The results are in: According to their own reports, some federal agencies are already testing AI in their FOIA offices. Many more are already using machine learning functions baked into current document search and discovery tools or plan to make use of AI in the future.

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In almost every FOIA policy discussion these days, the topic of AI comes up. What we are already seeing should be concerning to those who want broad access to the public’s information.

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As protests of the killing of George Floyd and other black Americans continue, many communities are looking for answers in how to hold police departments more accountable to the communities they serve. In conjunction with today’s training, we’re putting together a collection of resources on how public records can play a small part in that work.

Last week, we fixed some API bugs that a user reported. We also set the groundwork to get hacking on our Sunshine Week site; you can help us with that tomorrow on the FOIA Slack or at Code for Boston.

For Sunshine Week 2019, we’re working on building a database of the best FOIA suggestions to help showcase the power of transparency - and give requesters a little inspiration when they’re stuck for ideas. Join us next Tuesday in Boston or on our FOIA Slack.

Currently, our development efforts are focused mostly on overhauling user authentication across our services, making it easier to log in to any of our sites while also simplifying permissions and organization management.

Last week we mostly spent fixing a few bugs that popped up rarely but still needed quashing. Chief among them: A bug that broke request pages if they had multiple communications that each had hundreds of communications.

We launched portal integration with MuckRock a while ago, but have noticed that we are still missing a lot of portals in the system. We’ve made it easier for us to catch when an agency starts using a portal, plus a few other tweaks to speed up getting requesters to their files.