I think a significant contributing factor that makes ‘simple’ questions in some contexts prohibitively difficult to answer is the lack of True Availability of the information being requested.
In this case, I’m defining True Availability[1] as the requested content being already prepared and organized into the correct format and grouped together, needing no further processing other than finding it. Conditional Availability would be when you know how to obtain the information, but it requires some degree of processing and filtering to be ready for consumption.
In computer science, this is similar to a lookup table. Lookup tables typically contain a collection of pre-calculated results for common computations, because looking up a result in a table is generally faster than calculating it from scratch. Anything you have in a LT is Truly Available, whereas anything you have to calculate is Conditionally Available.
In your example of freedom of information requests, the questions are hard to answer because they are only available on the condition that someone filters the requested information from everything else and then prepares it into a usable format for releasing.
If I was tasked with refining the information availability of a large organization, I would attempt to prepare publicly-releasable copies of everything that COULD legally be requested via freedom of information act and publish a public database of that. Let them knock themselves out. Individual request processing and answering sounds like a terribly inefficient method of sharing information. There are probably legal/bureaucratic/practical difficulties to my proposed solution, but my point is merely that there are in some contexts systemic barriers making answers disproportionately expensive rather than answers being intrinsically more difficult in every case.
I think a significant contributing factor that makes ‘simple’ questions in some contexts prohibitively difficult to answer is the lack of True Availability of the information being requested.
In this case, I’m defining True Availability[1] as the requested content being already prepared and organized into the correct format and grouped together, needing no further processing other than finding it. Conditional Availability would be when you know how to obtain the information, but it requires some degree of processing and filtering to be ready for consumption.
In computer science, this is similar to a lookup table. Lookup tables typically contain a collection of pre-calculated results for common computations, because looking up a result in a table is generally faster than calculating it from scratch.
Anything you have in a LT is Truly Available, whereas anything you have to calculate is Conditionally Available.
In your example of freedom of information requests, the questions are hard to answer because they are only available on the condition that someone filters the requested information from everything else and then prepares it into a usable format for releasing.
If I was tasked with refining the information availability of a large organization, I would attempt to prepare publicly-releasable copies of everything that COULD legally be requested via freedom of information act and publish a public database of that. Let them knock themselves out. Individual request processing and answering sounds like a terribly inefficient method of sharing information.
There are probably legal/bureaucratic/practical difficulties to my proposed solution, but my point is merely that there are in some contexts systemic barriers making answers disproportionately expensive rather than answers being intrinsically more difficult in every case.
I suspect there already exist more conventional terms for the concepts I’m referring to, but I’m making do with what I already have Available.