Some of you may have noticed that the SocialUnwind.com site, where I was storing open records documents, is no longer working. Unfortunately, I was in a rush a few days ago and I inadvertently crashed the site. To make matters worse, I broke my number one rule – take a snapshot of the site before attempting to upgrade it. Guess what? I relearned the reason why I should take snapshots. I didn’t and the upgrade did not work. As a result, the site is down.
I have been thinking about creating a site specifically for archiving open records and crowdsourcing the analysis of the documents. Since the SocialUnwind site needs to be rebuilt, I decided that I might as well launch the Public Documents archive website that I have been thinking about creating. You can get a peek look at it at this link. (It is a work in progress.)
Thomas Dorman has been kind enough to share the results of his open records requests about the recent County raises. There are numerous records and he wants to make them available to all of you. I’ll continue finalizing the Public Documents site this weekend and, hopefully, if everything goes as planned, there will be numerous open records requests for your enjoyment on Monday.
Stay tuned to my blog for updates. There are the issues of the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) Bond, Veronica Escobar’s pending open records request in regards to Greg Allen’s comments and the upcoming County Commissioner’s raises.
I have numerous open records requests documents that need to analyzed and I am sure many more will be coming in soon. I will post them on the Public Documents site so that you can review them. I have also been contacted by some individuals that have public documents that they want to share. My new site will allow anyone to share any public documents that they have.
I’m also hoping that as you preview the documents, if you find something important, that you will share it via the comments portion of the site. Finally, I’ve been asked to help with filing open records requests. I’ll set up tutorials in the new site with instructions and sample letters for filing your own open records requests.
Thank you for patience and feel free to let me know if there are features you would like. Also, set up your accounts so that you can fully participate and be updated as new documents are posted.
This is the work the news media never does and one more reason they are becoming increasingly irrelevant and not trusted.