Building New Jersey's First Statewide FOI Platform

In 2018 I built and launched New Jersey's first statewide freedom of information platform. I designed the system, wrote the software, and ran it for roughly seven years before stepping down. The problem it solved was procedural: filing an Open Public Records Act request meant knowing which of hundreds of agencies to write to, in what format, and having no way to track what happened next.

I built it to handle the full lifecycle of a records request — submission, routing to the correct custodian, response tracking, and publication — and made every request and response public by default. That last decision was the important one: it turned a stream of one-off requests into a searchable public archive, so the same record never had to be requested twice.

Scaling it to 565 agencies across all 21 counties meant solving the unglamorous problems: agency contact data that no one maintained, wildly inconsistent response formats, and the storage and indexing of 250GB of released documents.