The questions an archive cannot answer
What kinds of orders has the Supervisor of Records actually issued — releases, respond-betters, scope clarifications, or fee quotes? Which custodians are most often appealed? Where in the Commonwealth do procedural closes outnumber substantive rulings? Which doctrines have drifted in the case law without anyone noticing?
These are the questions a working journalist asks once and gives up on, because the answers are nowhere — not in the SOR portal, not in the State Reference archive, not in any academic dataset. They require reading every order. We did that, in software, and we kept doing it daily as new orders publish.
What you'll find here
Findings — live trend lines and tables for the 30,800-order corpus. The rate at which the Supervisor issues any order against an agency has held in a 52–58 percent band since the 2017 reform. The narrower rate of orders that actually require records be released is smaller and is currently being refined.
MassTech — a long-running case study in agency transparency failure, told through the records the agency would not produce.
Ask — a question form for journalists and researchers. We answer at low cost; we publish what we find.
Method — the classifier in plain English: what phrases trigger which outcomes, what we strip before classifying, and the known errors we have not yet fixed. Open for audit.