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Enable FOIA requests and government transparency through citizen self service

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Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests help to keep our government transparent. Well, they’re the best tool we have at least.

We found some compelling issues on this topic down in Raleigh, NC’s News & Observer, in an article about a state law that would limit the reach of public records requests. One of the main arguments for the bill and limiting the access of people wanting to see what their government, school boards, public universities and elected officials were up to was the productivity burden inherent to searching for, organizing and providing the documents being requested. It can take public employees away from their daily jobs for hours and at times, becomes a multi-departmental effort.

Understandably, sorting through cabinet after cabinet of manually completed state HR forms or disciplinary action requests or salary histories for the last ten years would be enough to drive someone to drink. In the morning. But what if those forms were never paper to begin with? See where we’re headed with this?

If all those forms were made into powerful LincDoc eForms, all that data would be accessible in a snap. You could even go a step beyond that to customize a search just for public records requests that would result in a single, multi-page document with each requested bit of information included. It could present to the user a single document that has forms from operations about some huge construction budget screw-up, personnel file information and board meeting minutes, each one being clearly time-stamped with its respective historic recording data (time, day, meeting attendees, etc.) for authenticity.

And, any portions of data that are exempt from public record, like those in personnel records or minutes from closed meeting sessions can be simply marked as so using business logic that will prevent them from being returned in a FOIA query.

Lastly, just to make this idea truly mind-blowing, you can make the request form available on a web site, connected directly to a universal records repository so that reporters and concerned citizens can search all by themselves, whenever they want and not have to take public employees away from their jobs in order to organize the request. They could however, see a record of who accessed the search request form and when. Oh, and, since public entities are often allowed to charge requesting parties a nominal amount for time spent, copies and printing charges associated with producing records, a payment module could be attached to the public-facing form. A product like WebLink from Laserfiche is what is used in many organizations, and works great.

See just how powerful eForms capture can be? It’s not just about the form, it’s about making things easy for everyone.

Comments

Going all electronic is the goal but...

Submitted by Bill Galusha May 24, 2011 - 3:55 PM

I don’t disagree that going all electronic is the best way to manage information, but the reality is that government is far from completely eliminating paper. Generally speaking, many government agencies have more than just a few forms, often it’s hundreds of different forms. To add to the problem a lot of the paper that an agency is dealing with comes from outside the agency where there is very little control over it. Add in all the other unstructured data (emails, meeting notes, photos, electronic files, etc) and you have a huge problem.

FOIA had good intentions, but it created problems for agencies responding to the request in a timely manner without impacting the agencies day-to-day operations, and ensuring that confidential data is not included when fulfilling a request. The good thing is vendors like EMC have been able to solve these problems.

In one case, a county agency implemented EMC Captiva to not only capture and digitize the paper, but is also redacting all confidential data so that in the future these records can be easily shared with the public. In another example, a state health department was so overwhelmed by the number of public request that they often failed to meet the deadlines imposed by the state. By using the EMC Captiva capture solution they now process nearly all request on time (a 65% improvement), and rather than it taking weeks to process a request, it can be handled in a matter of hours.

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OK, but

Submitted by Bryant Duhon May 25, 2011 - 4:28 PM

Thanks for the thoughts gentlemen, but, both of you make the redaction process look like magic. Born digital or paper and then converted, HOW do you apply that redaction logic, how do you keep redacted information from being hacked upon release. If the redacted information is something simple like a person's name, I can see how your products could handle that. However, when there's something more complicated that involves an actual person deciding what needs to be withheld, how to you help automate/alert a government official doing the redacting that "hey, you need to look at this"?

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Redaction solution built for EMC Captiva

Submitted by Bill Galusha June 03, 2011 - 4:36 PM

Check out the redaction solution called BlackMark that one of our partners (PaperFree) built - http://www.paperfreecorporation.com/redaction/index.shtml
They have it implemented in a few places. They offer both a solution that handles redaction manually and a more advanced solution for automated redaction.

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