OPRAmachine Blog

Esther Surden of NJ Tech Weekly recently interviewed OPRAmachine founder Gavin Rozzi about the impact of the site in a feature article published in May. Gavin Rozzi was a journalist in Ocean County and finishing up his education at Stockton University when he came up with the idea for OPRAmachine. OPRAmachine is an open-source platform that lets citizens easily file requests for public records to their local governments, and it makes the requests and answers available to the public. [Read More]

OPRAmachine experienced some downtime this week due to some complications with our server infrastructure. We have taken steps to fix the problem and apologize to any users who were unable to access the site.

We will be undertaking additional upgrades in the near future and will keep the community posted.

As a part of OPRAmachine’s 2019 Sunshine Week initiatives and in response to several inquiries from users, we wanted to take a minute to share how we are protecting the privacy of our users. 1. We never publish your email address Your private email address is never revealed to the government or other users when you use OPRAmachine. All a public agency would be able to see is the unique OPRA request email address from the requests. [Read More]

I am writing in response to Jonathan Frodella’s article that appeared in the January 17th, 2019 edition of the New Jersey Law Journal entitled “Victims of Serious Crimes Need More Protection Under OPRA.” Mr. Frodella - whose article was written from the perspective of an attorney that advises municipal clerks - contends that services that automatically publish public records requests and responses such as OPRAmachine, which I founded in 2017, serve to create a “complication” for custodians of records by not requiring individuals to certify whether or not they were convicted of an indictable offense due to the remote possibility of a convicted criminal requesting information about their victims. [Read More]

PRINCETON - Gavin Rozzi, founder and lead administrator of OPRAmachine, was interviewed by U.S. 1 News, publishers of the website PrincetonInfo.com From their article: Anyone who has ever tried to request government records in New Jersey knows that authorities and bureaucracies make the information request process intentionally difficult and inconvenient, to discourage the public from seeking information that is required by law to be public. The OPRAMachine bypasses some of this hassle. [Read More]

Get unlimited requests, private requests and an exclusive dashboard with OPRAmachine Pro, our new tier of service for advanced users.

Learn more here

PRESS RELEASE GREEN BROOK, NJ – Gavin Rozzi, founder and lead administrator of OPRAmachine, announced that he and his team received an award for their work with government transparency and the Open Public Records Act (OPRA). Rozzi Media Group, publishers of Ocean County Politics, was awarded the Excellence in Local News Award in the “Innovate Local” category at a ceremony held on Friday in Middlesex County. The award is issued to journalists who “…used new and emerging technologies or strategies to enhance and improve the value and impact of their reporting efforts. [Read More]

OPRAmachine is pleased to announce our 2018 year in review.

2018 was our first full year in operation and brought unprecedented growth to the site. We’ve compiled a video with some of the most interesting statistics we’ve compiled in the past year, including our most popular towns and requests.

We are pleased to announce that you can now file private OPRA requests using OPRAmachine! Private OPRA requests can be filed with public agencies if you have an OPRAmachine Pro subscription. With a Pro subscription, you can keep your OPRA requests and documents private, so they won’t show up on the site or in search engines. This feature is geared toward companies and individuals who use OPRAmachine in a professional capacity, such as law firms, private investigators and corporate users. [Read More]

Our OPRA lawsuit against Monmouth County is scheduled to be heard on Monday, November 26th We are set to have a hearing for our case at 3:00 PM Wendesday before the Monmouth County assignment judge. Read more about the case here Essentially, Monmouth County and its attorneys made a mistake when responding to an OPRA request submitted by an OPRAmachine user. They failed to properly redact documents, and OPRAmachine staff took action to correct their error, and even waived enforcement of our formal takedown policy. [Read More]