need to continue adding into the database laws and information on government agencies that we're missing.
We need $55 - $150 per month, depending on traffic demands, for servers and a database.
Users will need a page to change their passwords and update their account information. We'll build that!
Oh, and it'd be great to get rid of bottlenecks that would stop us from expanding when FOIA Machine is used heavily.
Who are we?
FOIA Machine is currently housed at CIR (more about us in a minute) and is being built by a team of people working at a variety of news organizations:
Djordje Padejski is FOIA Machine's founding director and community manager. He is a founder of Serbia’s Center for Investigative Reporting and was a 2012 Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford University.
Shane Shifflett is FOIA Machine's developer and a data reporter at The Huffington Post. Before that, he was a data reporter for CIR.
Michael Corey, a news applications developer for CIR, is an advisor to FOIA Machine and occasionally contributes code to the project.
Coulter Jones is FOIA Machine's project manager and a data journalist at WNYC. Before that, he was an investigative reporter for CIR specializing in data analysis.
David Suriano is CIR's master of user interface design. He is working to make sure FOIA Machine looks good and is easy to use.
The FOIA Machine advisory group includes Chase Davis of The New York Times, David Herzog of the University of Missouri, T. Christian Miller of ProPublica, and Martha Mendoza of the Associated Press.
CIR has taken on FOIA Machine because we believe that journalism that moves citizens to action is an essential pillar of democracy. To correct injustices, people need to know what's really happening. FOIA Machine is all about bringing previously hidden information to light.
We are the only nonprofit journalism organization in the country with the in-house ability to produce stories on every available media platform – from print to video, radio and interactive data applications – making our reporting accessible and engaging and presented for maximum impact. We have worked with more than 300 news outlets, including FRONTLINE, ABC, Univision, Al-Jazeera English, The Young Turks, Stars and Stripes, the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, NPR, The Daily Beast, CNN, YouTube and more.
CIR is home to FOIA Machine until it is ready to go public (that’s where you come in!), when it will be handed over to the national, nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors(IRE), which offers its hundreds of members around the world access to its extensive resource center, conferences and specialized training."
OK, so you get it? These people are for real, and this project can make a difference.
Jump in - you're be proud you did!
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