Since MuckRock’s founding, one of our goals has been to help as many people as possible take advantage of their right to public records. Today, we’re pleased to announce that MuckRock is going open source so that others can join us in that mission in new ways.

Starting now, MuckRock is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, with the site’s source code available on Github. You can see exactly how we manage tens of thousands of public records requests, and our hope is that you’ll find new and useful ways to extend our work, whether you’re a newsroom standing up an internal FOIA tracker or maybe even a government agency looking for a better way to intake and process records requests. Maybe you even want to launch MuckRock in your own country (MuckRock Canada, maybe?).

We hope that others can learn from what we’ve built and in turn help us build a more transparent future for everyone.

We’d also love your help in continuing to develop the site. We’re working on standing up a developer mailing list and, if there’s interest, accepting outside contributions and bug fixes. If you’d like to get those communications, just sign up below. In the meantime, take a peak at the software that makes MuckRock run, and if you support our work, please consider making a donation to help us keep doing it.

Image by Boskampi via Pixabay