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The Foilies 2023: Recognizing the worst in government transparency

What better way to kick off Sunshine Week 2023 than with a little group therapy? These days, everyone is finding classified documents in places they shouldn't be: their homes, their offices, their storage lockers, their garages, their guitar cases, between the cracks of their couches, under some withered celery in the vegetable drawer … OK, we're exaggerating—but it is getting ridiculous.

To help highlight the absurdity of how hard it is to get documents you're entitled to, while how easy it is for officials to apparently roam off with classified documents accidentally, we're excited to once again join together with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to bring you the Foilies, a round up of the worst of the worst in 2022 transparency capers.

And the winners are ...
Training and tips for a transparent 2023

Sunshine Week is finally here! The annual week-long celebration of transparency brings together a wide range of people who use, support and celebrate the power of open records, and we're excited to be hosting and cohosting a few events.
  • March 14 at 1pm Eastern: Cracking Puerto Rico’s Financial Secrecy with Centro de Periodismo Investigativo’s Carla Minet, Carlos Ramos and MuckRock’s André Natta.

    Join us for a one-hour session to hear how Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI) used a mix of litigation, automation and old-fashioned reporting work to bring together, for the first time, over 20,000 previously secret documents that showed the operations of Puerto Rico’s secretive financial control board. CPI’s Carla Minet and Carlos Ramos will share how they used DocumentCloud to consolidate and permanently archive the records as part of an inaugural Gateway Grant, as well as share lessons you can apply to your own work.

  • March 15 at 1pm Eastern: FOIA 101: A Public Records Primer for Everyone with Kiera Murray and Jodi Rave Spotted Bear of SPJ’s FOI Committee.

    Never filed a FOIA or public records request but ready to give it a go? Have burning transparency questions, but you’re too afraid to ask? Join us on March 15 at 1pm Eastern for a joint FOIA training with the Society of Professional Journalists and MuckRock, where we’ll walk through the basics of what you need to know about public records as well as strategies that even veterans will find useful to upping their FOIA game. MuckRock’s Kiera Murray will share tips and tricks she’s gleaned from helping thousands of requesters as well as leading some of the largest public records campaigns ever, with a special introduction from Jodi Rave Spotted Bear, Society of Professional Journalists board member and FOIA chair.

  • March 16 at 1pm Eastern: Air Quality Access with Dillon and Anthony Moser

    Ever wonder how bad the air actually is on those smoggy days? Wish you knew the impact of that proposal for a new distribution center on your family’s health or how your local government is ticketing polluters who break the law?

    Join us for a special Sunshine Week training on how you can use public records requests and other data sources to get answers about what’s in your air. Building on our collaborative reporting on Chicago’s air quality and our guides to environmental records requests, MuckRock reporter Dillon Bergin shares practical request ideas you can file immediately that help assess local risks, identify potential polluters and look at how your government is or isn’t responding. Bergin will be joined by Anthony Moser, folk technologist and board president of Neighbors for Environmental Justice (N4EJ), to talk about Ineffective By Choice: A Review of Environmental Enforcement Data in Chicago 2002-2022, and how N4EJ received two decades of previously unpublished data from the Dept of Administrative Hearings, analyzed it, and put it in context with inspection reports, CDPH emails, and other documents obtained through FOIA.

  • March 16, 1 p.m. Eastern: Supercharging Accountability Reporting with MuckRock and DocumentCloud at the NC Local News & Information Summit with André Natta.

    Digging through public records can be intimidating, especially for small newsrooms. Join this session to test drive MuckRock’s public records tools and DocumentCloud’s new Add-Ons library. Learn how powerful web scrapers, table extraction tools and machine learning models can supercharge and streamline your reporting.

There's still time: Have a document-driven project? Apply for the Gateway Grant program to support it

The March 17 deadline is approaching for our next round of Gateway Grants, a program that provides funding and technical support to document-driven reporting, civic engagement efforts and other projects that put DocumentCloud to work to help gather, analyze and publish critical documents for the public.

Apply today, and if you missed it you can check out our informational session for more details and background. And if you're looking for hands-on support, you can also pitch your story ideas to our editorial team.

For The Record was written by Michael Morisy.

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