Publishing to your public archive

Publishing puts a closed request and its released documents into your agency's public archive, where anyone can find them without filing. It is a separate decision from releasing, and it is made after the release rather than as part of it.

Releasing and publishing are not the same act

Releasing sends records to the person who asked for them. It answers one request.

Publishing makes the same records findable by the public. It answers every future request for the same thing.

Govflo never infers the second from the first. Jurisdictions differ on what may be proactively disclosed, so publishing is switched on deliberately, case by case, by someone who has thought about it.

How to publish

1. Open the closed request.
2. Publish it to the public archive.
3. Confirm what is about to change. Publishing makes the request and its documents readable by anyone who reaches the archive.

Published cases appear under Document Workspace, then Published Cases, and on your citizen portal if the catalog is switched on under Settings, then Channels, then Citizen Portal.

Withdrawing something you published

Withdrawing removes the request and its documents from the archive, and it asks you to confirm for the same reason publishing does: either one changes who can see the records.

One caveat. A download link opened in the last minute may still work briefly until it expires. Withdrawing stops the archive listing, not a transfer already in progress.

What is worth publishing

Start with what you release repeatedly. Budget documents, meeting minutes, salary schedules, inspection reports, policy documents. Anything you have released more than twice is a candidate.

Publishing one of those converts a recurring request into a download. The requester gets the record immediately, no matter is opened, and no deadline starts.

What is not worth publishing

Anything where the release decision turned on who was asking, or on a redaction judgment you would not want applied as a general rule.

A record released to one requester under one set of circumstances is not automatically a record fit for open publication. That is exactly why the two decisions are separate.

Where you see the return

Where your intake form shows a citizen an existing published record before they file, and they take it instead, that is counted on the Requests avoided card on your dashboard.

It is the only place in the product where effort spent publishing shows up as work that never arrived.