Founded in 2010, the non-profit MuckRock Foundation helps the public access, understand and use information in support of a stronger democracy. Our core services include MuckRock, where we facilitate thousands of public records requests every week, and DocumentCloud, a tool for analyzing, annotating and publishing primary source documents. MuckRock's database of nearly 22,000 government agencies spans local, state and federal offices across the United States and our archives include more than 120,000 public records requests, which anyone can read, copy and learn from. DocumentCloud is a vital resource for working with primary source documents, and we are continually developing Add-Ons to extend DocumentCloud's functionality through powerful OCR, bulk processing, and site monitoring tools. We also host FOIA Machine, a free tool for tracking your own public records requests, and oTranscribe, a handy utility for making timestamped transcriptions of any audio or video file.
Code for our major services is hosted on GitHub, including MuckRock/FOIA Machine; DocumentCloud's backend and frontend; our account management service Squarelet; and a collection of Add-Ons that extend DocumentCloud's functionality. Our open source transcription software, oTranscribe, lives in a separate GitHub account.
Our editorial department pursues collaborative demonstration projects that show the breadth of what is possible with public records. These collaborations showcase our tools and support newsrooms in doing reporting and storytelling they wouldn’t be able to do without our support and assistance. We use GitHub to host data and methodology for our original reporting. Our guide to editorial GitHub repositories includes links to our stories and the data behind them.
Like our work? Register for our newsletter and get free weekly updates. You can also sign up for a MuckRock account and file a public records request today, or you can make a tax deductible donation.
Join us on Slack to talk through any questions you have, or reach out to our open source fellow Sanjin via email (sanjin at muckrock dot com).
