PlainSite :: The Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants

"Aaron Swartz was an internet activist whose work was instrumental in creating PlainSite. He took his own life on January 11, 2013 due to events related to the wrongful criminal prosecution of his activities attempting to make public information freely available to the public. In his memory, Think Computer Foundation is sponsoring a number of grants to improve access to public information, in cooperation with the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Grants 1-3: RECAP RECAP (PACER backwards) parses expensive ($0.10 per page) PACER dockets and uploads their contents to the Internet Archive so that they can be accessed for free. These dockets keep PlainSite up to date. Unfortunately, for various reasons, recent development on RECAP has slowed. The browser extension is only available for Firefox, and it has a few limitations. Three grants worth $5,000.00 each are being made available related to RECAP. Each grant is worth $5,000.00: Grant 1: Develop and release a version of RECAP for the Google Chrome browser that matches the current Firefox browser extension functionality Grant 2: Develop and release a version of RECAP for Internet Explorer that matches the current Firefox browser extension functionality Grant 3: Update the Firefox browser extension to capture appellate court documents, and update the RECAP server code to parse them and respond appropriately to browser extension requests All code must be released under the GPL license, per the original RECAP terms. Applicants can apply for multiple grants. You can find the RECAP Extension for Firefox Github repository here. If you are interested in working on this project, please register according to the instructions below, and we will e-mail you development environment instructions. Please Do not test your code against RECAP's production servers. Grant 4: Visualization PlainSite has a lot of data, but sometimes it can be hard to connect the dots. We would love to see some cool visualization tools to help people make sense of it all. Judges will be chosen from legal informatics specialists and the experts at Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School. First Place: $2,500 Second Place: $1,500 Third Place: $1,000 We'll plan to have the judges make their decisions by April 30, 2013."