Civic & Government /Document processing live field guide · 8 min

FOI Triage Logger

Reads each inbound Freedom of Information request, extracts the reference, applicant, date and scope, routes it to the owning department and starts the 30-day statutory clock, then flags requests touching third-party personal affairs for exemption review before the officer signs anything.

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theater/demos/civic-gov_foi-triage-logger.html · sandbox · read-only

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FIG. 1

The live demo, running on fabricated data. Open it to step through the full flow — every output is shown for a person to approve before anything happens.

How it would work

Reads each inbound FOI request — email, PDF or scan — extracts the file fields, proposes a department and a validity check, starts the statutory clock, and surfaces likely-exempt scope for the FOI officer to assess before anything is logged.

Input 01

The inbound request

FOI requests as they actually arrive — a typed email, a section 17 PDF application form, or a scanned handwritten letter — plus the council's records-store and department map.

Agent 02

Reads, routes, times, flags

Extracts the reference, applicant, received date and scope; checks the request is valid under s17; proposes the owning department; starts the 30-day clock; and tests the scope against the exemption framework.

Output 03

A draft register entry

A draft register entry — reference, applicant, scope, routed department, due date and any exemption flag with its cited ground — laid out for the FOI officer to review, correct and approve before it is logged or actioned.

Where it works well

It starts the statutory clock on day one and surfaces a third-party flag at intake, not late.

Done by hand it is the better part of an hour per request, and routing a misread scope to the wrong department burns days off a 30-day window.
Best for a single FOI officer or a governance coordinator carrying FOI alongside other duties: a steady trickle that occasionally spikes.
The recaptured time goes back into the judgement only the officer can make — reading scope, weighing exemptions — against a clean draft register.

The slow, invisible cost is the front end of an FOI request — locating, transcribing and routing it before any judgement is applied. The 30-day clock under s21 of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Vic) runs from a valid request landing, whether or not anyone has logged it yet.

Where it works badly

It reads what is in front of it — and a request that is routine on its face but sensitive in context is where it is confidently wrong.

Weak on long, discursive letters that bury the scope in three paragraphs, or omnibus requests spanning several departments — the routing proposal degrades and the officer re-reads anyway.
A faint scan or an ambiguous scope line lowers extraction confidence; a low-confidence read is meant to land in front of the officer, not be auto-logged.

The honest test

Take your last twenty requests: how many had a scope you could state in one line and route to a single owner? If most needed a call with the applicant first, this saves you less than you'd hope.

A records request whose plain wording looks ordinary, but which in context would identify a complainant, carries no third-party name in the scope text — so no s33 flag is raised, even though an experienced officer would have raised one.

What it doesn't do — and shouldn't

It surfaces and proposes. The FOI officer applies the legal test and signs. That boundary is deliberate.

WHAT IT DOES

Proposes the owning department and checks validity under s17

Starts the 30-day clock and shows days elapsed against it

Flags scope touching third-party personal affairs (s33), with the ground it relied on

WHAT IT WON’T

Apply an exemption or weigh the public-interest test

Redact a document or release or refuse a request

Decide whether disclosure would be unreasonable under s33

An FOI decision is a reviewable legal act — an applicant can seek review by the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner — and the unreasonable- disclosure judgement under s33 turns on context the document text doesn't carry. The accountable officer stays on the decision because the consequence, and the review, land on them — not the tool.

What your data has to look like

Machine-readable requests, a current routing map, and the exemption framework encoded against the actual sections of the Act.

Typical readiness

across orgs we see, before the first job

Requests machine-readable enough to extract from

Usual weak point

A current department / records-store map

Needs shaping

The exemption framework encoded to the Act

Needs shaping

A way to know which version of the Act and fees is current

Usual weak point

The real first job

The routing map and the encoded exemption framework are usually the real first job — and it is rarely about buying a tool. It is writing down what your FOI officer already knows: how requests get routed, which grounds get raised most, where the records actually sit. That encoding is typically bigger and more valuable than the extraction layer on top of it.

Right fit if…

A single FOI officer or governance coordinator handling a steady trickle of requests

Most requests have a scope you can state in one line and route to one owner

Intake is mixed — emails, PDFs and the occasional scan — and bursty

You can point to a current department map and your most-raised exemption grounds

Walk away if…

Most requests are long, discursive letters or omnibus requests spanning departments

A large share arrive as poor scans of handwritten letters

Your routing map is out of date after a restructure nobody has reflected

You want a tool that decides exemptions or signs the FOI decision for you

Open questions

The worried-buyer questions, answered straight

It never makes the exemption decision under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Vic) — it proposes a classification and surfaces the ground it relied on, for example scope text naming a third party flagged under s33. The FOI officer reads the flag, applies the legal test, and signs. The risk it removes is the missed flag — a request quietly logged as routine when the scope touches someone else’s personal affairs — not a wrong release, because no release happens without the officer’s signature.

Mixed intake is the normal case, and the demo deliberately includes a handwritten scan alongside typed PDFs and emails. The model reads all three, but a faint scan or an ambiguous scope line lowers its confidence — and a low-confidence extraction is meant to land in front of the officer, not be auto-logged. If a request is so unclear it isn’t a valid s17 request, that is itself a flag for follow-up, not something to file silently.

No. It replaces the locating, transcribing and routing of each request — the clerical front end. The judgement that defines the role stays human: whether a request is valid under s17, whether an exemption applies, what gets redacted, and the signature on the decision. The officer gets the 30-day statutory clock started on day one and a clean draft register, and spends their time on the calls only they can make.

The request itself is point-in-time, so currency isn’t the issue there. What must be current is the routing map — which department now owns which records — and the exemption framework it checks against. If a team has been restructured, or the FOI Act’s exemptions, the s21 timeframes or the application fee have changed and that hasn’t been reflected, it will route to a stale owner or cite an out-of-date ground. Keeping that mapping current is part of the setup, not a one-off.

It is built to run inside your tenancy — the demo’s stack is Power Platform and SharePoint, so the requests, applicant details and the draft register stay in the council’s own Microsoft environment rather than a third-party service. FOI requests routinely contain personal affairs information, so the deployment is scoped to keep that data inside your boundary and your existing access controls; the specifics are part of what we agree before anything is built. The demo runs entirely on fabricated requests.

What it takes to build

3–5 weeks · 4 phases

Reused from template~65%

Bespoke to this skin~35%

stack · Power Platform · SharePoint · LLM extraction

What it would cost

Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates.

Bite-sized first piece

One contained change, low risk

Pilot build

Most builds land here

Embedded support

Scale on proof

Considering this for your FOI team?

The honest place to start is a bite-sized first piece — encoding your routing map and most-raised exemption grounds, low risk. Tell us where it hurts; we'll play it back, scope it, and show you what's possible.

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