30,800 orders.
Twelve years.
The questions no one had asked.

The questions an archive cannot answer

Has the Supervisor of Records ordered fewer agencies to release records over the past three years? 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

The Data — live trend lines and tables for the 30,800-order corpus. Begin with: has the rate at which the Supervisor orders disclosure declined since 2022? (Yes, slightly. The detail is on the page.)

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.

The Massachusetts Public Records Law has been called among the weaker open-records regimes in the country. The 2017 reform helped. Whether subsequent administration has kept pace with that promise is — until now — a matter of impression. This project replaces impression with a count.

See the data →