The OpenMissouri.org team has been hard at work these past few months, since our March 17 launch at the Reynolds Journalism Institute during Open Missouri Day. We’re offering new features that make it easier for you to find, request and share data sets held by state and local government agencies.

Sunshine This

We added a button that lets registered site users generate, on the fly, a customized Sunshine request letter for a data set. Just register for an account and provide your complete contact information. Click on Sunshine This and OpenMissouri.org creates the letter. You’ll need to copy and paste the letter into your email or word processing program and put on the finishing touches before sending it along.

Suggest a Data Set

If you are a registered user, you can now tell us about data sets that you’ve discovered by clicking on the Suggest a Data Set button. You can even upload a copy of the data to share it with others. We’ll verify the information before we post it for the public.

Now with more data

We added information about more 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 at the Missouri School of Journalism will continue to gather information about data sets from state and local government agencies this fall.

Other improvements

• Moved off Heroku, an Amazon cloud-based development service, to a faster production server.
• Added a contact form so it’s easier for you to contact us.
• Redesigned the site. It’s a little more eye pleasing, we think.

Thanks and remember that you can get the latest OpenMissouri.org news by following @OpenMissouri on Twitter, subscribing to our email newsletter  (look for the box on the bottom right of the home page) and subscribing to our RSS feeds for data sets and blog posts.

-David Herzog. OpenMissouri.org founder