On December 17, MuckRock, Code for Boston, and Hacks/Hackers are putting together a demo night to highlight a number of open source projects, including MuckRock’s newest government transparency tool, GovLens.

Registration is free, but an RSVP is required! If you’re in the area, we’d love to see you there.

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.

Come check out our demo night

At the demo night, we’ll joining other Code for Boston projects to demo what we’ve been working on Tuesday evenings since last March. We’re excited to publicly showcase GovLens, our automated government website checker. It evaluates agencies around the country on security, accessibility, and other key metrics, and it provides easy to understand explanations for both policy makers and the public. Registration is free, so if you’re in the Boston area, we’d love to see you!

Come hack transparency with us

Every Tuesday night, we gather in Cambridge with a group of coders, designers, and others who want to see more open government. Over 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.

You can find out more and join us by checking out Code for Boston’s website.

Give feedback, get updates

There are a number of other ways to help us continue to improve the core MuckRock site experience.

Newsletter: 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 that need your help.

Subscribers to the weekly newsletter get exclusive data sets, FOIA-related scripts, and other transparency hacker tidbits only available for subscribers. You can subscribe to the newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.

Slack: In addition to the newsletter, we have a developer channel on the MuckRock Slack.

Github: Check out some of our issues labeled “help wanted” for ideas on good places to start or just pop into our Slack’s #Developers channel.

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.