DocumentCloud’s most powerful feature has always been our users. Every day, that community pushes the boundaries of what can be done with documents, from solo journo-coders extracting data on deadline to the Documenters platform rethinking how to make public meetings more public.
To help drive that community’s impact and collaboration, today we’re launching Add-Ons, an easy way for anyone to launch, maintain, and share new capabilities right within DocumentCloud, ranging from exporting notes to applying machine learning techniques.
To get started, all you need to do is log in to DocumentCloud, select some documents, and then pick an Add-On. It will start running in the background, and then notify you of its progress. Add-Ons can also optionally send you an email, generate files for you, or be configured to integrate with a wide range of external tools, such as Slack, cloud-hosted APIs, or a range of open source packages.
In addition to the Hello World Add-On template that demonstrates basic functionality, we have a few Add-Ons live now that can also serve as a base for your to fork and build on:
Regex Extractor: Let’s you define a Regex string to pull out specified text matches into a spreadsheet across a selection of documents.
PDF Export: Helps you get your PDFs out of DocumentCloud, adding the selected documents into a Zip file that’s then displayed to you.
Note Export: Extracts all the notes on selected documents and saves them as text files you can download.
Bulk Edit: Let’s you update metadata on many documents at once.
SideKick Document Classification: Makes it easy to train a machine learning model to classify documents by an arbitrary type, such as identifying if a document is likely to be an email, a resident complaint, or other categories of records.
Notification Alerts: A simple example of a scheduled automation that lets you adjust a search query and have DocumentCloud alert you if any new results match it.
Currently, running Add-Ons from the web interface requires submitting them through a review process and giving our team a chance to check in, but you can run Add-Ons from the command line or as scheduled GitHub Actions now, and we’ll be adding the ability to directly import and run your own Add-Ons from within the web interface, with no review process, in the coming months.
If you have written an Add-On or have an existing DocumentCloud script or other document analysis tooling you’d like to share as an Add-On for everyone to use, fill out this submission form and our team will follow up with you.
