Community Events

What are Community Hype Meetings?

  • These are fun, casual meetings where Transparency Alabama builds community around our research. We’ll talk about what we’ve been working on and how to use existing tools on our website. It’s also a space for Transparency Alabama to hear about the cool tools our community has been building or ideas for tools they’d like to have in the future.

  • Our goal is to offer 1 vitual and 1 in-person meeting per quarter.

  • Our events are always FREE and open to the public.

  • Sign up for the upcoming August 28 Community Hype Meeting here.

Upcoming Community Workshops

  • We’re hosting our first Open Records Request Workshop on August 21! This workshop will be aimed at training our volunteer-base to help build out the Open Records Archive, but you do not have to volunteer with us in order to come to the workshop.

  • We may still be working out kinks in our curriculum or presentation during this first workshop. If you attend the first workshop, we’ll send you a feedback form afterwards. Feedback from this first workshop will help us edit our materials and make future workshops more accessible to wider audiences.

  • Sign up for the upcoming August 21 Open Records Request Workshop here.

Want to Volunteer?

Transparency Alabama is an all volunteer organization (AVO). This means we are currently 100% volunteer-powered. We have multiple volunteer committees for volunteers who are interested in making sustained, long-term committments to our various programs.

Data & Coding Committee:

→ Help us collect and clean campaign finance data

→ Help us get the Campaign Finance Dashboard up and running

→ Help us build out docket.pub

→ Help us automate open records requests (similar to MuckRock)

All-Hands-On-Deck Committee:

→ Help us with the physical setup/breakdown of community events, greeting and directing community members at doors, etc

Crafts Committee:

→ Help us experiment with different crafts for our Make Your Own Merch program. Designed to reduce waste, increase community buy-in, and just be fun!

Government Relations Committee:

→ Are we just here to yell at the government? NO! We strongly believe in distinguishing between corruption and capacity/administrative breakdown. Help us build relationships with local government officials and bridge capacity for communicating with the public.

For Law Students and/or Lawyers:

→ General Community Service: any of the volunteer committees

→ Legal Research Committee (Pro Bono): We have internal legal questions that we are researching but do not have a supervising attorney. This committee functions as a laidback sounding board. We’ll send the statutes and cases we’ve been reading, then have a meeting to talk about them and compare notes. Kind of like a book club.

If you’re interested in becoming a volunteer for Transparency Alabama, please fill out this form: Volunteer Interest Form

Pictured below is our Volunteer of the Year, Scrump, diligently supervising our Founder to ensure the campaign finance data is cleaned properly.