I posted this in the Distributed FOIA project in the recommended diaries today but thought I would pull it out to here for specific discussion.
I am suggesting that interested parties on DKos jump on a project that does something like SETI for this pundit-outing project. It doesn't have to be specific to pundits in any way. They can serve as the nucleus from which we begin. It would be a great beginning.
We need structure here to be effective.
I think that as part of this effort we should be building a flow-chart or relationship chart to show the linkages and also where people are doing the FOIAs.
In science we do this for gene-gene relationships because it can get so confusing.
In project management we do this to make its abundantly clear how various parts of a project are dependent upon each other and who owns each project component.
We need to do it here to help us understand:
- how different entities and people are interrelated
- how to allocate people's FOIA requests
- assign data correlators/managers who can consume and output this data in a meaningful manner.
This is screaming out of not only a dedicated site here for kossites to go to with info but we need an engine behind it so that the environment can impose the project management scheme and also gate data until someone else other than the original FOIA kossite contributor can QC the input (to minimize the freepers).
We on Dkos have, collectively and in a massively parallel fashion, government contractor experience, computer expertise, the project manager types (I volunteer to pitch in) and we have, most importantly, the people .. the roots.. who want to help but should not be expected to be able to feret out the minutae of an effective target for the FOIA request.
Let me know what you think