By Toby McIntosh
The use of crowdfunding to raise money for freedom of information requests is occurring at modest levels in the Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States, according to reports gathered by FreedomInfo.org.
The number of instances may be too few to be called a trend, but too intriguing to be ignored.
And crowdfunding appears to be working.
– In the US, a new “FOI Machine” was started with a grant, plus funds raised from mroe than 2,000 persons on the funding platform Kickstarter.
– In Australia, a group raised $1,000 in an hour to pay processing fees for a FOIA request about trade negotiations.
– Another online effort in Australia doesn’t involve asking for money. Instead volunteers are asked to make FOI requests that fit into a larger investigative initiative.
– A top investigative journalist in the US has successfully found backers for his work making FOI requests, promising them periodic reports, consultations and even “FOIA Terroist” t-shirts.
– Muckrock, a US group with website that facilitates making FOIA requests, now has a built-in feature to facilitate crowdfunding.
– Journalists and activists in the Australia, German and the US have successfully raised small amounts for very specific requests.
Crowdfunding sometimes gets fast results. Small monetary goals have been reached within a few hours.
The impetus for FOI-specific crowdsourcing may be derive from the burgeoning use of the technique by investigative journalists to get financing for specific reporting projects (see for example this article on the trend among Canadian freelance journalists).
Moreover, the adoption of crowdfunding by FOI activists follows a global trend.
“During the past 5 years Crowdfunding has been doubling in size every year,” wrote Ivan Botoucharov in a January blog post. He is co-founder, co-president and head of public relations of OneEurope. In 2013, $5.5 billion was raised through crowdfunding via 1,000 platforms. More than a quarter of the total was for “social causes” — more than for any other sector.
Here are nine examples of crowdfunding in the FOI world.
(Consistent with the theme, Freedominfo.org would welcome other examples and comments.)
Australian Papers Gets Backing
More than one hundred people donated funds to a crowdsourced effort to pay for a FOIA request about Australia’s broadband policy.
The Delimiter online news site used the funding site Pozible to raise $2,262 from over 122 donors in six hours, according to reports in The Australian and ABC News.
The goals was acess to a “blue book” briefing book given to the new Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. The requests generated 545 pages of documents and a price tag of $2,071. The Delimiter editor Renai LeMay promised to release the documents in full.
Funds Raised in Five Hours
Pirate Party Australia turned to crowdfunding to raise the $1,080 processing fee demanded by the government for documents relating to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.
The group in October 2013 raised the money within the first hour of launching the campaign, confirming that there is significant public interest surrounding the international agreement.
The documents, which were requested from IP Australia, revealed little information, with at least half the 2,376 pages being wholly or substantially redacted. The FOIA law “allows near-complete exclusion of the public under the guise of protecting international relations,” charged Brendan Molloy, who lodged the request on behalf of Pirate Party Australia. “Black marker politics is unacceptable: the default must be transparency, involvement and discussion,” he said.
File a Request With Us
A different approach was taken for an Australian project called DetentionLogs. Readers were asked to make specific requests and provided with the tools.
The project began because of concerns about the treatment of immigrants in detention centers. Several journalists obtained a list of around 7,000 “incidents.” To find out more about specific incidents, readers where encouraged to file FOI requests. Pre-drafted FOI requests were set up on RightToKnow, OpenAustralia’s FOI site. In mind-summer of 2013 around 125 such FOI requests had been made through this site.
Matthew Landauer, director of OpenAustralia, said the government was hostile to the effort, as more fully described in a blog post and in an article he co-authored. Among other things, 85 FOI requests were deemed “substantially the same” and treated as a single request, “thereby delaying the bulk of the requests and most likely leading to their refusal en masse,” Landauer wrote.
MuckRock Encourages Crowdfunding
There’s actually a crowdfunding feature on MuckRock, a US website through which FOIA requests can be submitted and tracked.
In this example, MuckRock cofounder Michael Morisy in May of 2013 asked for information about the National Security Agency’s data storage facility in Utah.
He set out to raise $277.20, which would exactly cover the government’s bill. He raised $312.20. The donor’s names are listed on the page.
Muckrock users, who file requests through the site, are shown a crowdfunding option when a fee assessment is made. The crowdfunding effort isn’t prominent on the MuckRock home page, but Muckrock might tweet about it or publicize it in other ways, and the requesters use their own networks to publicize the funding appeal.
About half a dozen Muckrock requesters have used crowdfunding, all successful, Morisey said. Mostly they raised $300-$400. Sometimes it took 24 hours, other times several weeks. The average donation of $50 was higher than expected.
He notes the irony of situations in which funds are raised even after the government has denied a fee waiver because there is no broad public interest.
It’s best to give potential funders a clear understanding of what to expect and why you think the documents are important, Morisey said. Crowdfunding is a useful tool in engaging the audience in the story, he said.
The crowd has other sues on Muckrock, which also has a question and answer feature providing answers to FOIA-related questions.
And a FOI Terrorist T-shirt
US investigative journalist Jason Leopold, an active FOIA user, has raised several thousand dollars via the online journalism site Beacon to support current and future document requests. Beacon offers crowdfunding for journalists, but Leopold’s pitch specifically references FOIA.
He promises “regular updates about document requests I am filing with various government agencies and why the material is valuable and newsworthy,” plus access to the documents and analysts of the material. Also offered are “a Q&A with me and open government experts in BEACON discussion forums, tips on filing good state and federal FOIA requests, and access to every story, by every writer on BEACON.”
The options include $5 per month and paying that amount at other intervals. Someone sending in $90 gets a year’s subscription will get an invitation to participate in an exclusive hangout with Jason and a “FOIA Terrorist” t-shirt.
It seems to have worked out well so far. Leopold raised $2,230 in 14 days.
An enthusiastic Leopold told FreedomInfo.org:
Much of my investigative reporting over the past year has been based on documents I have obtained via FOIA so my audience has been very enthusiastic about supporting my project. I tend to file FOIAs with the intent of litigating the bigger cases (I currently have seven active FOIA lawsuits). The funds I have raised actually are used to fund my FOIA lawsuits, the filing fee specifically. It is very difficult to obtain documents pertaining to national security/counterterrorism issues so one must pursue a lawsuit in order to have a shot at prying loose these records.
The project allows me to discuss some of the wonky issues associated with FOIAs and provide readers with tips on filing good FOIA requests and obtaining information they otherwise would not have been aware of, such as processing notes, estimated dates of completion, etc.
Broad Funding Effort
Right to know activists in 2013 launched The Freedom of the Press Foundation “to collect deductible donations for a changing suite of scrappy public-interest organizations — both new and existing — focused on exposing mismanagement, cruelty, corruption, repression, and criminality in our increasingly opaque institutions,” according to blog post describing the effort.
The first four beneficiaries of the still ongoing effort included WikiLeaks and the National Security Archive, the parent organization of FreedomInfo.org.
Hot Topic Brings Donations
In Germany in late 2012, a hot topic stimulated donations of more than 5,000 euros over a weekend.
The donation campaign was run by netzpolitik.org and Digitale Gesellschaft (a news outlet and campaigning platform for digital rights). The money went toward the costs of a request involving the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
FOIA Machine Kickstarted
“FOIA Machine” was billed on Kickstarter as “like TurboTax for government records.”
The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) wanted funds to expand “an integrated web platform developed by veteran investigative reporters and technology pros to streamline “the complicated process of filing and tracking public record requests, putting all of the steps, rules, exceptions and best practices in one place and allowing users to track requests on dashboards, receive alerts, share request blueprints and get social support and expertise from the FOIA Machine community.”
Seed money for the project ($47,000) was provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Knight offered CIR an additional $10,000 grant if it attracted 2,000 backers. They are listed on the FOIA Machine site.
Turning to Kickstarter, CIR got 2,071 backers who pledged $53,654, well above an original of goal of $17,500 and above the “stretch goal” was $50,000.
The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri matched every dollar donated up to the first $15,000.
`Transparency Gap’ Coverage Planned
A British journalist, Rowan Emslie, used the online journalism site Beacon to raise money for his plans to write and campaign on the general topic of “very little meaningful interaction” between journalists and pro-transparency activists.
Emslie promised two stories a month critiquing media’s role in the transparency movement and “exclusive interaction with me through BEACON discussions.” He said, “Most of all, I want to air the opinions and findings of as many different sources as possible in search for a better way of covering the transparency movement.”
In late February 2014, he reported being 108% funded after 14 days with $323 raised.
FreedomInfo.org Can’t Resist
Donations can be made here to the National Security Archive, which sponsors Freedominfo.org.
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