OPRAmachine Blog

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]

As of today we are proud to announce that OPRAmachine now reaches every municipality in every county of the State of New Jersey.

We now have every municipal government added to our database. This is certainly a milestone for OPRAmachine, but our work is far from over. We still need help adding municipal utilities authorities and various county government agencies.

 

In this video, we give a brief overview of the concept behind OPRAmachine.com.

 

The upcoming launch of OPRAmachine is going to make it easier for citizens to obtain public records by way of the Open Public Records Act. In this post, we will explain how records custodians at public agencies can effectively utilize OPRAmachine to respond to requests, both via email and through our online web interface.

 

We are seeking volunteers to help fill OPRAmachine with more governmental agencies. This is an easy way to get involved in help making government accountable and accessible from the comfort of your home. As it stands now, OPRAmachine will be launching in beta with support for all 33 municipalities, MUAs, school boards and housing authorities for Ocean County. It is the goal of the development team to expand on a county-by-county basis throughout New Jersey in order to bring this powerful tool to more citizens following our launch in Ocean County. [Read More]