About FOI Monitor

What this is

When an agency releases a document under the Freedom of Information Act 1982, it has to publish that document on its own disclosure log. FOI Monitor covers 28 of those logs. Each has its own format, and none of them can be searched together.

FOI Monitor collects those logs into one index. For each release it records what the agency published, extracts the text of the released document, adds a short summary and links back to the agency's own log and the original file. Nothing here is obtained by making FOI requests. Every record is a copy of something an agency chose to publish.

Who it is for

Journalists, researchers, advocates and public servants who need to know what has already been released on a topic before they ask for more. A search that once meant opening every agency's website and reading PDF after PDF now takes one query.

How it works

1. Each day FOI Monitor checks every agency's disclosure log for new releases.
2. It downloads each released document, usually a PDF, and extracts the text. Scanned pages go through optical character recognition, which can misread stamps, handwriting and redaction marks.
3. An AI model writes a summary of a few sentences from the extracted text. The summary is labelled as AI-generated wherever it appears.
4. The release, its text and its summary are added to the index. The agency's log and the original document are linked from every page.

The footer of every page shows when the logs were last checked. If checks have paused, it says so, and releases published since then will not appear until checks resume.

About the summaries

Summaries are written by an AI model to help you decide whether a document is worth opening. They are not a substitute for the document. A summary can miss or misread redacted and scanned pages, and it can state a document's purpose with more confidence than the text supports. Read the source before relying on anything it says.

What it misses

• Agencies publish in different formats. Some give no reference number or release date, so FOI Monitor shows "No reference published" or "Date not published" rather than guessing.
• Some documents cannot be downloaded, or contain no text that can be extracted. Those releases are still listed, but cannot be searched by content.
• Coverage starts when FOI Monitor began checking each log. Older releases may be absent.
• An agency may change the layout of its log. Until FOI Monitor is updated to match, new releases from that agency will not be indexed.

Privacy and takedown

FOI Monitor republishes records that agencies have already published. If a release or its text concerns you, you can ask for it to be hidden. The privacy and takedown page explains what to send and what happens next.

Source code and contact

FOI Monitor is open source. The code, including every agency's log reader, is at FOI Monitor on GitHub. Copyright and licensing terms for the agencies' content are on the copyright and compliance page.

Questions, corrections and requests go to ed.miller@energyfuturesfoundation.org.