1Today, we’re announcing the opening of applications for round two of our Gateway Grants, offering up to $150,000 in grants between $10,000 and $50,000 to support projects that help analyze, preserve and grant access to key documents.

Last year, DocumentCloud helped newsrooms, researchers and community groups upload and analyze a record number of materials, ranging from the leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to documents that trace who profits from rainforest destruction.

We’re expanding that support with a new call for proposals. This program seeks to help new and existing DocumentCloud users collect, analyze and preserve key documents and information. We also encourage joint applications, bringing together multiple organizations to take advantage of DocumentCloud’s collaborative and open nature.

Selected recipients will receive funding as well as technical assistance from our Open Source Fellow in order to preserve and archive an important document collection, bring new digital tools into the DocumentCloud ecosystem and help ensure that the public has direct and permanent access to humanity’s most important records.

In this round, we are offering a range of support to fit the varied needs of projects. This includes smaller grants aimed at adapting tools to work with DocumentCloud or help make existing collections accessible as well as large grants that have more ambitious goals for novel document collection, analysis or publishing and that would involve applying new tools or techniques to make that project happen.

FOIA Online launched a little over a decade ago to high expectations: The federal government was ditching fax machines and snail mail to allow electronic submission through a web portal, in a move that was projected to save money, increase transparency and ultimately make both requesters and FOIA officers' lives easier. Early estimates projected savings of over $200 million, with six agencies signing on at launch. For E&E News, Kevin Bogardus dug into recently released records and interviewed people inside and outside government (paywalled article) to understand how that promising effort fell flat.

His reporting relies, in part, on records released under FOIA to friend-of-MuckRock GovernmentAttic.org, which has the PDF of the response available here. Those documents include an internal presentation detailing the "death spiral" FOIA Online was facing: Costs to maintain the service were increasing, promised improvements were out reach and as individual agencies ditched the platform, the cost rose even more for everyone else. 

FOIA Online is set to be shut down on September 30. MuckRock is adjusting communication processes to use agencies' most up-to-date contacts to keep requests flowing smoothly. PoliticoPro subscribers can read the full piece here and everyone can explore the FOIA'd documents here.

• MuckRock's biggest response, ever: Ben Welsh requested aerial photographs of Mauna Loa after the volcanic eruption from the US Geological Survey, and the agency provided over 3 terabytes of data in response. We're still working on uploading them to the site, but you can scope out what's up there on the request page.
• Higher Education: Adam Steinbaugh filed a number of requests to see what action public colleges have taken, if any, in response to a recent statement by the colleges' presidents pledging to stop Critical Race Theory in the schools.
• Runa Sandvik has filed a request for the FBI files of Arne Treholt, a Norwegian journalist, diplomat and convicted KGB spy. 

For The Record was written by Michael Morisy.