Combining funding with community can lead to great things. Recently a project to build a useful open government tool -- which gained initial support through a Knight prototype grant -- completed a highly successful crowdfunding campaign. This will allow the Center for Investigative Reporting to expand "FOIA Machine" into public availability, with features that will be useful to any journalist or news/information effort.

FOIA Machine is an online tool to streamline the creation, filing, and tracking Freedom of Information Act requests. When their Kickstarter campaign concluded on Aug. 16, the project had raised $53,654 from 2071 backers -- surpassing their initial goal of $17,500, and even their "stretch" goal of $50,000. This included matching funds from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri for matching every dollar donated up to the first $15,000. In addition, the Knight Foundation gave CIR an additional $10,000 grant since the campaign reached 2,000 backers.

"Building the FOIA Machine community will be essential to making the project a success. The fact that you are donating, in this case, is just as important as the amount of money you give," says the campaign page.

This is generally true for crowdfunding campaigns. When people help to crowdfund a project, they feel invested in all kinds of ways -- and they often keep investing attention and energy to the project long after they've donated money. In this case, the community of FOIA Machine backers is a crucial resource for honing, testing, and evangelizing this tool -- which is why the Knight Foundation offered a matching grant once the project achieved a critical mass of backers.

Djordje Padejski, a Serbian journalist at CIR and founder of FOIA Machine, came up with the project idea last year while on a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, he ran Serbia's first center for investigative reporting.

"I was filing FOIA requests all over the world, I was a frequent FOIA user," he said.

He noted that filing and tracking FOIA requests can be a complex process. Usually journalists and other people who file FOIAs learn how to do it by asking their colleagues or peers who have already done it.

"I thought, why don't we collect successful requests, create a library of good examples?" said Padejski. "So whenever I want to file a request to, say, the EPA, I can see successful ones -- and also see what documents people got back in response."

"FOIA Machine isn't just about automating the process of creating a request; it's also about sharing that collective knowledge. This tool won't solve all your FOIA problems, but it'll help you stay organized, manage and track your requests, etc. It's a knowledge base."

Padejski teamed up with CIR staffers during a hackathon at Stanford to build some initial components of FOIA Machine. Following that, last fall the project received a small grant from the Knight Prototype Fund. With this support, the team created a functional FOIA Machine prototype, currently being tested internally by about 15 CIR users at CIR.

So far FOIA Machine includes:

• Request creation wizard. This walks you through five steps that, based on your interests, create the text of a records request to fit the specific regulations of a specific government agencies. You can then copy this text into an e-mail or letter to send to the agency.
• Request dashboard. This lists all FOIA requests submitted by a user. For each request it displays the subject, status, agency, date of submission, due date, type and jurisdiction. Each request can be explored in a separate view.
• Professional request creation tool. This allows more advanced users to type their own request letter, but still take advantage of FOIA Machine's tracking tools.
• Basic information pages about each jurisdiction/statute and agency, with placeholders for data statistics.
• Reminder notifications to alert you when due dates for your requests have past, so you know when to follow up with the agency's FOIA officer.

With the Kickstarter funding, the plan is to make an expanded version of FOIA Machine available on the web to a community of beta testers in the next few months, with general availability coming in 2014. Likely new features will include:

• Public requests. "Whenever you start a new request, the first thing you'll decide is whether it's a private or public request. Ultimately we're hoping that everyone will share their requests and results after they're finished," Padejski said. Each public request will have a public webpage.
• Social tools. This will support discussing and publicizing FOIA requests and results both within the community of FOIA Machine users, and via social media. This could allow users to pool requests, and also easily demonstrate high demand for certain requests -- which could expedite fulfillment of popular requests.

Right now FOIA Machine generates and manages requests for most U.S. federal government agencies, as well as for state agencies in California. Beginning in 2014, FOIA Machine will add support for more states, and eventually for some local governments as well. "We'll do some data hackathons and other public events around the country, where we'll invite people to help us gather info about the state-level FOIA process," said Padejski.

So beginning next year, journalists and others focused on community-level news and information will be able to use this web-based tool to access federal documents, including those related to issues in a certain community or region -- such as the federal lobbying activities of local companies or organizations.

"I was a local reporter, and you always need government documents and datasets to do that work," said Padejski. "You could use FOIA Machine to copy successful similar requests that were made in a different community. Looking at the public requests on file here is a great ways to get a story idea, or a blueprint for how you'll cover it."

Some open government experts have expressed concern that a tool like FOIA Machine might backfire by increasing the already considerable backlog of requests that some federal agencies are struggling to fulfill. Padejski counters, "FOIA Machine is not intended to spam federal agencies. It helps you build better, more targeted requests that are easier to fulfill. Ultimately this should streamline the FOIA process for everyone."

He added, "The point is to encourage the government to proactively open more records, so they'd see less FOIA requests."

One option the FOIA Machine team is considering is posting on the web lists of FOIA requests that are long overdue -- a year or more -- in order to increase public pressure on agencies to respond.

To follow the progress of this project and be alerted when it becomes publicly available, register for updates at FOIAmachine.org