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foia-decrease

Does Open Data Decrease FOIA requests?

Total FOIA requests

Omits police, administrative hearings, health, and finance since these all have some data problems right now. The decrease over this period is not statistically significant.

Dept of Buildings FOIA requests

Department of Buildings is the ony Department with a clear decrease in FOIA requests. In the early period, most of the requests in the early period were about permits or building violations, which are now on the Data Portal.

Non Dept of Buildings FOIA requests

Department of Buildings FOIA requests make up a little less than half of the the total FOIA requests. Omitting this department, the overall number of FOIA requests is clearly increasing.

Key Questions

  • Open Data only seems to strongly substitute for FOIA requests in the building department. How were the FOIA requests for this department different than other departments?
  • For efficiencies, the number of requests is not as interesting as effort spent responding to FOIA. What does that look like over time?

Notes

To make these images, run the the R script chi_foia.R. You need to be connected to the internet as we get the data from the http://data.cityofchicago.org SODA API.

  • The police foia data ends in 2013
  • The health foia data ends in 2013 and has a bizarre spike in 2012
  • Most Administrative Hearings FOIA requests are for case files and often request multiple case files. At the beginning of 2014, Administrative Hearings started listing each case file as a separate line in the FOIA log to reflect the true volume more accurately.

Thanks

Thanks to Johnathan Levy and Tom Schenk, Jr. for helping me track down some of the weirdnesses in this data.