FOIA Scores

A site to evaluate various agencies based on time it takes to fulfill FOIA requests and how many are completed versus rejected.

FOIA Scores was created using data from Muckrock by Andrew Tran, Kai Teoh, and Hilary Fung at the FOIA Data Hackday hosted by Buzzfeed.

Notes

• We only noticed FOIAMapper's excellent FOIA scorecard for federal agencies halfway through our project. But we continued on since it had data on federal agencies as well as state and local agencies.

• The live page only lists the first hundred results so the search function is the best way to dig through other scores.

What's in the repo

• data/requests.csv with metadata about 19,000 FOIA requests made through Muckrock.com.
• parser.R goes through the requests.csv file and creates a histogram PNG of the distribution of days it takes an agency to fulfill a FOIA request and also generates agencies.json.
• agencies.json is the generated file used to run FOIA Scores.
• pngs is the folder where all the auto-generated histogram PNGs reside. I probably should have changed the format to prevent blocky histogram outputs.
• img/shame-button.png in honor of our Buzzfeed host, a button attached to each agency with an average fulfillment rate of more than 100 days.
• Various js and css folders that make up the site.

Things we would have included if we had more time

• The initial idea was to combine fulfillment stats from Muckrock, FOIAMapper, and FOIA.gov, but we only had a few hours so we just limited our analysis to Muckrock.
• Search by keywords culled from the description field (as well as agency) to see average fulfillment days and completion rate.
• Add links to examples of succesful FOIA requests and rejected FOIA requests by agency.
• A more effective way to page through results instead of limiting display of results to first 100.

What's next?

Nothing, really. We leave it to you all to browse or update, if you'd like.