Last week, we started including links with details on how to cancel or change your subscription settings. We also put into writing some more of the reasoning behind the GovLens project.
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.
Site Updates
Improved receipts
During our overhaul of our account management system, we tweaked receipt handling. One thing that was unintentionally dropped: A link to exactly where you need to go to change your account settings. We’ve added links back so if you have a Professional or Organization account, you’ll get information on where to go to tweak settings if you need to change anything.
Building out the vision for GovLens
Every Tuesday night, we gather in Cambridge with a group of coders, designers, and others who want to see more open government. The past few months, we’ve been mixing MuckRock’s agency database with a set of scanners and scrapers to help gauge the accessibility, mobile-friendliness, and security of America’s digital infrastructure.
We’ve dubbed the project GovLens, and last week we spent some time discussing a little bit more about the background on the project, which we captured here. You can find out more and join us by checking out Code for Boston’s website.
Reporting bugs and submitting fixes
There are a number of other 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
