FOIA is an API. We can treat the Freedom of Information Act (and its localized equivalents) as a protocol for requesting and receiving data from the government. This approach helps journalists and researchers collect high levels of detail from public agencies across geographies and over time. It's how we scaled, for example, a project to collect medical examiner records from dozens of counties across America in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. During this conversation, we'll talk about techniques for automating and scaling public records requests and how we can go beyond acquisition and start automating the processing and analysis of data we collect. This is a conversation and a space for sharing ideas to support movements toward opening up public data.
Michael and I both work on software projects (MuckRock and FOIAmail, respectively) that aim to increase the efficiency of filing public records requests. We are both frequently looking for opportunities to collaborate and build on our projects. MozFest will be a good opportunities to meet similarly minded people, hackers and foundations that share these interests and may want to partner in the future.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:The session will include some introductory/conceptual remarks about FOIA automation, what is, what its potential capabilities are, and a practical case-study of how we used it for a major coronavirus research project. We'll have time for a few questions about us, but we really want to open the discussion to the floor and get some "What if we ... ?" questions going. We want this to be a creative brainstorm to get people to think about the possibilities more, and that could include a range of participants. In all likelihood, we'll only have time for a handful of comments that would lead to short conversations of their own, so the exact headcount shouldn't make a huge difference.
Matt is a data specialist with The Washington Post, previously a JSK journalism fellow at Stanford. He also created FOIAmail, an open-source framework for automating public records requests.