The IJF wins product of the year award from LION Publishers

The IJF has won LION Publishers’s product of the year award for its public-interest database Open By Default.

The announcement was made Thursday evening at LION Publishers’s awards ceremony, part of their annual summit in Chicago. LION Publishers is an industry association of more than 500 online independent news outlets across the U.S. and Canada.

The award recognizes organizations who have “developed a successful and creative short-term or long-term product to strengthen their journalistic impact, financial health, and/or operational resilience.”

“This product stands out for reasons of usability and obvious impact to journalists and community members,” the independent panel of judges said about awarding the recognition to Open By Default. 

“We’ll be looking forward to seeing this evolve and celebrating the good reporting that comes from such easy access to a trove of knowledge. The IJF’s Open By Default was launched in March. It makes previously completed federal access to information requests freely available to the public.

The database began two years ago as a project of Thompson Rivers University law professor Matt Malone with the assistance of graduate student Adam Soames.

Hoping to grow the database and ensure its long-term sustainability, Malone and Soames approached the IJF last year to propose partnering on the project.

Over the following months, Soames worked alongside IJF developers Daniel Nass and Sam Park to expand the database.

And, in March, Open By Default launched on the IJF’s website, sharing just over 20,000 completed access to information requests totalling more than 2.6 million pages.

Since then, the IJF has nearly doubled the number of both completed requests and pages held in the repository and has been cited by other outlets such as the Globe and Mail and CBC News.

Zane Schwartz, chief executive officer of the IJF, said, “Open By Default strengthens democracy by making 5 million pages of internal government documents free for all Canadians. I’m so proud of the entire IJF team for this lovely honour.” 

Alongside the product of the year category, the IJF was previously named as a finalist for LION Publishers’s new business of the year award. 

The IJF is also nominated for the Institute of Nonprofit News’s startup of the year award whose winner will be announced on September 18.

Try out the IJF’s award-winning database for yourself. Search our repository of thousands of internal government documents released through federal access requests.