Today, MuckRock’s Beryl Lipton and Open the Government’s Freddy Martinez will be featured in a training session hosted by the Project on Government Oversight. In coordination with that event, we’ve compiled some fast thoughts on how federal oversight and resources can complement local and state research and policy developments.

Over the course of the next week, a few brave newsrooms are getting upgraded to the new DocumentCloud platform, which offers a variety of improvements from speed and search to mobile-friendly annotations. Here’s how to cut to the front of the line or ask for a delay.

On June 26, we held our first COVID Public Info training, giving journalists, researchers, and everyone else tips, tricks, and templates for using transparency laws to dig into public records. We covered ground like how to adjust your approach as governments still operate at reduced capacity, as well as called out some specific stories that used transparency to dig into key issues.

Over 500 volunteers have sent in suggestions to our MuckRock Assignment asking to submit local police departments as candidates for more transparency around the money spent by police departments to settle or battle lawsuits.

At least 12 New York state police departments claim to have no records of officer misconduct from the past 50 years, according to responses to Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests.

As protests for police accountability and reform continue, transparency changes are already taking place in cities across America — even as public records show emerging new challenges.

We’ve loved seeing the creative ways users have used our Assignments crowdsourcing tools, from digging through documents to building petitions. Now, to help newsrooms quickly gather answers to big questions, we’ve created an experimental spinoff of Assignments designed to help organize volunteers in gathering and label large amounts of data no matter where it may live.

A New York state senator blasted MuckRock’s latest transparency project to access police disciplinary records, calling it an “unintended consequence” of recent legislation designed to allow access to police disciplinary records.

We’re offering a free training session and plenty of ways to demand transparency in the midst of a pandemic and the movement for police accountability.

Last week, we released support for “flat pages” on DocumentCloud, which we use to host documentation, about pages, and more.