Feature request: warning when submitting to states with residential requirements

[red-bin]

Tennessee, Arizona and Arkansas (and probably a few more) have statutory requirements for residency within a state for public records laws. It would be super useful to be given a warning prior to a request's submission (especially for bulk requests).

Alternatively, the creation of a crowdsourcing task for residents interested in submitting requests on others' behalf could get around residential requirements.

[morisy]

So we do have this a little bit, though we're trying to improve the consistency of outcomes through a mix of technical and legal work.

https://www.muckrock.com/place/ lists the states that are allowed to bar out of state requesters.

In each of those states, we have two volunteers. However, those volunteers are only tapped when a requester files a request with an agency that has previously blocked an out of state requester. In those cases, a requester gets a heads up that a proxy will be used and the volunteers name is automatically subbed in.

Involving a proxy requester can keep requests flowing, but it can also lead to complications:

• What if the original requester agrees to pay fees, gets the documents they requested, and then doesn't pay the fee?
• What if the original requester wants to sue? Does the proxy have to get involved? What if the original requester's request leads to a reverse FOIA lawsuit? Is the proxy all the sudden in more of a legal morass then they signed up for?

Most of the time, the system works ok, but we're seeing agencies take the citizenship requirement to further and further extremes (TCOG had a good report on this), so we're looking at broader legal strategies.

In the meantime, if you think API access to some of the above mentioned data (jurisdictions that allow agencies to require citizenship, a boolean on whether agencies have previously restricted to only citizens) would be valuable, we'd love help implementing that — should be relatively straight forward tweaks.

[morisy]

Also the note on bulk requests would be good — trying to find good ways to integrate more data during submission process (see how "White House" now shows "exempt").

[red-bin]

How about a sub-dict within each jurisdiction? Not sure what else could be added, but I'm sure there'd be a bunch to justify a sub-dict.

"request_requirements": { "request_requires_residency": True}

[red-bin]

Other things that would be useful: "cannot_be_prisoner" "allows_third_party_representation" "requires_grievances"