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'Freedom of Information, Finally Made Easy' by MuckRock (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the not-all-data-wants-to-be-free dept.

The quote in the title is from www.muckrock.com/about/. And that is exactly what MuckRock is all about: Making FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests for you (and investigative reporters) so you don't have to deal with the often-daunting paperwork and runarounds you may run into when you try to pry information out of a recalcitrant government agency. In theory, most government information is public. In practice, many local, state and federal government bodies would just as soon never tell you anything. This is why Tim Lord talked with MuckRock co-founder Michael Morisy, and why we're running this interview in the middle of Sunshine Week, which exists "...to educate the public about the importance of open government and the dangers of excessive and unnecessary secrecy."

2 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. MySociety's free WhatDoTheyKnow and Alaveteli by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you're in the UK, check out http://www.whatdotheyknow.com, which does a lot of this for free. Also, they've been setting up lots of international branches of it (an open source project) called 'Alavateli': http://www.alaveteli.org/.

  2. Re:From the founder by v3rgEz · · Score: 2, Informative
    Our service has two big fan groups: People who have never filed a request, and people who file a lot and would like help tracking. For either, if we can save them a half hour hunting for how to fill out the request, to remember to follow up, to sort out which documents went to which request, to figure out where to send the request, we think $4 is a fantastic value. If your time is worth less than that, hopefully we can serve as a good resource just for reference purposes.

    Right now, we manually help people with the appeals process, and can recommend lawyers we've worked with in the past if it comes to a lawsuit. It's definitely the trickier part, but we recently launched a free question and answer tool (https://www.muckrock.com/questions/) in addition to our individual support. Hope that helps.