OPRAmachine Blog

On April 5th, 2018 I had the distinct pleasure of joining Bill Watt, the host of WLFR 91.7 FM’s “Watt’s the Move” to talk about my work with OPRAmachine and open government matters in New Jersey. A video of the segment of the show where we dicussed my work with OPRAmachine and its impact can be viewed here. (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d. [Read More]

Recently, multiple users have brought it to our attention that they have been receiving spam links to viruses or questionable websites in response to their OPRA requests. Today, we have taken action to combat the recent rise in spam that has been impacting our users and cluttering request pages. OPRAmachine has increased our capabilities for dealing with spam, and going forward, spam messages that are flagged by our system will be held back before going out to users and being published to request pages. [Read More]

Today marks four months since OPRAmachine was officially launched and made accessible to the general public. Since then, it has been breaking down barriers for access to public information in New Jersey and helping to educate the public about OPRA. Our October 24th, 2017 the launch came after several months worth of technical preparation and trial & error as we learned to work with the open source Alavetelisoftware that powers our backend server as well as the technical challenges of managing the various components of the web service. [Read More]

Some requests filed by users of OPRAmachine have resulted in litigation against public agencies for their denial of requests. All of these lawsuits have been filed after requests were originally sent out through our platform. Here are some notable cases of interest: Rozzi v. Office of the Attorney General We have encountered heavy resistance from the state attorney general’s office, as the office has refused to provide emailed responses to OPRA requests submitted by our system. [Read More]

We are making available a downloadable database of all OPRA requests filed through OPRAmachine for analysis and research purposes. The database will include an index of all OPRA requests filed through OPRAmachine, as well as the current state of each request. We hope this database will be a valuable research tool for those studying OPRA and state & local government in New Jersey. The database can be obtained in SQLite or CSV format, in addition to being able to be accessed over the morph. [Read More]

Today, OPRAmachine announces the launch of our new documentation website, docs.opramachine.com. Our new documentation website is designed to be a centralized hub for answers to some of the frequently asked questions received by the site administration about how the site works. The new documentation website will include request templates, guides on how to use the site’s functionality, as well as specific guides for requesters and custodians of records making use of OPRAmachine. [Read More]

The Sunlight Foundation, a respected nonprofit that focuses on governmental transparency issues, recently covered the launch of OPRAmachine.

In the charity’s “Today in OpenGov” blog series, they highlighted OPRAmachine as “…the first implementation of the Alaveteli platform, to operate purely at the state and local level.”

Read their full blog post here.

 

In this video, we show examples of successful requests for legal documents served on state & local government submitted by users of OPRAmachine, in addition to covering how to use New Jersey state court databases to obtain information about active lawsuits.

 

The links to the two state court databases used in this webcast are as follows:

New Jersey Superior Court ACMS Public Access

New Jersey Superior Court Civil Motion Calendar

Yesterday, we celebrated the milestone of 1000 OPRA requests filed via OPRAmachine since our launch in late October. Thousands of pages of government documents are now freely available to members of the public on our site. Thank you to our supporters, users and the dedicated civil servants who have made this all possible!