FOIA Machine by The Center for Investigative Reporting | Hacker News Reader

FOIA Machine by The Center for Investigative Reporting

kickstarter.com

93 pointsknowtheory18 comments

How is this different than what Muckrock is doing?

http://www.muckrock.com/

"MuckRock is an open government tool powered by state and federal Freedom of Information laws, a generous grant from the Sunlight Foundation, and you: Requests are based on your questions, concerns and passions, and you are free to embed, share and write about any of the verified government documents hosted here. Want to learn more? Check out our about page."

<3 MuckRock. they are awesome dudes.

This is what the FOIA Machine guys said specifically about that in their application for a Knight News Challenge Grant (scroll down to the competition section): https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submissio...

MuckRock co-founder here, hoping to clarify a few things.

* Over 80% of MuckRock's requests were filed with no charge to the user.

* MuckRock has supported filing mass-requests for a while now.

* MuckRock does offer a database including every single state law, example requests to use and modify, thousands of government agencies, and the ability for users to contribute to this growing database.

We also have a tool people can use, today, to file and share requests, with over 5,000 requests filed and almost 1,000 users.

Please explore!

Requests around America: https://www.muckrock.com/place/

News we've broken: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/

StackOverflow for FOIA: https://www.muckrock.com/questions/

Just FYI, I've used and love Muckrock. Just putting my bromance out in public. Thanks for creating it.

Thanks! It's very much appreciated.

FOIAMachine dev here. There are a few projects operating in the space and it seems the more help being offered to get people asking their government for data and documents the better off we'll all be. There's gonna be some overlap, nothing is totally novel and I like to think FOIAMachine builds on some of the great ideas that came before it, including those generated by MuckRock. I see FOIAMachine different in a few ways. It has tighter controls for sharing requests with specific people (or keeping them private). We're building controls so you can make requests more social. What that means is sharing a request with others to build support publicly. And of course, we'll share what users make available via an API. Also, while we're asking for funding now the service will be totally free. It's built so users can help each other. It's built so you have the tools to stay organized. Once the code is done the hosting costs are minimal and it won't need much to keep the lights on and help people create their requests. MuckRock and Alaveteli are great and their creators have done yeoman's work. FOIAMachine approaches the problem from a different angle and I think it'll be a useful tool for a lot of people.

"FOIAMachine approaches the problem from a different angle."

FOIA Machine has been telling me this since 2011, and yet you continue to copy what we deploy, feature by feature. Seriously. I'd love to work together, and I already offered to open source our source code for you, but that's not an offer that has ever been taken up.

I'm always available to talk: Michael@MuckRock.com.

"FOIAMachine approaches the problem from a different angle"

Can you explain what this different angle is?

Sorry Shane, but I'd rather give my money to MuckRock.

There shouldn't be controls for sharing; all FOIA requests should be open, as well as the responses. That's the point of the platform.

More social? FOIA officers don't care if your request is social, they care if your request fits within the scope and guidelines of what should be in a FOIA request.

Your angle seems to be the wrong angle. Just saying.

It's kind of funny--you know that subcomponent of PRISM where the government sends a machine-readable subpoena, and a corporation, in response, automatically runs a query to pull together a user's records and drop them in a government-accessible dead-drop computer? If done correctly, this would basically be the same thing, but for citizens "subpoenaing" government.

I say "if done correctly" because it currently sounds like it only handles the "send" part of the FOIA request. It'd be a lot more convenient if it also used the Center for Investigative Reporting as the receive address, scanned in and OCRed all the FOIA'ed documents that get received... maybe even have some lawyers pick through each received document and provide analysis + highlight interesting bits, like Groklaw does. Is that part of the plan? (The non-receiving version could always be kept in place either way, for when people want to just get at their own personal records.)

Hi derefr!

That's exactly how we operate, and we're working more on the "analysis" end of things now (https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/jun/25/booz-alle...). Would love suggestions on how we can do it better.

Another project with similar aims, which I worked on when I was employed by MySociety and which is used in several countries around the world is Alaveteli: http://www.alaveteli.org/ https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli

Alaveteli is based on the code that has powered the British site http://www.WhatDoTheyKnow.com/ for several years.

Also used in New Zealand: http://fyi.org.nz - it's awesome :D

Also used in Australia : http://www.righttoknow.org.au

I couldn't quickly find if it is a proposed feature but...

A cool feature would be to crowd fund the feeds. After filing a request and it makes it through to the fee portion, list it somewhere so that users can chip in to unlock a request.

foiamachine developer here. this is a great idea. thanks so much!

It just reached its goal! Good job everyone!

i just donated $25.

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