OPRAmachine Blog

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]

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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]

We are pleased to announce the succesful completion of recent upgrades to the underlying code that powers OPRAmachine. After some brief downtime on Saturday, we are pleased to announce the succesful completion of the deployment of the latest changes to the OPRAmachine platform. Here are some of the improvements you can begin taking advantage of immediately: 1. Collapisble correspondence We’ve added the ability to collapse parts of the chain of correspondence on OPRA requests, making it easier to keep things tidy on request threads that have a lot of messages. [Read More]

This month, OPRAmachine will be celebrating its first year of revolutionizing public records & transparency throughout New Jersey. The official one year anniversary of the public launch of the OPRAmachine statewide freedom of information portal will be coming up on October 24th, 2018. Throughout October, we will be reflecting on what the site has accomplished in its first year of public availability. We’ll be talking about the positives, including feedback from users and government officials, in addition to the negatives, such as technical and legal challenges that we have encountered in the course of running the site. [Read More]

We have good news for our users who request records from Toms River Township and the Toms River Police Department For a few months now, we have had an impasse with the Toms River clerk’s office and police department over their refusal to honor requests submitted through OPRAmachine. The township recently purchased a proprietary system from GovQA for handling public records requests and attempted to force OPRAmachine users to submit their requests through the proprietary system, which would have prevented the requests from being published on the OPRAmachine website. [Read More]