Four weeks for FOI, and no overview

Friday afternoon, half past three. An FOI request lands at a municipality: every piece of internal correspondence and advice surrounding a contested 2021 permit decision. The FOI coordinator sends round an email. The project lead has moved to another department. The lawyer who advised at the time has retired. What remains is scattered across a DMS, two SharePoint sites, a shared drive, and the mailbox of someone who has long since left. Four weeks’ statutory deadline, plus two weeks’ extension if you’re lucky. And an organisation that doesn’t quite know what it’s holding.

The Dutch FOI Act (Woo) gives citizens the right to government information. For a municipality or ministry that means: demonstrating what you have, and demonstrating it is complete. In practice this is done by hand. Someone sends emails round, asks colleagues to search, gets back folders full of files. Deduplicating and reading take up most of the time. An FOI dossier of any size easily runs into hundreds of hours of work, and missing the deadline carries a statutory penalty under the General Administrative Law Act (Awb).

The real problem isn’t the deadline. It’s what you don’t know you have. A piece of advice exchanged in an email thread that never made it to the DMS. A meeting note on the personal drive of someone who has since left. A draft memo in six versions, with no one quite sure which one was in circulation at the time. With every FOI dossier you release without that overview, you carry the risk that a journalist will surface a missing document later — through another route, a second request, a leak, a similar case. And then the problem isn’t that the document existed. The problem is that you didn’t provide complete information.

We don’t start with the FOI request — we start with what the organisation already has. The platform indexes document sources by content: DMS, shared drives, SharePoint, archive services, mail archive — not by filename. OCR makes old scans and incoming letters searchable, even when they sit as a PDF attachment from 2018. Document types are recognised and tied to case numbers, dossiers or projects — in short, mapped to the organisation’s existing logic. Duplicates and drafts stay traceable but no longer clutter the overview. The real gain is the step after: once a dossier is compiled, the platform sweeps the full estate for related material that isn’t in it, and produces readable metadata that lets you make decisions. A human then decides whether those documents stay out, deliberately, or are added in.

After this, the FOI coordinator doesn’t just deliver the dossier faster. She delivers a dossier whose origin she can explain. Which sources were searched. Which documents were included. Which were excluded, and on what grounds. When the journalist calls with the standard question — are any documents missing? — there’s no silence on the other end of the line.