Your Seattle exchange makes perfect sense when you connect the people and the tech. You're using web3 thinking to interface with people using web2 tools to manipulate web1 software reading data from web0 systems. Sending and receiving info through this system is sometimes literally a game of telephone, but the translation steps will be set in stone.

E.g. Your email sent to IT was routed, unread, to another department. That department starts their rudimentary FOIA process which includes submitting IT-Request-4 regarding your specific date and field range. IT-Request-4 does not come with context. Seattle's IT department now specs out adding fields to a production database and adding your custom export to the end-of-day batch. They spec out additional hosting costs because IT-Request-4 was designed as a way to create data pipelines.

At this point there are only three people involved and they each have a different view on what's happening due to a knowledge gap. You could eliminate this (imho) by providing motivation and context in your initial request.

I wonder how these exchanges would look if you sent a 'pre-FOIA' heads up to specific departments in a city, introducing yourself as conducting a large-scale survey of FOIA processes and letting them know your request will revolve around a year's worth of email metadata. It feels like this could be a more collaborative process.