We are conducting research to write recommendations for the site referenced in last summer’s FOIA Improvement Act that “allows a member of the public to submit a request for records… to any agency from a single website.” At a minimum, our work requires researching how to send requests to agencies in a way that fits into their existing processes and doesn’t add a delay or otherwise burden the process.
We’re especially interested in understanding how this can be done in a way that improves the system as a whole.
- Initial research that is broader than what we plan to work on
- Imperfect and incomplete: please let us know what we’re missing!
- Qualitative: this research is used to find patterns to further examine and test
- Finished or complete
- A list of everything we plan to fix or address
- Quantitative, statistically significant, or generalizable
We are sharing our initial research because we know it is imperfect and would greatly appreciate your feedback. Please open an issue in GitHub or email us at National.FOIAPortal@usdoj.gov, and keep our contributing policy in mind.
We started with a first round of interviews with users and stakeholders, including agencies, requesters, requester advocates, and vendors. (A HUGE thank you to everyone who took time to speak with us so far!) To learn more, read our research plan or 18F’s approach to stakeholder and user interviews.
Next, we synthesized our interviews to identify common patterns and pain points, including for requesters and agencies. Importantly, these syntheses are early possible findings that we plan to test and research further, not a final report.
Currently, we are brainstorming hypotheses and user stories based on our research so far. Next, we’ll prioritize them based on what we understand the least and would pose the greatest risk to the project if we got them wrong. This is based on lean methodologies.
We’ll start building prototypes in this GitHub repo to test those hypotheses with users and stakeholders soon. A good software prototype is like a movie set: they’re quicker and easier to build than the real thing, but just believable enough to show off (for testing). Learn more about 18F’s approach to prototyping and usability testing.
Your feedback is valuable in helping us adjust and improve our hypotheses. We are sharing our initial research because we know it is imperfect and would greatly appreciate your feedback. Please open an issue in GitHub or email us at National.FOIAPortal@usdoj.gov, and keep our contributing policy in mind.