RSSMuckRock’s getting better at filing FOIA over time
Jul 12
Uncategorized Site Updates, Stats No Comments
One of the hypothesis we had when we launched the site was that, by watching hundreds and hundreds of requests, we could help our users be more successful in filing requests that get answered. I’m happy to report that, so far, it seams we were right:
Sorry for the jaggy graph, but the trends are pretty clear: We’re doing much, much better lately when it comes to getting requests actually answered, thanks to regularly tweaking the template system, the FOIA contact database and the suggested requests, as well as by deploying the new follow up tool.
None of this would have been possible, of course, without the amazingly talented community of requesters who have been helping us pave new ground in transparency on all sorts of issues. You can download the data set I used to make the above graph in .CSV format, which you can open in Excel. As a bonus, the data set also includes total requests filed via MuckRock and the total pages we’ve published. An important caveat about the latter: Our counting mechanism was, up until relatively recently, fairly bugging and drastically undercounted the amount we had published. The big spikes the past few weeks are the result of us fixing those bugs. One other, slightly smaller caveat is that “Total Pages” also includes some material that is still embargoed and is not publicly viewable yet.
Thanks again for helping us slowly fine tune government transparency: We couldn’t have done it without you.
