A large share of the records requests that land on public-sector staff aren't hard — they're just for information that's already public but hard to reach. When residents can self-serve a clear, sourced answer, those routine requests never need to be filed, and your team gets its time back for the requests that genuinely require judgment.
Right-to-Know and open-records processes exist for good reason, but the queue rarely reflects that reason. A meaningful portion of inbound is people asking for a salary, a permit, an assessment, or a violation history — records that are already public. Each one still consumes the same intake, search, review, and response cycle as a complex request. Staff spend their scarcest resource, attention, retrieving facts a resident could have read directly if the path existed.
The fix isn't to publish more files; agencies already publish plenty. It's to make the public data answerable, so the routine question resolves itself before it becomes a formal request.
Deflection only works when the self-service answer is genuinely better than filing a request. A raw dataset isn't — it hands the resident a spreadsheet and asks them to become an analyst. ALKARTIS closes that gap by connecting fragmented public records into one explainable answer. Ask about a property or a person once, and the engine assembles the relevant records and shows where each figure came from.
You don't cut request volume by publishing more data. You cut it by making the data answer the question — so the resident never needs to ask a person.
The goal isn't a smaller commitment to transparency — it's a smarter allocation of it. When the self-answerable questions peel away, what's left in the queue is the work that actually needs a human: requests involving redaction judgment, non-public records, unusual scope, or legal nuance. Those get faster, more careful attention precisely because staff aren't spending their day re-typing public salary figures. Fewer easy tickets means shorter turnaround on the hard ones and less backlog pressure overall.
ALKARTIS doesn't replace your Right-to-Know workflow or your systems of record. It sits in front of the routine questions as an additive layer, so your existing process keeps handling formal requests while fewer of the easy ones ever reach it. You can pilot it on the datasets that drive the most repetitive inbound and measure the effect before expanding.
The case for self-service is easy to make and easy to test. Start with the categories that dominate your queue — often salary, permit, assessment, and violation lookups — and put a sourced, self-serve answer in front of them. Then watch the composition of inbound: not just whether total volume dips, but whether the share of routine, self-answerable requests falls while the complex ones become a larger, more appropriate slice of what reaches staff. That shift is the real win. It means the process is being reserved for the requests that actually need human judgment, and it gives you a concrete before-and-after to point to.
ALKARTIS is live in Philadelphia today, connecting public records including city payroll since 2016, OPA assessments, L&I permits and valuations, code violations, rental licensing, eviction filings, and 311 requests — the exact categories that generate a lot of routine requests. The platform is expanding city by city, so agencies elsewhere are on the roadmap as new cities come online. For any jurisdiction, the next step is a conversation with our team.
It targets the routine, self-answerable requests — the ones asking for information already in your public records. When residents can get a clear, sourced answer themselves, fewer of those become formal requests. Complex or genuinely non-public requests still come to your staff; the goal is to free their time for those, not to eliminate the process.
No — it is the opposite. Deflection here means making public records so easy to read and self-serve that people don't need to file a request to get them. Every answer is explainable and traces to a checkable source, so it increases transparency rather than reducing it.
No. ALKARTIS works alongside your existing systems and Right-to-Know workflow rather than replacing them. It sits in front of the routine questions so your formal process handles fewer of the easy ones and more of the requests that truly need staff judgment.
ALKARTIS is live in Philadelphia, where it connects public records such as city payroll since 2016, OPA assessments, L&I permits and valuations, code violations, rental licensing, eviction filings, and 311 requests. Coverage grows as new cities come online.
For agencies it is a custom deployment, and programmatic or API access is part of the Enterprise tier. It is scoped with our team rather than signed up for online, so the datasets and deployment fit your systems. Talk to our team to get started.
Tell us which records drive the most repetitive inbound. We'll show how a sourced, self-service layer over them can deflect the easy requests and leave your staff the ones that matter.