RSSA peak at MuckRock’s new wizard
Aug 16
Uncategorized FOI, MuckRock 1 Comment
The mission of MuckRock is to make it as simple as possible to file your freedom of information requests, and we’ve been working hard to make it easier than ever to navigate creating, tracking and sharing your requests. We have big announcements coming up soon on the “sharing” front, but right now, we wanted to give you a better look at the “creating” portion: We’ve broken the wizard down into tabbed categories with better descriptions helping you figure out exactly what kind of request you need to make to get the information you want.
You can also see a progress bar up top that shows you how far you are along in actually getting that request finished up. You’ll actually find a similar progress bar on all request pages now (see here for a sample). That gives you a quick, visual way to see how far along your request is: Whether it’s waiting for a response, hasn’t been sent out yet, or is even still just a draft in your inbox. There’s also a new color-coding system for tracking these responses, so that if a response is coded green, everything’s smooth sailing; if it’s coded red, the request has been denied, the government has failed to respond within the statutory limits, or something else has gone wrong; and if it’s coded yellow, a user response is needed, such as finishing up a draft or OK’ing some proposed compromise that the government agency is requesting. You can even quickly see the status of all current requests with this system on the FOI request homepage, which is right now almost entirely green.
