OPRAmachine Blog

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!

OPRAmachine founder Gavin Rozzi was recently interviewed about the site’s first month by the mySociety Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit that created the software that powers the site.

Read the full interview here.

ATLANTIC COUNTY – One local news website editor is using OPRAmachine’s ability to obtain public records to write about sexual harassment claims that were settled by county officials, reporting details that were previously unknown to the public with the help of our system. This weekend local news site Atlantic County News published an article detailing how that site’s editor made use of OPRAmachine in order to obtain records regarding several recent out-of-court sexual harassment settlements that involved allegations made against county officials. [Read More]

You can use OPRAmachine to easily receive email alerts for specific towns and government agencies as they receive and respond to requests for public records made using our website. Even if you don’t use the site to make your own public records requests, you can become informed about the activities of New Jersey state and local government with OPRAmachine email alerts tailored specifically to the towns and requests you’d like to follow. [Read More]

Some requests have been having delivery issues, currently to at least one municipality and one county. The purpose of this blog post is to provide guidance to both members of public sector IT departments / records custodians and the requestors that use OPRAmachine to request information. Are you a records custodian or government official? Please pass this post along to your IT department. Inevitably, as OPRAmachine users make use of the site’s capabilities to send requests to more towns, some firewalls may inadvertently prevent our emails from getting delivered. [Read More]