Calls to the FOIA offices of GSA, NASA, and the State Department inquiring about their policies with regards to Slack messages went unreturned. But a document posted last July by the National Archives and Records Administration mentions Slack specifically, and lays out guidelines for archiving electronic communications.

To find out how the policies will actually be carried out, one FOIA enthusiast is testing the government’s readiness to comply with requests for Slack messages.

Allan Lasser is a developer at MuckRock, a website that helps its users send and monitor FOIA requests. Earlier this month, he sent a request to the Federal Communications Commission, asking the agency to reveal a list of teams that use Slack to communicate at work.

If he’s successful, Lasser wrote to me in an email, he’ll be able to search for the names of the specific Slack channels and groups that the FCC has set up, and can tailor a follow-up FOIA request for the actual messages he wants to see.

So why is Lasser going after FCC employees’ work-related communications? He was motivated by the same reason that set me out to write this story: to find out if and how Slack and the federal government have thought about how to deal with FOIA requests. The FCC is generally up with modern technology and has been responsive to FOIA requests in the past, Lasser said, so he chose that agency as his proving ground—even though he’s not sure if they use Slack. (His request is unlikely to succeed: An FCC spokesperson said the agency does not use the program.)

“It’s important that we set high expectations and a clear path for requesting Slack data from agencies,” Lasser wrote to me. “Slack is becoming a de-facto tool for internal workplace communication, so this is a situation where we can really get ahead of the government in setting clear expectations for record retainment and disclosure.”

Slack, for its part, is trying to make it easier for organizations to comply with strict document-retention requirements. Usually, the lead user of a group that uses Slack is allowed to export a transcript of all messages sent and received in public channels and groups. But a change the company made in 2014 allows organizations to apply for a special exemption that allows them to export every message sent and received by team members—including one-on-one messages and those sent in private groups.

A spokesperson for Slack said the extra export capabilities were designed in part to allow federal agencies to comply with FOIA requests, in addition to helping financial-services companies that have to follow strict message-retention rules, and companies that are subject to discovery in litigation. The spokesperson would not share the number of organizations that have applied for the special export program, saying only that it represented “a small percentage of Slack customers.”