The Department of Justice will create a Freedom of Information Act dashboard to visually demonstrate the progress made by government agencies in processing FOIA requests.
The online “visual report card” was announced Wednesday as part of of the DOJ’s Open Government plan.
In December, the White House issued an open government directive, which required agencies to take public suggestions on increasing transparency. All agencies had to come up with an open government plan by April 7. The Justice Department used an online feedback system called Ideascale to set up a Web site, OpenDOJ, to gather suggestions from the public.
The DOJ’s “flagship initiative,” generated by a suggestion from a member of the public, will be the FOIA Dashboard, which will graphically display the progress of various government.
In a blog posting announcing the Open Government plan, DOJ’s new media specialist Tracy Russo highlighted three steps that the Justice Department will take immediately to increase transparency: making significant court filing available on the DOJ’s Web site; posting a calendar of the Attorney General’s meetings and activities; and publishing the underlying data that is summarized in office or division reports.
According to the plan, the DOJ Office of Public Affairs will post court filings as soon as they are filed to make them more accessible to the public.
“The public will often learn about these filings from news reports, but those reports rarely give adequate context, and even more rarely give direct access to the very actions they are describing,” the plan says. “Federal courts and numerous commercial services provide access to the documents, but often only at a cost and regularly only with some delay. The department is committed to making these papers more readily available. This information should be available to the public, so that Americans can review the documents themselves and gain a full understanding of the department’s actions.”
The Attorney General’s calendar will be posted on a monthly basis, though some sensitive meetings will not be noticed, Russo said.
“Redactions will be kept to a minimum, consistent with the principles laid out in the Attorney General’s FOIA Guidelines. While there will always be aspects of the Attorney General’s responsibilities that cannot be disclosed publicly, lest they compromise important national security, law enforcement or litigation interests, there is much that can, and should be, disclosed,” Russo wrote.
A PDF version of the plan is embedded below, and the Justice Department has created a Web site explaining the plan.
