This project will evaluate Massachusetts municipalities’ responsiveness to records requests, as well as which have kept up with reviewing and releasing the executive session minutes of their local boards, and which have not.
The options you have at your college’s fountain machine are usually determined by a contract with one of the two big names in beverages: Coca-Cola or Pepsi.
The goal of this project is to create transparency around the relationships between the CDC (and its children agencies/ institutes/ departments) and private institutions of health (e.g. hospital systems, insurance companies, health advocacy groups) with regards to COVID-19 policies, treatments, etc.
Despite an estimated 175,000 sexual assault evidence collection kits that sit untested in evidence rooms and crime labs across the country, there is no federal law in place mandating policies or testing of kits, and we don't know how many more go uncounted. This project aims to end that, one city and one kit at a time.
looking at curfew violations from May 30, 2020 to date in cities around America
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/14/21286741/chicago-city-curfew-african-american-arrest-aclu
The programs being designed and implemented across the country under the auspices of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) have drawn fire from Muslim community members and civil rights activists. They are criticized for unfairly targeting Muslims, being used for surveillance under the pretext of community outreach, and being based on an unfounded theory of radicalization.
Despite the heavy criticism CVE has been subjected to, there remain lingering questions about precisely which communities are targeted, what research (and which experts) agencies are relying on for their approaches, how (or if) government agencies are planning to safeguard civil liberties, which community leaders are being supported and for what reasons, etc.
By making the relevant government documents public, we hope to help answer some of these questions.
Chicago’s air quality is among the worst in the U.S., and the city has several local hotspots for particulate matter 2.5 — the tiny particles that come from diesel trucks and industry and enter people’s lungs and blood, causing significant health problems. Between April 2021 and March 2023, the tech company Microsoft installed and monitored 115 air quality sensors across Chicago. We worked with Chicago newsrooms, including the Cicero Independiente, WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, to analyze this data for a series of stories on the city’s comparatively poor air quality. We then installed our own air quality sensors in Chicago neighborhoods that lacked coverage in the Microsoft network — and looked for trends and spikes in pollution.
While the vast majority of public contracting is done with integrity, bad actors and a lack of public knowledge have a disproportionate effect on the fiscal wellbeing and public trust of every level of government.
This is an investigation into the censorship of art by renowned artist Serhat Tanyolacar at Polk State College for being 'too controversial'. I hope to document the internal workings of an American college administration attempting to censor protected speech in the form of artistic expression by an adjunct faculty member.
CIA's internal histories tell the story of the Agency, based on classified documents and interviews with the people involved. They're some of the best resources on the history of the Agency, yet most of them remain unavailable to the public. This project will request copies of every CIA history that can be identified.
The #DeeperThanWater FOIA project is an effort of the Deeper Than Water Coalition, which aims to expose the injustice of mass incarceration through the lens of water justice. This specific project aims to make available all public documents pertaining to the ongoing refusal of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections to provide safe and clean drinking water to prisoners detained at MCI-Norfolk and surrounding facilities.
Is your college using your phone to track whether you're in class? We're asking public colleges and universities for their contracts with Degree Analytics, a company increasingly present on campus.
"Disappearing Day Care" is our ongoing series on the U.S. child care industry. We published our first part of this series in Michigan in 2022, with the Detroit Free-Press and Chalkbeat Detroit. In 2023, we are focusing on Missouri, with The Missouri Independent.
As journalists dealing with data and document sets, we find that the most interesting information is usually hidden in large, unstructured, and incomplete sets of documents. Especially information in public contracts: what the government is buying, how much money is being spent, and who are the suppliers. To answer these questions, four media organizations — La Nacion, CLIP, Ojo Público, and MuckRock — joined forces under the JournalismAI Collab and experimented with different machine learning tools and techniques in order to build a platform that helps investigative reporters understand and process unstructured documents to get useful insights.
The Documenting COVID-19 project is a repository of searchable documents related to the COVID-19 pandemic obtained through state open-records laws and the Freedom of Information Act. It has produced hundreds of stories with local, regional and national newsroom partners throughout the United States.
The Department of Interior wants to destroy a huge amount of records. This request preserves them all.
See background info here: https://altgov2.org/doi-records-destruction/
Records requests for alleged domestic terror attacks or attempts or investigations into alleged crimes re: domestic terrorism, hate crimes, multiple-casualty incidents, and other similar incidents.