Six months ago, when I got onboard the Knight Open Government Survey project, I had only the slightest sense of what I was getting into. When the last survey was released in March 2010, I was only an intern – warm and safe in the bubble of the intern room/proto-document vault (Photo: Anya Melyakova). I had little knowledge of the survey beyond skimming an article in the New York Times. Within a couple days on the job, I began to grasp the significance of the project.
The largest and most time-consuming task I had to undertake was the day-to-day management of the 90-agency FOIA survey. From day one, FOIA responses from agencies began arriving and a basic filing and indexing system had to be established. Once a degree of crowd control was in place, I could easily determine agencies’ most basic level of compliance with the FOIA: responsiveness. (more…)
