Accessibility and Access

Many public administrators miss the access "forest" for the accessibility "trees" and already shockingly few administrators make active efforts to enhance accessibility. The purpose of increased accessibility of public information is to promote the public's access to the government; however, government access itself is to narrow. Far too many FOIA Officers relish chances to reply to requests with denials and too many administrators assume that interested parties will magically create extra hours in the day to attend public meetings.

Too me, it is clear that administrators must firstly do a better job of selecting people to receive FOIA training. Something made clear (at least in Illinois' FOIA Law) is that documents maintained by public bodies are to be assumed to be sharable to the public. This is a mentality sorely lacking by many public bodies' FOIA Officers. Instead of relying on FOIA training to instill these values, when and where possible, we must select individual's whose values are aligned with FOIA.

While many municipalities provide options for entering comments into the public record asynchronously, we should seek to expand these options and not relegate them to the sidelines. There are infinitely many reasons for not making it to a particular board meeting, we should not look down on non-pensioners for having jobs and young families.

It is not incorrect for a FOIA Officer think that a document would obviously not be able to be given out without redaction or for administrators to worry about under-considered/aggressive comments from the public. The response to these issues is not to shy away from public access but to increase it. If municipalities made it standard to, rather than FOIA shame, maintain a database of successful FOIA requests, response times, and the documents successfully FOIA-ed, we would receive fewer low quality or repeat requests. If we more readily provided information to the less-engaged public, we would be more reliably receive insightful comment. Representative-democracy is based off of the assumption that the wisdom of the masses exists and a per-requisite is a basic education. It is ridiculous to assume that every resident would have a high quality understanding of how every municipal government in their locality interacts and which does what.

Further, if we are to expect that residents know how to navigate government smoothly, it is our responsibility to make government intuitive to a larger swath of the public is able to guide their own experience. This is why accessibility is merely a part of motivating access: high quality design and information sharing is inherently more accessible which inherently increases access. We must always strive to promote accessibility, not (solely) for its own sake, but for the sake of access writ large. Accessibility options improve access to documents for those who have particular needs, but for the general public. FOIA, public meeting attendance, and accessibility are not separate issues but different ways of increasing the quality of representation.