Sunshine Week has now come and gone, but it's not too late to brush up on your FOIA and transparency skills. Last week to help kick things off, MuckRock senior project support specialist Kiera Murray ran a training on the basics of public records, including strategies for figuring out what to request when you're not quite sure where to start. Watch a version of her presentation here and then dig into more advanced topics through our FOIA resources page.

We also had a special session with Carla Minet and Carlos Ramos from the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI) on how they've been piecing together a full picture of Puerto Rico's secretive financial control board through a mix of litigation, scraping and public records. CPI was an inaugural Gateway Grant recipient, and the non-profit newsroom has now posted 

Last Saturday, MuckRock reporter Betsy Ladyzhets led a session about wastewater surveillance at NYC School of Data, a civic data and technology conference that’s part of the city’s Open Data Week. Ladyzhets talked about how NYC’s wastewater surveillance program fits into a broader movement towards better tracking health through sewage and making the data public. Gale Brewer, member of the City Council and former Manhattan borough president, discussed how the NYC program has evolved since early in the pandemic, along with transparency challenges from the city agencies that run the surveillance. Kartik Chandran, engineering professor at Columbia University, talked about his work testing sewage on campus and monitoring for coronavirus variants. A recording from this session (and others at the conference) will be available on the event’s website in the coming weeks.

Shortly after World War II, the federal government dumped massive piles of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project in several areas of greater St. Louis, including near the airport, in Weldon Spring and along Latty Avenue next to Coldwater Creek.

Those piles were repeatedly moved and reburied and, to this day, 47,000 tons of radioactive waste is buried in the West Lake Landfill in northern St. Louis County. The Missouri Independent and MuckRock are investigating the history of the dumping and cleanup efforts of the radioactive waste and would like to hear from those most impacted. If you live in the area and may have been impacted, let us know.

The 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 by Friday evening — and if you missed it you can check out our informational session for more details and background.

For The Record was written by Michael Morisy.