Government Documents: Office of Information Policy/USDOJ and 18F Release Report on the “Discovery Phase” of The National FOIA Portal

From the U.S. Dept. of Justice:

…OIP [Office of Information Policy] is pleased to announce the results of its collaboration with GSA’s 18F team on the discovery phase of development of a National FOIA Portal.  As we enter development, we want to again solicit both public and agency participation in providing feedback on our work.
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In April 2017, the Office of Information Policy (OIP) announced its partnership with the General Services Administration’s (GSA) 18F team to create a consolidated online request portal.  To begin the project, OIP compiled a team with members including its own FOIA subject matter experts, 18F’s digital services team, and technical staff from DOJ’s Office of the Chief Information Officer and contractor support.  The team began by embarking on a “discovery phase” that included conducting extensive research, interviewing requesters, agencies, and the advocacy community, and testing prototypes of possible functionality.  The discovery phase focused on four categories of potential functionality:  the ability to submit a request to any agency, interoperability (i.e., making the new portal work with other existing systems), generating status updates, and the option to search for already released records.
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The work on this project is being done in the open (on Github), so that anyone can follow our work and provide feedback.  We urge you to follow our progress and participate.  One of our first priorities is a solution for portal interoperability with agencies’ existing case management systems.  We are particularly interested in feedback from agencies’ technical experts on the API schemas we are developing for the purpose of interoperability.

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