Will your FOIA request succeed? This new machine will tell you by Benjamin Mullin.
From the post:
Many journalists know the feeling: There could be a cache of documents that might confirm an important story. Your big scoop hinges on one question: Will the government official responsible for the records respond to your FOIA request?
Now, thanks to a new project from a data storage and analysis company, some of the guesswork has been taken out of that question.
Want to know the chances your public records request will get rejected? Plug it into FOIA Predictor, a probability analysis web application from Data.World, and it will provide an estimation of your success based on factors including word count, average sentence length and specificity.
…
Accuracy?
Best way to gauge that is experience with your FOIA requests.
Try starting at MuckRock.com.
Enjoy!