Imagine a scenario where AI can unredact, redacted names and expose abusive bullying people that you pay, via rates, fines, targeted levies, and library fees to run your city.

Powerful people working to kick some public butt.

Anyone can send an email to a Government department, a public company, or a Council. Ask for the details, emails, and times the public servants have mentioned you or your company.

Now imagine you own a Facebook page that is big and widely engaged with, that threatens their tight control over a city’s narrative. What you read and how it should get from WCC to you, the ratepayers, and citizens.

An example of a real-life scenario plays out: your Facebook network breaks a story, from a reliable source,  that the new city Mayor is about to “go have lunch with some billionaires”, and sell some public land under a movie cinema. We wonder, is the mayor thinking about the other cinemas in Island Bay or Brooklyn, or the other 500 property owners that have earthquake-prone buildings?

Then it starts, The WCC media team makes comments on your page about the story, they deny this is going to happen and try to make you look silly, and entice others “on your page to accuse you of spreading fake news” and bully your company! This is your page and WCC makes comments. You can ban them and delete their comments but you don’t!

They Deny deny deny, Lie, lie lie!

We assume the more bullying happens the more success the WCC media team of 30+ achieved . 

Back to the inquiry to get the docs. Council promises to give you the documents within 21 days, but it takes 90 days.

When the unknown quantity arrives you have no idea what to expect. 

What happens next is like a bad Welly movie. 

You discover 87 pages of “highly redacted” ( blacked out) emails and exchanges, meetings between the public servants that include abuse, lies, piss takes, and general bullying. 

You have personal relationships with these people. You find out in these docs, you have abused someone, physically assaulted someone, and your facebook page containing 255k followers is a joke, that you are a loser that wouldn’t have a clue what you’re doing.

How far has this city descended into the dark hole?

It appears the people writing this abuse are safe, as their name has been “hidden” and (redacted) to protect connection and their identity, they have an employment agreement that states “you must serve the city like a professional, commit and abide by the city’s high standards and values”. 

Two cities, one a city where transparency is required and respected, and one where a public servant is trying to undermine and shame a private media company, its owner and staff, causing harm, hurt, depression, anxiety and lost income.

Sitting behind the wall of council privacy, power, and intent on a destructive outcome. Seemingly safe to “say and do what they like” and do whatever is necessary to drive a clean narrative message from WCC to the ratepayers. Control control control.

With freedom to talk negatively and abusively about a ratepayer and a company, without any accountability.

It appears public officials thought they could “say and do whatever they wanted” to each other, and unsurprisingly do the damage they choose, cast shadows of doubt amongst the public, wrongfully accuse a person of assault, lie about a building for sale, and undermine a private community media company that reports council news, as it sees it. 

The lack of control to deliver the council narrative appears to have been difficult to take, causing some very troubling behavior to emerge. 

Without official Information act processes, Ai and a brave operator this harmful behavior would have continued unabated. 

This begs the question? How widespread is this abusive behavior, enabling public servants to act against a private company, using public money? 

Working to prove a point, One Networks AI engineers have “cracked the code”, and ushered in a new world of “transparency in Wellington”, and in this case received an apology from the CEO Barbara McKerrow and diplomatic services, with acknowledgment of wrongdoings, and with that the “predictable shuffling and direct apologies” that come from being snapped in a very small city. 

One Network engineer has also developed a method to unredacted official information act documents which identifies the names of the abusers.

Initially, as a trial, the team has now completely streamlined the OIA questioning process, the filtering and reading of answers in reply to OIA [official information requests], and can check the responses are fullsome based on the initial questions, make certain that the corresponding documents include answers to “all initial questions” and not just some, ensure enough detail is received to resolve the issue, plus all the data requested is received, in full. Presumably to uncover information.

In the first instance, the process is prompted to think of the best questions to ask on the topic, add those to operator questions, send and check receipt, hold the public entity to required timelines, evaluate the answers and automatically ask follow up questions if needed, and if it is not satisfied that the answers deal with the issue, automatically ask follow up questions and check those have been answered, and keep progressing, “without operator intervention” until the directed result is achieved.

Many questions could not have been conceived by human operators, and experienced OIA operators call the OIA process a game of “cat and mouse” between democracy services and bureaucrats and the entity or person seeking the informational feedback. The feedback can often go to hundreds of pages.

It is estimated that OIA processes cost the government and councils well over 200M per annum. If Flow was used it would save at least 90%, immediately.

On this OIA project, the requests and follow up  communication was handled within 1 hour, where previously it would have cost 20.

Initially a fee of $55,000 was quoted by WCC to provide 5 years of information, presumably to blow the request off, but upon a lesser timeframe being agreed, WCC took 2 months too long, as promised, and provided the 87 pages free.

To redact or not redact.

On this occasion the questions were basic, to capture as many possible outcomes as possible.

Questions like. Tell us when Gilbert Grape, x company and the topics x, x and x were mentioned by x, x or x or others, between the time frames of…

Many media, private individuals, publicity companies and think tanks use the OIA act to get private information from government agencies. Often large areas are redacted to protect individuals and sensitive information. 

One network owner was so shocked at what came back, he is now offering this service to others, calling it “Flow Ai” which can handle huge data, mass projects and run volumes of questions, deals with the inevitable delay created by bureaucratic inefficiency, avoidance tactics, and the sheer volume of information and human time required to process the information. This saved time and money can be sent to Mental health.

They report that Flow can create sophisticated questions, read the answers, answers, learn on all publically known data to calculate and un-redact names or information if requested, switching between the various LLM’S ( Language learning models) to achieve answers and the goal of: “transparency, efficiency, accountability and fairness”.

The redaction process is designed to protect projects and individuals within government and council, from public visibility and scrutiny. 

With transparency and fairness being the driving principle. 

A case and point.

Recently the owner of One Network  and owner of Wellington live a very large local social media page requested WCC send all mentions of his name and company. 

After two delays and 3 months, presumably to allow officials to scrutinize the documents and reflect on being held accountable, and redact their names, the 87 pages of redacted documents arrived by email as a PDF, with an apology from democratic services and consequently Barbara McKerrow, CEO of WCC.

That apology contained a warning, “that if the owner of One Network didn’t respect council rules he would be blocked”, and future requests would need to be snail mailed in via post, with a PO box number supplied. 

Seemingly unable to offer a simple apology without further threat or control, the CEO has not communicated on the one outstanding point “where a council worker accused the One network owner of assaulting another person”. That issue was so despicable and dangerous, that the owner was not able to accept the CEO’s apology. 

Requesting that the person be professionally dealt with. “ In our business, if someone did this they would be removed immediately!

Mckerrow and democracy services apologised for a lack of professionalism, stating that the correspondence was below that council’s standards. 

As the redact or unredact movement starts to build momentum, mental health and anxiety and the issues around public servants doing their jobs, serving their rate payers fairly and honestly, and being required to be transparent rises to the top. 

These are presumed to be good hard working public servants, of which on this occasion, have used their positions to compete and try to control or diminish a public company’s efforts.

If you need help or support with the volume of information that comes with OIA projects, the FLOW service also predicts an outcome, targets certain areas, continuously learns on the data provided and all publically known data, organises the questions, understands and categorises the responses, automatically suggests further questions based upon sophisticated ai learning models & prompt engineering, uses freely known logins to public info and LLMs.

They report Flow Ai is able to save at least 90% of the time of researching, sending, calculating time, receiving, opening, scanning, reading and re scanning, re checking, re asking questions if not satisfied with the answers that official information act process requests take. 

On both sides, there is huge inefficiency. This movement hopes that it will save the government and councils time, in which that money coould go to mental health. 

The owner through his foundation intends to interact with Bill English’s social justice model, which reports is “better able” to measure impacts that are causing social and mental health issues and calculate this in monitory ways. 

It’s a brave new world with FLOW Ai,  needs to be used realistically, fairly, and “definitely without malice or setting out to harm, or cause anxiety, itself”.

Wellington endeavor’s to measure anxiety

Click here for OIA principles.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Information_Act_1982