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Roadmap
IMPORTANT: This is in an incredibly draft state. It is non-canon at this point, and feedback is welcome and changes are inevitable.
MuckRock exists to tell important stories, hold officials accountable, and to strengthen democracy. Our greatest tools in this are truth and transparency: We operate in the most open way we know how, showing our work and sharing our knowledge because we believe this leads to better results and bigger impact.
An important value underlying this is that MuckRock must be sustainable: Relying heavily on grants too easily perverts our independence and our mission, while going out of business means that we can do nothing for our users. We believe that organic growth — with revenue coming from a broad base of users — best allows us to achieve this goal while retaining our independence.
MuckRock's current primary goals right now to this end:
- Reduce and focus office workload through continued improvements to task system.
- Reach 400,000 monthly page views while maintaining a high bar for quality.
- Reach $8,000 in monthly normal (non-grants & project work) revenue.
This is the current roadmap for MuckRock's development, in rough order or development priority. As issues are given milestones, individual components will be removed from below the headings and linked to from this page.
See http://blog.estimote.com/post/119525082855/user-stories-on-steroids-how-estimote-uses-blog on why we're adding narrative to each project.
Project pages give readers an easy way to see and support our work MuckRock's initial project pages are simply a place that can explain projects, allow crowdfunding of them, and see related stories and requests to this project. Everything ideally should be manageable from the front end, although at first projects can only be created by admins. The goal should be more manually tweaking and flexibility over fully built features, and a focus on mobile-first: A user should be able to quickly come to the page, find something to click on, see how to contribute if there's a crowdfunding campaign, and have an easy way to share the page on social media. Ideally projects should support a large hero image (but probably should not be mandatory), a title, a list of contributors, have a (single?) manager, see interesting requests/docs, a way to turn them on or off for public view ability (even non-staff contributors should be able to see private projects)and invite deeper exploration, including calls to action to file on the site.
Benefit: New way to generate revenue through project funding, increase traffic through better ways to show our work.
- Crowdfunding on projects
- Add estimated completion date field.
- Only follow up on the estimated completion date, unless it has passed.
- Allow user to set estimated completion date.
- Include estimated completion date in follow up email.
- Allow letting specific users view shared embargoed requests
- Allow letting specific users take action on shared embargoed requests (two level of sharing: view and edit)
- Way to invite unregistered users to join site (simple email that says ~ Joe would like to share a request with you. Register here, and then let them know when you're ready)
- Change org model to reflect the $100/3 members/50 requests default
- Add member seats for $20, also gets an extra 10 requests
- Move to a single Stripe plan for billing
- Monthly summary emails.
- Daily Task Summary Emails
- Built-in Stat Emails
- Appeal Reminders
- Rich HTML + Plaintext
- Summary emails to agencies letting them know what's open in liu of mass emails.
Allow purchase of requests for users.- Show user crowdfunding page
Enhanced user profile.
- Add full-text search of OCRd material via DocCloud
- More advanced search (by filetype?)
- Merge search and filter interfaces
- Have search rank more intelligently
- Have search cover users, agencies, jurisdiction.
- Reduce communications included in follow ups: Only original communication plus up to five other communications, including most recent communication, and the prior four communications but not including previous auto follow up messages.
- Segment out first time purchases, return purchases, pro accounts, crowd funds, first time crowd funds
- Include embargo button for non-pro users, prompting them to upgrade
- Make special offer for community users wanting to embargo costing just $20 for first month.
- Include questions in sitemap.
- Allow users to delete their own questions.
- Allow admins to delete questions from front end.
- Allow answers to be posted from same page as question, rather than sending user to new page.
- Allow private questions?
- Include various types of stripe data into analytics (breaking out crowdfunding request payments vs. crowdfunding reporting vs. pro vs. community vs request fees vs ?)
- Load this data retroactively to early days of site
- Allow creation and assignment of generic tasks
- Include tasks that are already completed
- Allow users to email in tasks
- to [email protected]
- to [email protected] will snooze task until tuesday
- Allow suggested language for inclusion/replace default language on a per agency basis.
- Allow suggested language for inclusion/replace default language on a per jurisdiction basis.
- Allow suggested language for inclusion/replace default language on a per user basis (reporter can save certain mix ins).
- Mix in system helps craft appropriate appeals
- When an agency completes a request, allow a user to either send a quick thank you note, and add one to a counter for that agency's karma (or some other positive measure)
- Or B, if they aren't happy, leave advice for other requesters, like a Foursquare Tip. The goal is to get them to send positive reinforcement for good agencies, and do something positive (advice) even when agencies are not helpful.
- URL for source
- Metadata on type: Photo, Flag, Seal, etc.
- Submitted by username
Web based way to upload files
- Handled of files up to 100GB
- Allow selling of t-shirts and stickers.
- Integrate with crowdfunding so backers can get rewards.
- Figure out consistent way to include PDFs (and possible other file types including txt, doc, docx, etc) in outgoing communications such as fax, email, and mail.
- Do sanity checks so we don't send over 100 page faxes if something is uploaded in this system. Cap at 6 pages?
- Allow users to attach PDFs (and possible other file types) to requests, with clear indication that this is for supplementary material only
- Way to break out appeals from normal request flow as a "sub request"
- Way to break out complicated requests (such as referrals) into a sub-request.
- Lives right on site.
- Still not sold on this.
- This could be an evolution of the current statistics application. In addition to serializing our statistics through the API, we could add a page of data vizualization on top of it.
- If we're feeling particularly ambitious, we could reimplement the statistics system to operate in real time.
- We could also consider adding features like triggered notifications or tasks. For example, staff get an email when processing crosses a threshold value.
- System so that tasks must be verified by multiple people for accuracy
- Embargoed requests do not go through public system
- Generate assignments integrated into task system, including:
- Twitter handles for agency
- Verifying twitter handles for agency
- Pictures for agency
- Classifying pictures of agency (seal? flag? picture of office?)
- File by type of agency
- Save and share common request groups (largest 50 police departments)
- File with agency by type + location, even if we don't have it (PDs in 30 states)
- Generates appropriate tasks to add those agencies.
- Start with a great interface for public notes.
- Consider integration with WP-admin API to take advantage of great WordPress writing tools.
- Think deeply about what kinds of content we need to facilitate: Closely coordinate thinking of this with progress on Whitewash.
Bring back utility of sidebars for promoting crowdfunding campaigns, news content, etc.- Create areas on home page to promote news content.
- Archive and store tweets of gov agencies, officials using politiwhoops
- Archive and store changes in web pages of government and official web pages.
- Allow alerts to be set up and data export
- Figure out pro user benefits? Deleted tweets? Access over more than x months old?
- Way to reduce duplicate requests
- Work to get un-automatable tasks outsourceable to Mechanical Turk. Only non-embargoed tasks.
- Make it flexible so other types of tasks down the road also can be Turkable (the news heroku of Mechanical Turk)
- Allow users to upload public key.
- Allow users to get email notifications encrypted.
- Via plugin, allow client-side encryption of notes (similar to pgp.js/using PGP.js)
- Allow encryption of tasks
- Move to self-hosted Piwik
- Allow users to track requests not filed through MuckRock on MuckRock.
- Fee after 10 requests to unlock "unlimited" request tracking.
- Something to distinguish staff from non-staff
- On Q&A, request pages, profile pages, etc.
These goals are a bit different because they run alongside regular site development, are fairly experimental, and provide potentially large but relatively uncertain value.
Narrative: The goal of task automation is to use machine learning to predict how certain tasks should be completed, and to do them automatically. For example, the site should be able to automatically reject orphans that are particularly suspicious, to automatically mark responses as completed, rejected, etc. Not all tasks will be automated, but the goal is to create systems that continue to improve and reduce workload over time, with an easy path towards not only improving the accuracy of these systems, but widening the types of tasks that can be, at least partially, automated (starting with response and orphans). The system should start by subtly suggesting to the staffer what it thinks the categorization should be, and the likelihood of that categorization (either percentage or low, medium, high). After staff wide discussion of the results, including how accurate the system appears to be and and identifying potential pitfalls, the system should be set to identify and process tasks where it can do the work with a high degree, but not perfect, of accuracy. At this point, review and summary reports of automated work will need to be generated to offer chance to review automated work as well as set up monitors to ensure if data becomes widely divergent, this does not go unnoticed.
Benefit: Ongoing reduced office workload.
- Spam filtering on orphans
Test classifying response tasks- Evaluate whether system of classifications needs to change
Narrative: Whitewash provides a new way for people to not only contribute to MuckRock, but to interact with our stories, documents, and data, as well as opening up new, non-FOIA data sources for our editorial usage. It's a standalone platform that's managed and integrated with MuckRock, but which a user can eventually take full advantage of without ever visiting MuckRock.com, or even knowing much about MuckRock. The first goal, however, is to get it to be useful, which means hooking Whitewash up to real tasks that need real doing, and to make sure that we've built something that makes our lives easier.
Benefit: Reduced office workload, increased engagement, revenue from adoption by other news organizations.
- Get task system integrated with Whitewash and used by staff.
- Web version of tasks?