Last weekend, we joined our friends at Code for Boston to hack on a new project analyzing agency websites. We also pushed a number of features and fixes for our newly launched account service.

For previous site improvements, 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 here.

What’s new on MuckRock

Improved Organizational invitations

Last week, we pushed out a huge update to MuckRock account management. For the most part, it was a smooth upgrade process but there were a number of issues that needed some more tweaking. We’ve made the following changes:

• Invitations to join a new organization should now work more consistently.
• Some receipts were not being properly generated. This should now be fixed, but if you’re missing a receipt email us and we’ll get it sent over to you.
• Custom contact information override was not working.
• Some occasional payment bugs that would fail the payment are now fixed.
• Better error messages in a variety of cases.
• Creating new agencies was temporarily broken.
• Agencies were appearing out of order in some list views.
• Some users had the same request show up multiple times in various list views.

We have a number of other improvements and fixes coming down the line as well, but let us know if you run into bugs and we’ll work to fix up the problem. Check out last week’s release notes for an overview of all the new features we launched with our new Accounts service.

Code for Boston Spring Hackday 2019 + how you can come back on transparency

At this year’s Code for Boston Hack, we were joined by an amazing group of volunteers to help build a prototype automated scanner and scorecard maker that graded government agency websites on a variety of important factors, such as how well they protect user privacy and whether they’re easily accessible for a variety of constituents.

The project is very, very beta, but we made some amazing progress. For a sneak peek, sign up for the Release Notes newsletter at the top of this page.

Some big time #cfabrigade demos here: tracking water safety, analyzing police militarization data, examining gov website security, building a Slackbot to query city services, exploring criminal expungement advocacy, and way more. pic.twitter.com/t9HLWJjAwN

— Code for Boston (@CodeForBoston) April 7, 2019

If you’re the kind of person who gets excited about building cool, impactful open source software, you might also be interested in our Tuesday meetups in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or our other open source efforts.

There’s a number of ways to help us continue to improve the core MuckRock site experience. We have a project and a weekly newsletter, “Release Notes,” that highlights everything we’re working on. Register to get a summary of site updates each week and details on open issues you can help with.

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 the newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.

If you spot a bug or have a feature request, you can also help by opening an issue on GitHub.

If you do, 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.

Image via Wikimedia Commons