Background on MuckRock

Wikipedia could be used as a channel for conducting and managing information requests. This has not been done previously. I would like for it to be done in the future. This post is one of three in a series, and this one talks about Wikipedia and information requests. In other posts I present the idea of using Wikipedia as a channel for making information requests. and describe my own personal desire for a certain kind of medical information that I think about requesting through Wikipedia.

On 17 December Sue Gardner visited New York to receive a journalism award from the Knight Foundation. As part of her award, she was granted the opportunity to herself award $25,000 in Knight Foundation funds to the organization of her choice. She choose MuckRock, which is an organization which keeps infrastructure on their website for making information requests to the United States government.

The background to this is that the 1966 federal law called the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) permits citizens to ask for public information from the United States government. In the 60s when this law was passed it had a different context; everyone assumed that the government would be the keeper of public information, and no one imagined that there could ever be a way to serve the entirety of all public information to all citizens on request. People like Carl Malamud with his Public.Resource.Org and Aaron Swartz with for example the PACER database have managed their own projects to free public information they wished to make more available; this is a movement and lots of people are thinking about this. This is only about giving the public online access to information which everyone – the public, government, and everyone – unanimously agrees ought to be available for free online for anyone.

Since the advent of Internet people began to make Freedom of Information requests online. For various reasons, the government’s online interface for making requests is difficult for average people to use. Most of the people historically who made requests through this system has some kind of specialized bureaucratic training, and when the request process was translated online, it had non-intuitive peculiarities distinct to the culture of the class of bureaucrats which formerly were the primary class of users operating the request process. MuckRock on their website set up a more user-friendly interface designed to assist any kind of person to make government requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. They then invited anyone to make FOIA requests through their system.

MuckRock is doing a bit more than an interface supplement. Since every kind of request is different, when they receive a request through their queue, they have an actual human with specialized training and understanding review and reformat the request to conform to bureaucratic standards. They actually have not simplified the request process in total; rather, they are accepting low-quality and malformed requests, but using their own staff’s understanding to fix them, and then with that help the request becomes compliant with FOIA expectations.

Then MuckRock is doing some other interesting things. When they make requests, they make it themselves, and do not send it back to the requester for the requester to make the request. Since they are making the request themselves, they are managing it, so they get the reply. When they make the request they publish it on their website, and time stamp it, and publish any replies they get in a way threaded to the original request.

In summary, here is the old request process, and compare it with MuckRock’s new process:

Old way

1. An individual requester desires public government information
2. An individual requester learns the Freedom of Information Act request process
3. That requester alone makes a request according to complicated standards
4. In private correspondence, the requester mails a request to government agents for processing
5. In private correspondence, the government agent replies. The following may happen
• The requester gets the information requested
• The requester does not get the information requested – could there have been a mistake? What happened?
• The requester does not get a reply – could there have been a mistake? What happened?
6. The requester gets some reply or non-reply. Though this information is public for anyone, the knowledge of the outcome and any information received is only held by the requester.

MuckRock way

1. An individual requester desires public government information
2. This person knows nothing in particular about anything, and at a minimum only needs the sort of skill set used to request information from a library
3. That requester alone makes a request for the information on MuckRock’s interface
4. MuckRock staff reform the request to comply with complicated Freedom of Information Act standards
5. MuckRock staff publish the request on their website with a timestamp, so that anyone can see the request and when it was made
6. The timestamped public request is sent to the government
7. Any reply which comes from the government is likewise timestamped and published in a thread which connects it with the original request. These things could happen:
• The information requested is now available on the MuckRock website. Anyone who is searching for this information on the Internet can find it without making another FOIA request for it.
• The request is denied. This is very interesting also, and it is of immense public benefit to be publicly aware that data does not exist or that it is not available.
• The request gets no reply. Since the request was public and timestamped, getting no reply also becomes a public benefit, because it creates a tension in which government agencies will be more forthright in publicly denying requests than letting them sit in queue unprocessed indefinitely.
8. The requester and everyone else in the world have access to whatever reply or non-reply the request has gotten.

Of course, the goal of MuckRock is not to sort requests, but rather, to eventually call for free public access to all free public information. Nothing which MuckRock requests was ever intended to be private or barred from public access.