MuckRock Release Notes: Come hack on transparency software

MuckRock Release Notes: Come hack on transparency software

MuckRock, DocumentCloud, and all of our tools are open source - you can make them better!

Edited by JPat Brown

We’ve had our heads down working the past few weeks on major revisions to user authentication, organization management, and a variety of other major upgrades, so we did not get a chance to push anything out publicly last week.

We’re still looking for open source contributors interested in helping make MuckRock a better product, as well as hacking on all the other open source tools we help maintain, including DocumentCloud, FOIA Machine (which runs off of MuckRock’s code base), oTranscribe, and Quackbot.

Feel free to browse through open issues and if you want to talk tech with us, join our Slack and ask to be added to the #developers channel.

For previous site improvements on MuckRock, check out all of MuckRock’s release notes, and if you’d like to get a list of site improvements every Tuesday - along with ways to help contribute to the site’s development yourself - subscribe to our developer newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.

Come hack on MuckRock

We have a growing group of volunteer hackers helping to make MuckRock better every day. We want to make it easier to contribute, so we’re launching a new project and weekly newsletter, “Release Notes.” Register to get a summary of site updates each week, a list of issues you can help with, and details about our Code for Boston meetups.

Check out some of our issues labeled “help wanted” for ideas on where’s good to start, or just pop into our Slack’s #Developers channel.

Subscribers to the weekly newsletter get exclusive data sets, FOIA-related scripts, and other transparency hacker tidbits exclusively for subscribers. You can subscribe to to the newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.

If you want to contribute better FOIA tools for thousands of requesters, there’s a number of ways to help. If you find a bug you can email us directly or open an issue on GitHub.

If you do the latter, please search open issues first to make sure it hasn’t already been reported. If it has been reported previously, please leave an additional comment letting us know it’s an issue for you, particularly if you can provide more details about when it crops up or what you think is causing the problem.

In addition to the new newsletter, we have a developer channel on the MuckRock Slack. You can also join us at Code for Boston’s weekly hack nights, which take place Tuesday evenings in Kendall Square. We might not make it to every one of them, so if you want to meet up there it’s a good idea to check in on Slack first or check the newsletter. We will not be at tomorrow’s meetup.


Image via Wikimedia Commons