Release Notes: Fixing edited Assignment submissions plus an upcoming demo night in Boston

A bug in some of the code used to make selected Assignment submissions public broke some editing functions; that’s now fixed. More importantly, you can join us for an evening of food, beverages, and open data demos on Dec. 17th at Code for Boston Demo Night, where we’ll be unveiling our new 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

Assignment submission update bug fixed

Last week, we detected an error that would prevent Assignment managers from updating data. This error is now fixed.

As a reminder, if you are an admin of an Assignment (our crowdsourcing platform), you can tweak and edit submissions, particularly useful for correcting typos or fixing mistakes in submissions.

These edits are noted (including who made them) and are revertible with two clicks.

Example of an edited Assignments submission

Come check out our demo night

On Dec. 17, we’re joining other Code for Boston projects to demo what we’ve been working on Tuesday nights. In our case, it’s GovLens, our automated government website checker that evaluates agencies around the country on security, accessibility, and other key metrics, and 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.

Reporting bugs and submitting fixes

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 new 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.