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"Governmentdocs.org is a new web site launching today from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) that allows users to search responses to Freedom of Information Act requests.  The site adds a few social twists, allowing you see what pages of a specific document are popular and write your own reviews of the materials.  For each document on the site, you can help add metadata such as what names appear in a given document, leave comments, and also rate \u201Chow important\u201D the item is, which will improve the quality of the database over time.  \nAs for the database itself, Governmentdocs.org includes about 36,000 pages of materials at launch, obtained from the Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.  The organization has used character recognition to make the text of all of their documents, regardless of format, searchable.\nThe Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allows citizens to request records from the federal government, with certain limitations such as documents that have been rendered classified or otherwise confidential.  The subsequent Electronic Freedom of Information Act of 1996 requires government agencies to allow citizens to request documents electronically.  Details about obtaining such documents are available at the Department of Justice website.\nFOIA is a powerful tool for both the public and journalists, so anything that makes it more accessible is a good thing.  Building a user-generated repository of FOIA responses will certainly help advance the amount of government information available to us and help to some extent keep the lawmakers in Washington in check.  Governmentdocs.org is a nice adaptation of social media to the realm of government accountability.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/11/08/governmentdocs/>