Sanjin is the Open Source Fellow at the MuckRock Foundation which supports both the MuckRock and DocumentCloud platforms.
MuckRock is a non-profit, collaborative news site that brings together journalists, researchers, activists, and regular citizens to request, analyze, and share government documents, making politics more transparent and democracies more informed. MuckRock’s unique form of investigative and accountability journalism has been recognized by the Sunlight Foundation, The Freedom of the Press Foundation, and hundreds of local and national news outlets for its groundbreaking work in areas such as government spending, surveillance, and public safety. DocumentCloud is a platform founded on the belief that if journalists were more open about their sourcing, the public would be more inclined to trust their reporting. The platform is a tool to help journalists share, analyze, annotate and, ultimately, publish source documents to the open web.
At MuckRock/DocumentCloud, Sanjin develops DocumentCloud Add-Ons, which extend the base functionality of the DocumentCloud platform to include features like the ability to extract tables from PDFs, detect personally identifying information in documents, compress PDFs, re-flow PDFs for viewability for e-books and smartphones, transcribe audio in any language from audio or video files hosted on Google Drive, Dropbox, or YouTube, or use powerful machine learning models like GPT-3 to analyze mass amounts of documents. Sanjin also on-boards newsrooms to the DocumentCloud platform and assists newsrooms in technical projects like web-scraping, data extraction, and data visualization. He is also responsible for overseeing the success of MuckRock’s Gateway Grantee projects, each of which are seeking to preserve, analyze and publish critical document collections that are at risk of disappearing or are generally inaccessible.
Before joining MuckRock, Sanjin worked as the community organizing chair and digital security trainer at data transparency and civics organization Lucy Parsons Labs, where he assisted journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders, and activists in threat modeling, risk assessment, and developing security plans on an individual and organizational level as well as acted as the chief recruiter for the non-profit organization.
