Find. Request. Share state and local government data.

My RJI fellowship is officially over, but the OpenMissouri.org team has been making strides since we launched the site March 17 at Open Missouri Day during Sunshine Week.

We’ve:

• Added a “Sunshine this” button that lets registered site users generate a customized Sunshine request letter that they can copy and paste into another application. This letter generator is a real timesaver for journalists and citizens who want to request data from an agency. It does most of the heavy lifting for you.
• Added data-sharing to the “Suggest a data set” form that registered users can fill out to tell us about data they’ve discovered. So if you find out about a data set that a state or local agency has, you can tell us about it and share a copy. We’ll verify the information before we post it for the public.
• Added information about data sets and now are up to around 250. We’ll add more from the Missouri of Department of Public Safety in the coming weeks. Master’s degree students from my Computer-Assisted Reporting class will continue to gather information about data sets from state and local government agencies.
• Moved from Heroku, an Amazon cloud-based development service to a faster production server.
• Redesigned the site. It’s a little more eye-pleasing, we think.

You can help the project by:

Spreading the word about OpenMissouri.org.

• Following @OpenMissouri on Twitter.
• Signing up for the email newsletter (look for the box on the bottom right of the home page).
• Linking to OpenMissouri.org

Thanks and please let us know how OpenMissouri.org can help you.