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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."

7 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. I will give you my comment by Looker_Device · · Score: 2

    But you'll need to send me $6,248 for photocopying and personnel costs first.

    --
    Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
  2. heard about alaveteli? by darkeye · · Score: 2

    http://www.alaveteli.org/ is an open source FOIA tool, that can be localized for any country. it's operating on an EU level, and in many EU countries, including UK, Hungary, etc. for an English language adaptation, see: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/ or http://www.asktheeu.org/

  3. 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/.

  4. Another Roblimo Slashvertisement! by RocketRabbit · · Score: 3

    Thanks, Roblimo, for another Slashvertisement. At least the Reddit stories that are paid placement ads have a blue background.

    Why even have the "interview" shtick, and a better question - why the hell would a person pay money to some jerkass to file a FOIA claim? They are really easy to file yourself.

    Keep this up, Slashdot! Pretty soon you'll be just as credible as a Jimmy Saville endorsed nanny service and have just as many patrons as well.

  5. From the founder by v3rgEz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Michael here from MuckRock. Nobody else does what we do in the US for free. We lick the stamps, send the envelopes, scan the documents when they come back, and help post them. Hundreds of our users and thousands of our visitors find this to be a valuable service, but if you don't want to use us,we make that easy to: We've got thousands of request templates you can copy and paste for your own use, and a public database of agency contacts that's much more comprehensive than anything else we've seen. Any particular concerns we can address, please let me know. But for the record, over the past 3 years, we've spent about $30 on advertising, all on Google AdWords. Wasn't worth it.

    1. 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.

  6. dude by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    Are you kidding? Slashdot is barely a step above supermarket tabloids as it is. Let's see, today we've had: scam promotion, alien life discovered, religion helps science, and government conspiracy (the story you just read).

    Did I say "a step above"? Sorry, I was holding the picture upside down.