<aside> 📚 See our other Guides and Manuals: Get the Most Out of MuckRock and DocumentCloud for more tips and tricks on getting the most out of MuckRock tools. And if this was helpful to you, consider making a donation to support our work!
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<aside> 🧠To get help from one of these communities, you will need to clearly articulate your goals, spell out how you know what you already know, and explain what you are trying to access with your public records request. It is fine to point to outside articles for context, but you should always summarize what you are taking from them. Readers should be able to help you out based entirely on the information contained directly in your query.
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The National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC) maintains a public discussion list, FOI-L (FOI-L) where you can find answers to a wide range of questions and a community with substantial expertise.
MuckRock maintains a public FOIA Slack channel where you may also be able to find advice and guidance workshopping requests. The details on accessing MuckRock’s Slack are at MuckRock Slack.
Reddit is home to a lively FOIA community, r/foia where participants are great at helping each other dial in complex questions.
MuckRock’s own jurisdiction guide includes quite a bit of detail about response times and appeal criteria for individual states in the US. We also maintain an extensive list of state and local jurisdictions, along with links to the applicable laws, at MuckRock Place List which may be helpful to your research.
Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press maintains FOIA Wiki (FOIA Wiki), an in-depth guide to Federal FOIA, as well as an Open Government Guide (Open Government Guide) that covers state-level laws.
NFOIC has a map of state-level organizations working to protect access to information in their state: NFOIC Map. Each of those organizations is expert in the state they work in.