[INITIATIVE] A new and improved UIPA.org

[tyliec]

Background

The Uniform Information Practices Act (Modified), chapter 92F, Hawaii Revised Statutes (“UIPA”), is Hawaii’s public records law. The Office of Information Practices (“OIP”) was created by the Legislature in 1988 to administer the UIPA. Read More.

In essence, the UIPA is Hawaii's equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a federal law that provides individuals with the right to access information held by the government. A parallel example of the FOIA in action can be explored on the official FOIA website: FOIA.gov.

UIPA.org has been established as a dedicated portal for the state of Hawaii, aimed at streamlining the process of accessing public records, fostering transparency, and facilitating communication between the government and its constituents.

Philosophy

• Why even have a FOIA portal in the first place?

Getting information from the government is our right under the Freedom of Information Act, however the process is more opaque than you might expect. It is hard to know which agencies to request information from, what their contact information is, if you are filling out the forms right, ...etc. So even if policy dictates we are deserving of information, that means very little if there exists no implementation where we can retrieve said information.

Benefits

• Discovery: Most people don't know that certain government agencies exist in the first place. UIPA.org provides a specific set of state/county entities available to be requested
• Ease of use: The form provided by the Office of Information Practices has the opportunity for mistakes (extending the already extremely long turn around time). Creating a web version should resolve some of the common filling out of the form mistakes. See more forms here
• Transparency: Open sourcing the records request process allows everyone who is interested in the same information to look up previous requests if they are available, or at least their request will help the next person.

What needs to be done?

Breaking down what needs to be done into two categories, the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and the Future (What the project could be).

MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

These are mostly in the order they need to be done in.

• [EPIC] Investigate existing behaviour #42
• [EPIC] Instantiate Development Pipeline #44
• [EPIC] Develop the new platform #50
• [EPIC] Instantiate Deployment Pipeline #64
• [EPIC] Implement Migration Plan #49

Future

• [EPIC] Discover use cases #56
• [EPIC] Determine Maintenance Outlook #66
• [EPIC] Educational & Training Materials #79

Additional Details

The community partner for this project is the Public First Law Center. Our main point of contact with them is Brian Black.

The uipa.org project is not hosted by Code With Aloha, but instead hosted on our community partner's infrastructure.

A FOIA portal using the theme/fork we are using: https://fragdenstaat.de/
Another FOIA Portal: https://muckrack.com/

Previous News

• https://www.civilbeat.org/2018/09/new-service-helps-public-access-public-records/
• https://www.civilbeat.org/2021/06/we-need-to-improve-government-transparency-in-hawaii/

Questions

Running list of questions

• Who owns the uipa.org domain?
• How do we feel about community involvement in the request process?
• • Fundraising for "community" requests
• • Allowing users to hop on each others requests

TODO

• Submit the project to https://network.okfn.org/project/