About This Site
Who built this, why it exists, and what it isn't.
- This site is an independent personal project, not run by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the State of Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Administration, or its Information Policy Analysis Division (the Data Practices Office). The advisory opinions themselves are real public records, reproduced here for easier searching — but this site itself is not an official source.
- Its creator, Ryan Jancik, is not an attorney. Nothing on this site, including the "Understanding Chapter 13" guide and the opinion summaries, has been reviewed by one.
- Everything here — the guide, the topic write-ups, and the AI-generated opinion summaries — is for informational, historical, and educational research purposes only. None of it is legal advice, and none of it is a substitute for reading the actual opinion text or talking to a lawyer about your own situation.
- For anything formal — a filing, a citation, a legal proceeding — consult the Data Practices Office or a certified copy of the record directly, not this mirror, and talk to a licensed Minnesota attorney before making a decision.
- Found a summary that misstates what an opinion says, a broken link, or something that needs a correction or redaction? Report it here — every opinion's page also has a link to report an issue with that specific one.
What this site is
Minnesota's Data Practices Office has published well over a thousand written advisory opinions since the early 1990s, answering real questions about how the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act applies in practice. They're public records and genuinely useful — but the state's own search tools for them are hard to use, and there's no easy way to browse by topic or search the full text.
This site reorganizes that same public archive into something easier to search, browse by topic, and actually read — plus a plain-English "Understanding Chapter 13" guide for people who don't want to read the statute cold. AI assistance was used to help write summaries and the guide content, which is disclosed wherever it applies.
Who built it
This site was built by Ryan Jancik, a computer scientist and data engineer who has also spent more than 16 years in patient-safety, hospital-accountability, and community-safety advocacy — work that has included initiating a federal investigation that led to an "Immediate Jeopardy" citation against a Minnesota hospital, and organizing neighborhood crime-prevention efforts in Brooklyn Park.
That work runs on the same idea this site is built around: data creates accountability, but only if people can actually get to it. This site exists to make one specific slice of public data — Minnesota's Data Practices Advisory Opinions — easier to find, search, and understand. For more about his background, visit jancik.com/about.html.