Quantity of response documents: Records marker of public records complexity

The GovQA Quantity of Response Documents marker indicates a 31% increase in total documents provided to requesters between 2018 and 2020. While a hefty increase might be expected corresponding with the dramatically higher request numbers for this timeframe, the factors affecting how many documents end up being produced are complex, subject to rapid change, and can cause responsive document quantity to rise or fall, netting out to a smaller increase than expected – or possibly even a decrease. This blog will outline some key factors influencing the quantity of documents agencies and jurisdictions provide in response to requests.

Documents aren’t what they used to be

Defining “document” used to be easy. It meant a single piece of paper, or set of papers, put together for a specific purpose. The limited amount of information one sheet could hold hadn’t changed much over millennia.

But as governments incorporate electronic documents to leverage efficiency and public benefit, the amount and type of information a single document can contain can be huge and vary widely. What might at one time have been hundreds of documents might now be a single electronic file, People also have the flexibility to combine multiple documents into one, such as combining multiple email messages and attachments into a single PDF file.

Data-packed electronic documents replacing many pages of paper documents would have the tendency to cut the number of documents needed to respond to a request. But other forces, examined below, have tended to significantly increase the quantity of documents provided.Many, if not all, of these factors stem from the fact that governments are significantly increasing, often by orders of magnitude, the amount of data and documents they are collecting in a multitude of formats.

Technology proliferates government documents and data

The pace at which governments are generating new electronic documents, data, and records can be difficult to get one’shead around. The variety and quantity are staggering: imaged and digitized paper documents; born-digital documents; records of communications in a plethora of media; video and audio recordings governments have created themselves or collected from other sources; photos; GIS and other mapping data. The list goes on and on. As the State of Washington puts it, “One of the consequences of technology is the ability to generate unprecedented volumes of information and data – exabytes [a billion gigabytes], anyone?” Or as California describes it “the explosion of electronic data generated in recent decades.”

Oceans of email

While Granicus has cited the reality that governments are drowning in public records requests, Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, suggests that much of the problem can be traced to email:

“…We are drowning in email…. We use email for everything.

Everything.

We have long-winded discussions. We have short, pithy exchanges. We transfer documents and photos. We copy our bosses and blind-copy anyone with a pulse. We send HTML newsletters and promote activities through third-party email services. We forward and reply. We have auto-replies and vacation notifications. We have email addresses and inboxes designated for specific services. We create folders (and forget what the folders contain). We send and receive email from our phones, our tablets, our laptops.

Not to mention: we now have 15, 20, maybe even 25 years’ worth of archived email messages.”

While for many governments it’s relatively easy to do system-wide searches for keywords and date ranges that requesters are interested in, the volume of results these searches generate can be overwhelming. According to Rhyne:

“…Often [many] people are involved in the discussion, and each of those people have been busy replying, forwarding and cc’ing. Because when someone replies, forwards or cc’s, often they are including all of the replies, forwards and cc’s before it.”

Searches will end up producing the same email chains over and over again, and without special technology there is no practical way to mark a chain as having been previously reviewed, allow staff to save the time otherwise spent on reviewing it over and over as it pings back and forth accumulating new replies and attachments.

Washington State requires that if certain kinds of duplicate records are pulled from different sources they still have to be provided (e.g. the same email exchange produced by two different sources). But the reality is that even for jurisdictions without this requirement, it isn’t practical to spend time weeding out duplicates. And for jurisdictions like Virginia that charge requesters for review time, this kind of winnowing down only increases costs.

Another pitfall of email is hidden/inaccessible personal archives. Microsoft-based email systems automatically shunt emails to users’ local hard drives as .pst files, which don’t get caught in system-wide searches.

Governments are also creating masses of new records through their enthusiastic adoption of social media. Since it documents government activities, social media fits the definition of public record and is covered in some form by the public records laws of all 50 states, as well as some open meeting laws.

As Florida law states, a public record is any material “regardless of the physical form, characteristics, or means of transmission, made or received pursuant to law or ordinance or in connection with the transaction of official business by any agency.” Many states, like California, provide specific guidance for determining what social media activity must be preserved under document retention requirements.

Examples of public records requests involving social media include:

• A request to the City of Santa Barbara, CA, for all social media postings related to a gun buy-back event sponsored by the police department
• A Colorado agency request for any and all communications, including on social media, related to oil drilling and fracking
• A request to a North Carolina town for any and all discussion, comment, or feedback regarding plans for a proposed bridge

The move to open government

At the same time that political and social developments have spurred citizens to demand greater access to the workings of government, technology has made the information governments generate much more shareable. These two forces come together in open government, making information available on agency websites or dedicated open government portals without the need for a request . Proactively posting information and documents is an investment, especially if information that is exempt from disclosure must be redacted. However, some governments are betting that doing so will promote efficiency as well as increase transparency and public trust. The State of Wisconsin, for example, posts investigative files, photographs, and audio and video recordings related to Officer Involved Critical Incidents, such as the August 23, 2020, incident in Kenosha in which police shot an unarmed citizen.

In theory, proactively making records accessible through self-service (whether using request deflection tools like those offered by Granicus or Open Data portals such as those that can be integrated into Granicus tools) should reduce the number and scope of requests and, thus, the quantity of documents needing to be processed and provided.

The City of Lakewood, CO, for instance, has implemented the “Lakewood Speaks” interactive platform to boost public participation in city council, planning commission, and other meetings where issues are debated and decisions are made. The site makes it much more convenient for citizens to review meeting agendas and submit comments before meetings and take part in the meeting itself. The results of the site, which has been active in Lakewood for three years, are staggering. Overall participation increased eightfold, while participation by 35-54 year olds is more than ten times higher. The number of participants under 35 is more than 100 times higher online than in-person.

Governments have provided public meeting documents on a proactive basis for years, but “Lakewood Speaks” and similar platforms are also creating new types of documentation (including around site users) that are subject to public records requests and privacy considerations.

For example, comments submitted through “Lakewood Speaks” are published on the site along with the commenter’s full name, but commenters must also submit their street and email addresses, which become part of the public record. As the site advises all information submitted via email or through the website may be subject to a public records request pursuant to the public records statutes.

Getting the right balance of cost and benefit

There will always be new technology and new record formats that have the potential to increase or decrease the quantity of response documents assembled for a typical public records request. But trying to measure the impact of these innovations on response document quantity is complex – because many, like the Lakewood Speaks site, could lead to both increases and decreases that are difficult to parse out. And it can be like a game of whack-a-mole – solving one problem or creating a new benefit with one mechanism can just create a different – or entirely new – problem.

The State of Washington asks “Technology was supposed to make things easier and better, right?” To which one data manager responds: “information is a frenemy” – just as data and records have great value, they can also create huge burdens. Balancing these factors will be critical as document counts continue to rise. And technology certainly has a role to play in simplifying the management of the increases in response documents.