Are you a news nerd head out to SRC CON later this week? Come to our session or say hi to learn more about ways to help make FOIA stronger for everyone, and feel free to email Michael if you want to meet up (he’ll be there Wednesday morning through Friday evening) If you’re not coming to Minneapolis, here is what’s new on MuckRock plus how you can contribute.
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 at the top or bottom of this page.
What’s new on MuckRock
Last week was relatively light as we focus on integrating MuckRock and DocumentCloud’s user bases, but we did fix a few bugs worth noting.
Accent marks no longer break Assignment tool
The way we were storing question database entries in Assignments caused issues with unicode characters, including meaning characters with accents as well as emojis would cause an error if included in questions. This is now fixed.
Portal Tweaks
We tweaked some of our portal integrations to catch more responses more quickly and get them loaded onto the site.
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.
If you subscribe to the weekly newsletter, we’ll include exclusive data sets, FOIA-related scripts, and other transparency hacker tidbits exclusively for subscribers. You can also 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.
For those who want to contribute design, code, or otherwise more directly to the site, 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 be at tomorrow’s meetup.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
