This article originally appeared in The Detroit News April 16, 2024. 

Paul Allen has a big idea.

You may not know Allen, but I bet you know of Ancestry.com, the genealogy service he co-founded.

Allen told me his focus has shifted from the family tree to government meetings. His new platform, Citizen Portal, has a simple mission: Capture video of every public meeting of every public body at every level of government in the United States.

With this service, anyone with a cellphone can look up what’s happening across Michigan. The platform aggregates meetings and creates searchable transcripts. Users can run AI-assisted searches and share snippets of the meeting on social media.

Sounds sensible, right? In everyday life, we expect instantaneous information. You and a friend are arguing over which movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1995 — was it “Forrest Gump” or “The Shawshank Redemption”? Google can settle the argument in seconds.

But not so for government records.

Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) says that people are entitled to state and local government records. But the gap between what’s technologically possible and how the law actually works is widening. FOIA does not favor the curious citizen.

Let’s say your local library had some upgrades and you want to know how much it cost. You’ll have to ask for records. But you don’t know the date or title of the documents, so who do you ask?

Assuming you find the right person in the right department, he or she will likely hand you a form to fill out and return.

Now they’ll give you your document, right? Oh, no.

A government body has up to 15 business days to respond. But you’ll probably wait longer, since that is only the deadline to respond, not the deadline to hand records over. The records officer goes through inboxes and file cabinets. He then reviews the records. If any of the information is exempt, he will blot it out with a black marker. In the end, you won’t get some of the records at all.

Eventually, the records will be ready. But then you have to pay your FOIA bill. Not just for the paper copies but for the time spent retrieving and reviewing the records.

If you disagree with any of the redactions, no worries. Just hire a lawyer and sue.

The process is hostile to requestors, and unnecessarily so. Citizens have questions about how their government operates every day. It shouldn’t be a part-time job to get those questions answered.

And that’s assuming the records are available in the first place. In Michigan, neither the Governor’s Office nor the Legislature is covered by FOIA. Thankfully, the Legislature is considering worthwhile legislation to change that.

But improving FOIA is like buying fresh horses for the pony express instead of adopting satellite communication.

Improvements to FOIA would be welcome, but Michigan needs to go further. Three ideas:

First, agencies should flip to proactive disclosure. Rather than waiting to be asked, documents are placed in the cloud and made searchable.

Second, government should use artificial intelligence and language processing tools to locate, retrieve and review records. If Ancestry.com can search multiple databases — newspapers, immigration, marriage, census — for information about great-grandmother Katherine, then Michigan can use similar technology.

Third, the state could encourage experimentation and then scale it. Somewhere out there a public records officer has figured out how to process requests quickly. How do they do it? The state could commission a pilot program. Or it could host a hackathon for entrepreneurial programmers.

Trust in government is eroding. Lengthy and expensive battles over public records do not help. These are the people’s records, after all.

Technology will revolutionize government transparency and accountability. The law should keep up.

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.