The FOIA Machine Will Simplify Your Right to Information
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2013-07-19 23:17:08 UTC
Filing FOIA requests is the stuff of nightmares. First the paperwork, then the waiting and the keeping track of it. And, if you're the kind of person who files many in a day, it can be a rabbit hole from which you may never return. To make the process less painful, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) built the FOIA machine, for which it is raising funds on Kickstarter.
Quite simply, the FOIA machine is an open-source, online interface that works to make the process of filing FOIA requests easier. The application aims to take the laborious and time-consuming process and simplify it so anyone can use it. The interface makes the laws and best practices of filing a FOIA request accessible in one place.
The Center for Investigative Reporting started this project in late 2012, calling it BirdDog. The original scope of the project was limited to statistics on government response times to public requests. The current version of the project is the FOIA machine, which generates, edits and sends FOIA requests. Once the project goes public, it will be open-source, and handed over to Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a national non-profit.
Michael Corey, who, according to the project's Kickstarter page, is an 'occasional coder' on the project, told Mashable that the project will be heavily crowdsourced. "We think this is the perfect kind of thing for that — a group of really dedicated people with specialized information, who can help a much larger, less experienced group."
The FOIA Machine is what happens when the right set of people get together to make things happen. The original project was the brainchild of Djordje Padejski, a 2012 Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford University. Padejski was working on the project for a few years before teaming up with Micheal Corey, and David Suriano from the Center for Investigative Reporting. They, along with Huffington Post's Shane Shifflett and WNYC's Coulter Jones, are the team behind the FOIA Machine.
The Kickstarter project has been enormously successful, raising it's funding goal in less than 48 hours. The campaign runs until Aug. 16.
Image: FOIA Machine
Topics: Apps and Software, foia, kickstarter, U.S., US & World, Work & Play
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