Improved nesting and display of children/parent agencies

[morisy]

We should make it clearer when there's a parent-child relationship between various agencies, and make it easier to map out these connections in the long term.

Some examples of these relationships would be Air Force Personnel Center, which is a child agency of the Air Force.

This relationship should be displayed on the pages of both agency pages, as well as displayed on the agency picker on the submission form and other areas where agency names are displayed.

We should also have some way to signify what that relationship is, with some default language used for when that is left blank. We should use a dropdown selector if we think we can come up with a fairly comprehensive list of those kinds of parent, child relationships.

— Divisions
— Departments
— ???

We should allow you to set a "delegate" agencies, so that in towns where requests for animal control records, for example, get routed to a City Clerk, the user can still select "Animal Control" and have the requests properly routed to the correct agency.

These functionalities can be broken down into a number of incremental steps:

• Display parent agency name on the child agency page.
• Display child agency names on the parent agency pages. (A parent agency can have multiple children. I don't think child agencies should be able to have multiple parents, though that's not set in stone).
• A way on the backend to set what that relationship is on the child agency side, with a default of "Division" unless there's a compelling argument to have a different default.
• A UX tweak to show that relationship on the agency picker on the request submission page (only for children agencies).
• UX tweaks to show that relationship on other agency selection boxes and and on agency list views, such as muckrock.com/foi/list and muckrock/agency/list
• A way to pick a "delegate" agency on the backend, and if a user submits a request to a given agency that's delegated, the request goes to Child, C/O Parent Agency and uses the parent agencies contact information.

[mitchelljkotler]

Can there be multiple levels of nesting?

[morisy]

Yes; for example:

DHS -> ICE -> ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)

I think you'd only want to show one level down at a parent agency.

[mitchelljkotler]

Would you want to show all the levels up at the lowest level?

[morisy]

Just one level up. I think things get really complicated if you try to do more, though I think it'd be very useful to, down the line, have some view some where that shows multiple levels (Beryl and JPat have discussed this before).

[TJKenney]

Within DOD, Command and Support relationships can get very complicated. The key point is that the FOIA Requester Service Center which supports a given command does not have to be a part of that command. A headquarters can, and usually does, receive support from a RSC that's owned by somebody else. The relationship between the headquarters and the RSC is formalized by a memorandum of agreement/understanding.

Oftentimes, I will write out the entire hierarchy in the first sentence, i.e. "This is a Freedom of Information Act request directed toward [company/battalion/brigade/division/corps/forces command]." The analyst at the RSC has probably never heard of most of those echelons, but if he can locate the POC for one of them, he can get the request to the correct records custodian.

[red-bin]

Just a thought - could the top level of the hierarchy be the respective laws themselves rather than jurisdictions? I'm not sure if that could be considered "too abstract", but it might a simpler way to generalize the codification of FOI laws.