 Hi, thank you. I'm Michael Morrissey, the founder of Muck Rock, and it's a real pleasure to be speaking here today. Not the least of which is because at least two of the organizations represented as speakers today have helped keep me out of jail over the years, including the Berkman Center, which provided a legal referral shortly after we started the website and the state threatened to send me to jail for publishing information they gave me. So thank you for those who helped and thank you to everybody else for listening. Muck Rock is a nonprofit based just down the street. We're based in Harvard Square. We are founded in 2010. We've helped about 4,000 people across the country file over 25,000 public records requests and freedom of information requests. We're the single largest non-governmental repository in the U.S. of people's complete public records requests. We've worked with over 6,000 different agencies, agencies, tiny towns in Kansas, CAA, FBI. We kind of handle public records requests at all levels of government. I hear a lot that public records in FOIA doesn't work for people. We've helped to release over a million pages of original government records. That pace of release is doubling roughly every year. So we started, like I said, in 2010 with a very simple idea. What if we made the public records process nice? Has everybody in the room filed a public records request before? All right. That's actually about maybe a third of people. When I go into an average newsroom, it's actually fewer percentage than that of reporters have actually filed a public records request these days. And what we hear is that journalists are using this process less and less. The public is really struggling with this process. And we hear that's too complicated and too slow and too burdensome. But when you go back, and we actually did this, when you go back and you look at the decades of investigative reporting that has made a difference, the kinds of reporting that has changed laws or changed policies, the kinds of reporting that has righted wrongs, when you go back and you look at that reporting, disproportionate amount of it is based on public records, government documents. And most of the time, those documents aren't made public through leaks. Those documents aren't made public through something that's kind of somebody meeting in a garage somewhere and handing over documents. Most of the time, those documents are received through public records and Freedom Information Act requests. And so when we looked at sort of what we could do to help have an impact and improve government transparency, to improve reporting, to improve the public's trust in government, we came back again and again to the Freedom Information Act with a real desire to kind of make it accessible and easier for journalists to use. And over the years, we've kind of had a lot of newsrooms come and use our site. So Muckrock is an open platform. Anybody can sign up. We have newsrooms all over the country and all over the world that use us to kind of get documents out of the government. And we absolutely love those users. But earlier, I said we've had about almost 4,000 users, maybe 500 of our users are journalists. So that kind of raises another question, sort of, who are those like 3,700 or so other users who are not journalists? Well, let's take a step back. Muckrock's original idea, our original goal was sort of not to be sort of a nonprofit transparency organization, but to be a business and a tool that we'd sell to newsrooms. That was sort of our original business plan. We're going to sell to newspapers. We started in 2010. We'd sell all these licenses, be a nice B2B company, and retire after a few years. As anybody who's ever worked with a newspaper recently knows, that's a really terrible business plan. Newspapers aren't really spending money on tools. They're not really spending money on litigating employee requests. They're certainly not going to pay for software so that a junior reporter can go out and manage their public records requests more easily. So we had started the site. Our plan totally backfired when we actually asked newsrooms to pay. A lot of the newsrooms were like, well, will you pay us to use your site? And we said, that's not a good model for us either. And we were about to give up. And then we noticed something interesting. We noticed that even though newsrooms weren't using us, even though we had a really hard time getting into those traditional newspapers that we had hoped to make money off of, we had other types of users coming to the site and doing some really cool things with public records. We had activists. We had sort of academic researchers. We had all these other groups that we traditionally don't think about when it comes to public records who are using the site to dig up information about their government and get information out there. So one of the things about Muck Rock is when you file a request by default, that whole request is public. So traditionally, journalists are very private about what they do. They don't want to share their information. For a lot of the groups that came and started using our site, they saw that publicness as an asset. So if you're an activist and you can say, hey, follow along. I just filed a request with the mayor over these documents and you can show people your work. That encourages and builds a community around it. And so all these things that traditional newsrooms saw as impediments, sort of these new types of requests are saw as real value. And what we found was that these were people who sort of traditional journalism wasn't talking to them. Traditional journalism wasn't interested in their issues. And public records request allowed them to kind of get their story out there in a way that otherwise they just couldn't. And so some of our users were, maybe they were an activist who had sort of a fringe idea about surveillance. And so they'd file a request with their local town and then get documents that nobody would have expected them to get. Some of our users were actually worked in government. We had whistleblowers sign up and use the site. They knew where a document was, but they didn't want to get in trouble. And so they filed requests with their own department to get documents out there. And so kind of seeing this, we sort of launched a series of sort of crowdsourcing projects. One of our first was called the drone census, where we actually asked the public to kind of say, Hey, is your local town or city using unmanned aerial vehicles? And so this was a few years ago, drones are sort of a new idea. And we saw a lot of drone usage overseas, but nobody was really talking about it domestically. And so we sort of invited the public, Hey, file, give us your town's police information, we'll file public records request for you. And the results were fascinating. We found that the main state police had bought a drone from a local radio shack and was flying it around and experimenting with it. San Diego got back to us and said, We have no drone. But then a separate request filed with Seattle showed a contract signed by San Diego's chief of police asking for a drone. And by inviting the public into this process, we got all sorts of really wonderful, interesting results that traditional media just wasn't looking at. More recently, we've done a crowdsource project with a group called Campaign Zero that is looking at police reform. And one of the things they're really interested in is sort of getting information about sort of what are the underlying causes of violent interactions between police and particularly minority communities. And so one of the things they sort of asked for is all around the country, they filed about 100 different public records request for use of force policies. So before now, we've talked a lot about use of force, we talked about when is force justified or unjustified? They methodically went ask their public, ask their community, help us file these requests. And then once they got up 100 different copies of local use of force policies, they were able to compare and actually show for the first time, Hey, if your policy includes this provision, there's a small like less likely chance that somebody's going to die in a police interaction. And so by inviting the public in to these projects by inviolate by bringing in communities that aren't traditionally seen as public records request users, we have we found we can have a real impact on the public discussion. Recently, and we've we sort of started increasing the use of these crowdsourcing campaigns. We just launched this one a couple weeks ago, asking how local police departments are using social media monitoring. After some records request released, after some records released as part of this project, Geofedia, which was a major social media surveillance company, had its licenses revoked by Twitter. So these kinds of projects, traditional media isn't looking at it. It's all driven by sort of an audience that really cares about what's going on, has a huge impact. Some of these projects have had big results. One of the things we talked about is a project that started with one random users request asking about 1033 gear going to local police departments, sort of spawned one of our reporters, Sean Musgrave in the audience to kind of do a national project, looking at sort of what is each police department getting under these military grants. And sure enough, we had local schools getting grenade launchers. We had small towns getting sort of armored vehicles. And after this came out through these public records request, these programs were reformed. We've also had some various surveillance programs in Boston and Seattle and other cities canceled after regular citizens filed requests, got information released and brought to public scrutiny things that were otherwise secret. And then we've also done work on private prison, prison privatization and other issues that are really tough, tough, broad issues for traditional media entities to grapple with. But when you have a lot of really engaged citizens working online together, collaboratively, you can have a big impact. One of the other groups recently last last year, two years ago, the Boston Olympic bids, there was a lot of sort of public interest in getting the Olympics hosted here in Boston, and a group of sort of grassroots users, they were not part of the media, they were not part of any sort of formal traditional request or entity. They asked the city of Boston, hey, we want to see your Olympic bid. One of the sites built into one of the features built into our site is a crowdfunding feature. And so when the city came back and said, that's going to cost thousands and thousands of dollars if you want to know what's going on with the Olympics, within a few hours, people submitting contributions of $25, $40 actually raised all that money and made that public. That wouldn't have been possible under traditional public records process. But because things are going online, because you have these communities that can develop very quickly, you have greater transparency, greater accountability. So some of the things we've learned over this process of working with thousands of different users, of working with groups across the country, is how important that it is to enshrine that public records is a right. I think one of the things we've seen is that police departments in particular, but also a lot of government entities are starting to treat requesters like they're doing them a favor by handling their public records process. Like agencies are doing their user a favor when they're responding to your FOIA. If I got a parking ticket and I did not pay that parking ticket for several years, I would have a lot of fines and agencies would not take too kindly to that. But when a requester files a request and then waits years and years, there's almost never a penalty for the agency. There's very little recourse for requesters to kind of push for that. And one of the things is that we're seeing increasingly agencies and government officials are treating public records request as if it's a privilege that they can kind of give out at their whim and not a right and a responsibility they have for the public. Public records work shouldn't require lawsuits. I think one of the things we've seen over the past few years, I think three of the past public records talks I've given to people got on stage and said public records doesn't work unless you sue. And that's just not true. And I think that's a very discouraging message. And I think that's a very pessimistic standard to hold our government officials to when it comes to public access and transparency. We filed about 25,000 requests. We've sued over about three of them. And in those three cases we've sued. We haven't yet gotten any documents. We've been promised documents, but you haven't even actually got them yet. Public records does work. The Freedom Information Act does work. It has challenges. It needs improvements. But when we tell people that public records is something you need a lot of degree to access when FOIA is something that only sort of a few people can use that really breaks down a central part of our open democratic process. And finally, one of the things that I would really like folks to think about is sort of ways to make the public records process more positive. One of the things we've seen, particularly at the state and local level, but even at the federal level, is that the Freedom Information Act, public records laws, they're becoming increasingly antagonistic, partially because of the rhetoric around lawsuits, partially because of the people, the new groups of people are becoming part of the public records process. We're seeing an increasingly adversarial stance taken on both sides and public records. And one of the things that I'm really interested in is what can we do to make this a more positive process all around? How can we work with agencies to kind of see public records and Freedom Information Act not necessarily just as an obligation, but as an opportunity to share their mission, share the work they do with the public? As part of that, one of the things we've been doing over the past year is working on a new exemption repository. One of the things we want to do is help people file administrative appeals more easily. A lot of states are increasingly and at the federal level, we now have a great mediation process where you don't need to file a lawsuit, you don't need to be a lawyer, you can go to an agency, you can go to an independent body and sort of say, hey, how can we work this out? So I can get what I want while following the law and not being unduly burdened on some agencies. As part of that, we've put together an exemption database where we're trying to gather every exemption under every public records law in the United States, and that's free and open to the public. And I would really encourage people here in your roles as lawyers and educators and everything else to kind of try and think what can we do to sort of continue to make sure that public records and right to know is a right for everybody and who increasingly improve it, particularly now as it becomes sort of a more and more politicized area under assault on all sides. Thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it.