 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. And thank you for joining today's annual Open Meeting. Before we begin, please ensure that you have opened the WebEx participant and chat panels by using the associated icons located at the bottom of your screen. You are welcome to submit written questions throughout the webinar, which will be addressed at the Q&A session of the webinar. To submit a written question, select all panelists from the drop-down menu in the chat panel, then enter your question in the message box provided and sent. Please note all audio connections are muted at this time. If you require technical assistance, please send the chat to the event producer. With that, I'll turn the meeting over to David Ferrier. David, please go ahead. Good morning and welcome to the National Archives. Literally the National Archives. I'm talking to you from 700 Pennsylvania Avenue. Thank you for joining us for our fourth annual meeting of the Office of Government Information Services, the Federal Freedom of Information Act ombudsman. In July is a most appropriate month for OGIS's annual meeting. Fifty-four years ago this month, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed FOIA into law, providing for the public availability of federal department and agency records. In the years since, Congress has amended FOIA, creating OGIS in 2007. The office opened in 2009 and in 2016, mandating that OGIS had an annual meeting to inform the public about its reviews and reports and to receive public comments. When President Johnson signed FOIA into law in 1966, he noted in a signing statement that he did so, quote, with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people's right to know is cherished and guarded, unquote. As the 10th Archivist of the United States, I share that profound pride in our open society, and I'm proud of the work that OGIS does advocating for a federal FOIA process that works for all. OGIS's work facilitating greater access and transparency to federal government records and assisting anyone who seeks help with the FOIA process ties closely to our democracy. OGIS's work also fits squarely into one of the National Archives four strategic goals, make access happen. Later this morning, we'll hear from two members of the FOIA Advisory Committee about the 22 recommendations the committee has sent to me for improving the FOIA process. The committee, whose 20 members I appointed two years ago, has spent the last two years researching, surveying, listening and deliberating to come up with new ways to improve FOIA. The recommendations which the committee approved last month and were delivered to me earlier this month provide a roadmap for some of the work OGIS will do in the next year. Before turning the program over to OGIS Director Alina Simo for an update on OGIS's activities in the last year, a note to the FOIA community. Thank you for the work you do, whether you are a member of the public submitting FOIA requests for records or a member of the Federal Civil Service or a contractor working to fulfill those requests. This is easy amidst the pandemic and racial injustice, but your work, as President Johnson noticed, helps our democracy work. Thank you. Over to you, Alina, to update us on OGIS's activities for the past year. Great. Thank you so much, David. Good morning, everyone. I am Alina Simo, Director of the Office of Government Information Services, or OGIS, and it is my pleasure to welcome all of you to our fourth annual open meeting and our first virtual one. I hope everyone who is joining us today has been staying safe, healthy, and well. And again, thank you for joining us virtually. We are very pleased that Congress has given us the opportunity to provide an update on the review and reports of our office and to allow interested persons to appear and present laurel and written statements. This is a perfect forum to showcase all the great work that OGIS has been doing this past year and briefly cover our activities from the fall of 2019 to the present. We have reserved time at the end of today's session to receive public comments. We will also be monitoring the chat function and we will do our best to summarize any substantive comments we receive via chat during the public comment period. You may also submit any written comments to our email box, ogisopenmeetingatnara.gov. Our annual report for fiscal year 2019 is unique in a couple of different ways. First, we debuted a new and improved and much shorter annual report, a total of 10 substantive pages, not including the chart at the end, but we still managed to highlight all of the important work that OGIS has accomplished. Second, this annual report represents a fiscal year that challenged OGIS in unexpected ways. OGIS began the year with budget constraints while NARA continued under a series of continuing resolutions and prevented us from filling some long pending vacancies. And following the longest shutdown in the history of the federal government, OGIS returned and hit the ground running on all fronts, dispute resolution, compliance, and training and outreach. Let me cover each of these in more detail. Increase to OGIS continued at a pace roughly the same as the previous fiscal year. In fiscal year 2019, we handled and closed 4,649 requests for assistance from both FOIA requesters and agencies. This represents a small decrease from the 4,681 requests for assistance we addressed in fiscal year 2018. But as you can see from this chart, and we have discussed in the past, the increase in our case load from the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2016 on is directly connected to the passage of the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016. The amendments reaffirm the critical role OGIS plays in the FOIA process by requiring agencies to advise requesters of OGIS services at any stage throughout the FOIA administrative process. As in previous years, the majority of those who requested our assistance were individuals seeking help with the FOIA process. Despite the challenges of this past year, we streamlined our dispute resolution process and decreased our backlog by 50%. In fiscal year 2019, we looked closely at the information we shared with requesters to ensure that we are providing information that not only assists with the disputes at hand, but may improves future FOIA requests. We encourage requesters whenever possible to seek assistance directly from the agency in question. For instance, requesting an estimated date of completion using the agency's resources before asking orders to request a date on their behalf. FOIA requires us to report on the number of times each agency engaged in dispute resolution with the assistance of OGIS or the FOIA public liaison. And we have included this graphic to show those agencies with which we have interacted the most frequently in fiscal year 2019. Do not believe these statistics have changed. Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration tend to be our most frequent customers and clients. In the world of compliance, the FOIA statute mandates that OGIS review FOIA policies, procedures and compliance and identify procedures and methods for improving compliance. We do that in a variety of ways, including assessing individual agency FOIA programs, conducting assessments on a broader scale, connecting with agencies for a self-assessment program, and leading and supporting the FOIA advisory committee. We reviewed and updated FOIA regulations from nine departments and agencies in fiscal year 2019. SIGI, FDA, NASA, Department of Interior, Committees for Purchase from People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled Commission of Fine Arts, Department of State, American Battle Monuments Commission, and ETA. We completed and published one issue assessment, leveraging technology and FOIA searches. And we worked with individual agencies on specific compliance issues that arose in the course of providing dispute resolution services. For a third consecutive year, we partnered with NARA colleagues who administer the annual Records Management Self-Assessment, RMSA. As part of this oversight of federal records management programs, NARA conducts the self-assessment to determine whether federal agencies are complying with statutory and regulatory records management requirements. The partnership with the Chief Records Officer has assisted us with expanding a review of agency FOIA policies and procedures, identifying potential compliance issues that merit further exploration, and setting OGIS's goals and priorities. We published our assessment of the Department of Education, our 13th assessment of an agency FOIA program since OGIS established its compliance program. OGIS recommended seven actions that the department should take to comply with FOIA, including updating its FOIA regulations to reflect amendments to the FOIA, as well as the department's processes for implementing substantive and procedural changes. The department published its updated FOIA regulation early in fiscal year 2020. Our work with the FOIA Advisory Committee kept us fully engaged in a number of ways. The 2018-2020 term of the committee held four public meetings, a range of experts presented to the committee on such topics as inspector general audits with agency FOIA and records management programs, academic research on FOIA administration and trends, including how first-party requests dominate from agency FOIA programs, and the use of technology in administering FOIA. In between full committee meetings, the committee's three subcommittees, records management, time volume, and vision, met and began drafting proposed recommendations to the archivist. More on this later today. We also monitored and reported on the progress of prior committee recommendations, and I am pleased to report that we are able to complete five of eight committee recommendations thus far, and two additional recommendations are currently in progress, and we anticipate being able to complete them by the end of this year. OGIS continued its outreach efforts this past year. We organized another successful Sunshine League program that featured a conversation between archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, and Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, Farrell-Howell. The event also included panel discussions on the past, present, and future of OGIS, and the future of electronic record keeping. We hosted two public meetings of the Chief of Officers' Council, along with the DOJ Office of Information Policy, during which we discussed important issues with FOIA professionals across the federal government. And OGIS staff presented at a variety of organizations, including the American Society of Actless Professionals and the Coalition of Federal Ombudsman, and the FOIA program sponsored by the Census Bureau and CDC. We were able to teach eight sessions of FOIA dispute resolution skills for FOIA professionals, seven agencies specific and one interagency one. Unfortunately, our ability to offer these training courses has been significantly curtailed during the pandemic, but we are examining ways to reach for our training for online offering. In our two previous panel reports, we noted an increased demand for training tailored to the needs of individual agencies. This trend continued in fiscal year 2019 as we presented agency-specific training to the FDA, DHS, ETA, Department of Agriculture, DOD, and Department of the Treasury. And in November 2018, we also provided one interagency session. Despite the challenges we have all been facing during the COVID-19 pandemic, I am very proud to say that OGIS was able to adapt and transition smoothly within a matter of weeks to full-time telework. Since mid-March of this year, we have accomplished an amazing amount of work. We have received 1,238 new requests for mediation or unbiased assistance. We have closed 1,209 such requests. We have received and closed 403 telephone calls for mediation or unbiased assistance. We have co-hosted a roundtable discussion with OIP and co-chairs of Chief FOIA Office of Council Technology Committee to discuss technology issues with other government FOIA professionals. We have held two public FOIA Advisory Committee meetings. We have completed and published the FOIA Advisory Committee's final report and recommendation. We have hosted a successful webinar through our CDC FOIA program to discuss their FOIA issues and constraints during the COVID-19 pandemic. And we have published an assessment regarding how agencies are doing and informing requesters via their website about constraints on their FOIA processing capabilities during this time. As many of you know, the FOIA Advisory Committee, which reports to the Archivist of the United States, provides a forum for public discussion of FOIA issues and offers members of the public the opportunity to provide feedback and ideas for improving the FOIA process. The Archivist has renewed the committee's charter full term 2020-2022, and I am excited to continue to chair the next committee term. We were pleased to receive a number of nominations, which the Archivist will review, and we will announce the new committee members before our first meeting of the next term, which is scheduled for Thursday, September 10th. Today, we are excited to be able to discuss the work of the third term of the FOIA Advisory Committee and their recently issued final report and recommendation. We have a distinguished panel today, and I am very pleased to introduce our moderator of this panel, Kirsten Mitchell, and she in turn will introduce our panelists. Kirsten wears many hats, including as the compliance team lead with OGIS. She began her work at OGIS as a facilitator and has helped to resolve disputes between FOIA requesters and federal agencies in hundreds of cases. Kirsten is also serving as the president of the American Society of Actors Professionals, an organization that brings FOIA professionals and the requester community together to collaboratively improve access to information and privacy processes. Before joining OGIS in 2010, she worked at the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Sunshine Government and Government Initiative, a coalition of media groups that worked to gain passage of the Open Government Act of 2007, the tremendous FOIA, and created OGIS. As a former journalist, Kirsten frequently used state and federal records requests to shine a light on how government operates, most recently with the New York Times Company. Kirsten earned her undergraduate degree in English from Mary Washington College and her graduate degree in journalism there from American University. But the most important hat for today's purposes that Kirsten has learned also gallantly for the last two years has been as the designated federal officer for the FOIA Advisory Committee. So you may ask, what does the designated federal officer or DFO do? Beyond the core duties required by the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the DFO assures that accurate records are kept to the committee's deliberations and minutes of meetings are prepared and certified, sends agendas and copies of all related information to members before meetings, makes logistical arrangements for the meetings and arranges for resource persons, guest speakers, and supplementary materials, prepares federal register notices, maintains all committee documents, attends all subcommittee meetings, and this is my favorite one, sits next to the chair for communication during meetings and makes sure that committee business is conducted according to all applicable regulations policies and procedures. So she keeps me on track. I definitely could not have succeeded as the chair of the committee without Kirsten's amazing support and organizational skills. She has helped bring to the finish line what we will be discussing next. So without further ado, Kirsten, I'm going to turn it over to you and have you take over the slides. Okay. Thank you, Elena. That was a lovely introduction and I just want to say I don't do this alone. I have lots of help here at the National Archives for all of these various jobs. So I will introduce our panelists. Jason Barron really needs no introduction but a few words. He has had a long and distinguished career as an expert in electronic record keeping and e-discovery for which he is nationally and indeed internationally known. He's currently with the firm Fagri Drinker. He was the first appointed director of litigation for the National Archives and Records Administration for 13 years. Prior to that, he was a trial lawyer and senior counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice where he acted as lead counsel on a number of FOIA lawsuits. Jason has been quoted in many publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He has been invited to appear on CNN, MSNBC, NPR and Good Morning America. And it is a good morning indeed when the FOIA world can hear from Jason Barron. Patricia West has had a long and distinguished career at five federal agencies, most recently as Deputy Assistant General Counsel in the FOIA branch of the National Naval Relations Board. She has also worked at three cabinet level agencies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as well as the Export-Import Bank. I love the wide variety of experience that Patricia brings. Patricia is a big believer in collaboration and in picking up the phone to talk with requesters. One of my favorite stories about Patricia is she once greatly exceeded a requester's expectations when she phoned him to seek clarification on his FOIA request and explain types of agency records. He was a bit surprised that he got a call from a government official, and this call happened years ago. But to this day, Patricia often thinks of this gentleman whenever she phones requesters. Jason and Patricia were both on the final report working group that compiled and wrote the final report from various subcommittee reports, which we'll hear more about in a little bit. But I want to also recognize Abby Mosheim of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Sean Molten of the Project on Government Oversight who worked with Jason and Patricia in getting this final report to print, if you will. So before launching into the 22 recommendations, I just want to give some real quick background on the FOIA Advisory Committee. So as Alina mentioned earlier, the archivist signed the charter for the upcoming FOIA Advisory Committee earlier a few weeks ago. It's very much like the previous charter. Balance is very, very important. There are no more than 20 individuals from inside and outside the government, and they are tasked with studying the federal FOIA landscape across the executive branch and making recommendations to Archivist David Ferriero. Much more about the committee is available on the FOIA website, and the link is here on the slides. So this term of the Federal FOIA Advisory Committee decided in 2018 to form three subcommittees devoted to record management, time and volume issues, and a vision subcommittee looking at the future of FOIA. So before turning it over, I will give you a quick overview of each of the committees. Each subcommittee, as I mentioned earlier, submitted a report which is available on the FOIA Advisory Committee website. The recommendations from the three subcommittees were in turn merged into the single set of recommendations. Each subcommittee had two co-chairs, one from inside the government and one from outside the government. So I want to quickly mention the members who were the co-chairs. For time and volume, Emily Creighton of the American Immigration Council was the non-government co-chair and Bradley White of the Department of Homeland Security was the government co-chair. What's interesting about the American Immigration Council is there is no court discovery in immigration proceeding. So FOIA is the tool that one uses to get information from the government. So very big user of FOIA. The Department of Homeland Security and Bradley White hails from in FY 2019 process nearly 430,000 FOIA requests or 49% of all FOIA requests processed that fiscal year. So the vision of the subcommittee chair, persons were Joan Kaminer of the Environmental Protection Agency and Chris Knox of Deloitte. EPA processed more than 9,500 requests in FY 2019. So much smaller than DHS but still a big force in FOIA and Deloitte is a government contractor with a lot of work with FOIA at Discovery. And then finally, records management. Jason Barron, as I introduced earlier with Fagery Drinker, partnered with Lyon Law and the Department of the Treasury. Ryan is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Privacy, Transparency and Records so he wears many hats overseeing both FOIA and records management which as you'll hear from Jason is an important partnership. Let's start with records management since nine of the 22 recommendations fall into records management. Jason, you and Ryan chaired the records management subcommittee. Can you give a brief overview of those recommendations and put them into perspective? Why are they important? Thanks Kirsten and thank you Alina and Kirsten for having me as part of this webinar. I just want to say at the very top that the 13 years that I spent at the National Archives were some of the happiest years in my time in government working with Artemis David Ferriero and with General Counsel Gary Stern and the people in the General Counsel's office. So I had a mission coming into the FOIA Advisory Committee term to think about the subject of records more holistically, not just to have a silo with FOIA and a silo with the Federal Records Act. And what I thought that the subcommittee should do is to think about recommendations that would bridge that gap because in my experience in 33 years in government at the Justice Department and at NARA, FOIA people were over here and records officers were over here and the lawyers were in a third place and while they talked to each other sometimes there are different languages and cultures that are present and so why not have recommendations that try to integrate that along with new technology and new concepts that are coming into the 21st century across the board on FOIA and the Federal Records Act. So that's how I conceived and Ryan conceived the records boundaries subcommittee. So we'll go to the next slide person and we'll just go into the recommendations. Now the recommendations on these slides are all over the place where we just took several of them and they're not in the order of the final report but they're all part of the final report. The first one that I want to talk about recommendation four is that we believe that there should be training about records management for FOIA officers. So whether it's OIP or being conducted in some other place if there's going to be a module for FOIA if there's training for FOIA there should be a module for records management embedded within the FOIA training. Similarly at the National Archives there's a lot of training on records management issues but perhaps there should be a bit of emphasis on highlighting FOIA for those individuals that are part of records management throughout the government and so it seems to me that you have the definition of federal record you have the definition of agency record you have a lot in common with these communities and clearly searches on record systems so it seems to be training was very important and so we put that right up in the recommendations very near the beginning. Next slide. We also thought Ryan in particular and the rest of our subcommittee thought that we should recommend that guidance be put up on FOIA websites that are related to records management. FOIA websites vary throughout the government different agencies do different things but some have references to record schedules and as part of their website but why not recommend that this is more generally the case that agencies put up records management related materials on their website so the public can have a roadmap of sorts. Now there are other ways that agencies put up guides to FOIA requesters but it seems to us that it would be useful and helpful to have records management related materials particularly record schedules but not limited to that. Next slide. So we also looked at how agencies are putting up FOIA documents that have been released in online and while sub agencies use some services like FOIA online.gov we thought that a good recommendation would be for agencies to work towards the goal of giving access to records in central repositories in standardized ways using standardized metadata in addition to providing access on agency websites. OIP has issued guidance on metadata and in the final report we talked at some length about how agencies could accomplish this including with pointers from FOIA.gov and increased use of other repositories so it's something for agencies to consider. It would help the public access to have these kind of repositories to go to. Next slide. So the idea of FOIA should be integrated we thought in what NARA's initiative is which is known as FERMI, the Federal Electronic Records Modernization Initiative and NARA was very willing to think about this and is thinking about this in terms of a use case for access. FERMI is an approach that will ultimately result in a standardized interoperable RN solution across government using what are universal electronic records management requirements and access falls within the six categories of FERMI under use and in the spreadsheets and the materials that are on the FERMI website one can see that there should be some incorporation of access issues like FOIA so we are encouraging a use case for FOIA and agencies will become more familiar with FERMI over time. Our next slide. We also heard from various members of inspector's general offices in one of our public meetings and it did trigger a thought in our minds that we would recommend that the chair of STIGI the overarching body that inspector's general need and discuss policy issues and issues of oversight that STIGI considered designating a crosscutting project or making as a priority area the issue of how agencies provide FOIA access in particularly the records of electronic or digital form. This is something that I think is very important. I think inspector's general play can play a prominent role in pushing agencies to consider new and different ways of going about and to improve what they do and so some inspector general supervision is a worthy goal and so we are recommending that STIGI consider this and we hope that they take action on it in the future. Next slide. My as people who know me know that I have been pushing e-discovery, pushing issues with respect to technology for some time did so with the government and so we wanted to talk a little bit about here, about recommendations that go to machine readability e-discovery and to chief data officers as the new way of thinking about data and information and government. So we'll go to the next slide. So one of the recommendations that we came forward with was that FOIA documents released on FOIA websites whether they're central repositories or whether they're on agency web pages should be open legible machine readable and machine actionable. So what does that mean? We all know what legible means. Good copies that are easy to read should be up but with respect to the other terms this can vary over a spectrum. We have some agencies that we noted are still putting up PDFs or tipped images that cannot be read as text. They need to be OCR using optical character recognition and that's a problem but beyond that there are new technologies to embrace like XML or JSON or HTML or using dot CSV that's a way of being able to download spreadsheets. So the report goes into more detail on this but it seems to us that there's an opportunity to make the documents that are released more user friendly and so we're recommending this. Next slide. Okay, so this is one of my favorites Gerson and Patricia so as you both know that I've been on a soapbox for probably 15 years to have lawyers embrace eDiscovery and now for a larger community to embrace eDiscovery. When I and others on the subcommittee read chief FOIA officer reports that go into OIT every year what I found is that there is an embrace of some eDiscovery tools in federal agencies but there could be more done in this area and what the report recommends is that agencies give serious consideration to what in the private sector we're calling technology assistant review or predictive coding so in the larger requests that involve tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of documents it would be much more efficient for the FOIA process to incorporate what are these advanced search techniques so it's not for every FOIA request obviously but in the larger realm and the more complex realm of requests agencies should think about this and they should think more generally about eDiscovery tools anyway with even more modest requests and so we go on at length about that and there is an element of the discussion in the report about the tools that are used for email and capstone repositories every agency that has signed up for capstone that volunteered to do capstone and I think there are on the order of 200 of them are having a universe of being preserved for seven years in most cases and permanently for senior executives and so it becomes important over time if a lot of email is being preserved in a repository to be able to search it adequately and so eDiscovery tools will help and there should be I think a more robust discussion in government about using them so I'll get off my soapbox there and go on to the next recommendation so this is another favorite of mine and it will come up in another form later but we are in an era where the foundations of evidence-based policy-making act of 2019 has triggered a requirement that each agency appoint a chief data officer which is that person is going to in turn be part of a chief data officer council and the council has met at least ones so far this year the importance of CDOs is that they are tasked through OMB guidance to think about the data life cycle and the life cycle of information and part of a working group at each agency data governance body that the CDO chairs is going to be a chief FOIA officer and others in senior officials who are talking about data that each agency has and I think it's important and the subcommittee thought it was important to recommend that in that discussion particularly from the narrow liaison but from others to enhance the discussion by bringing in considerations of FOIA and record keeping when you are discussing data I can tell you that this is another aspect of siloing where if we don't have that conversation with each agency the risk is is that CDOs and people in that community are not going to be thinking about FOIA and record keeping very much when they are looking at data quality and the types of data that agencies have but it's clear to me and to the subcommittee that there really is a very close connection here and so we recommended that that there is an interaction and a teaching moment for the larger CDO community about records. Next slide. So that's it from me and I'll turn it back to Kirsten. Okay, thank you Jason for that brief overview so before turning it over to Patricia I have a couple of questions for you. I heard you say a couple of times you have a piece that you really liked a lot but which one of all of these is your favorite recommendation of these that you have just presented? That's sort of like who's my favorite child? Well I actually have one. Exactly. Easy for me. Look I've already said that e-discovery has been something that I have been focusing on for a very large part of my career because frankly when I was at the National Archives we had the tobacco lawsuit and I was tasked to search through 30 million Clinton administration emails and the situation has only gotten bigger National Archives has hundreds of millions of emails to search through and agencies as well through capstone repositories and just because every agency is keeping a lot of electronic stuff that in all sorts of forms it is incumbent. It is absolutely important to search. You can't accumulate records without being able to search them. What's the purpose? The strategic goal is to make access happen. You need to have some means of accessing these incredibly large repositories and so that's why I've been pushing the tools that lawyers have developed in the e-discovery space to both records officers and FOIA officers. Let me ask you one other question and that is what ideas do you have for getting this implemented for the FOIA officer at any federal agency? What guidelines should he or she use? Well, across these recommendations and in fact across all of the recommendations, the one that Patricia is going to discuss as well and we're going to come back to there is obviously a need for those experts in FOIA to be talking to others at the agency. The silo concept has got to go but FOIA officers are not designated themselves as the chief FOIA officer at an agency who have poured up to that chief FOIA officer and that officer sits with other senior officials in what I call the C-suite but CISOs, CFOs general counsels CISOs and you name it and chief privacy officers so there needs to be a conversation which we call information governance a larger conversation that includes the FOIA professionals on staff and if you can get a champion to hear you across the board the kind of projects that a FOIA office wants to engage in then you're a lot of the way there you obviously want to have small wins in the FOIA area before you ask for huge amounts of money and expenditures in the budget and there isn't a whole lot of money in the government to do very much of a lot of things but I think the FOIA officer should be talking to others and not just thinking of her job or his job as simply isolated and talking to only key individuals on FOIA requests. Okay great so excellent advice forming partnerships and communicating Patricia I am going to turn this over to you to go over the recommendations from the time volume subcommittee and I understand that the subcommittees that you were on conducted surveys of FOIA officers and FOIA requesters so we'd love to hear a bit about that as you go through the recommendations Sure Sure yeah just to well first I want to say when we put this presentation together we did decide to give everyone the recommendations broken down by the subcommittees so when you see these different numbers like one and ten and five all over the place just like you know in the report itself it's organized we've broken it out in the report by who the recommendations would go to if they were to OGIS or OIP the agencies were to the chief FOIA officers counselor to congress so as Kirsten mentioned the time volume subcommittee did have a survey put together a survey specific questions were requesters and specific questions were federal FOIA professionals and the survey was sent out to different networks of the subcommittee members as well as a big thank you to Claire Shamley and the American Society of Access professionals they were very helpful to went out to their network and as I said the surveys were specifically drafted for one for FOIA professionals and one for requesters and the decision among the committee members was to write open ended questions because they really wanted to hear the voices of the folks who responded to the survey and not be limited by multiple choices so the results of the surveys are attached to the subcommittees report and in it it does have the responses broken down by percentages but also there's a nice word cloud in there so you can see some of the different language that came through what I thought interesting in the survey was one of the questions for the requesters was what is your biggest question about the FOIA process and for all of them the biggest question was what is the process and then the flip side of that question FOIA agency professionals were asked what do you think is the biggest area of confusion among requesters and they identified it as knowledge about the process it's interesting because a lot of times the responses from the FOIA professionals and from the requestor community almost mirrored each other for example we had some questions in there regarding training for FOIA professionals and the FOIA professionals responding to the survey almost half of them said that they felt they did not receive adequate training among the FOIA requestor community roughly 25% of them felt that FOIA professionals could use training and that would help make the process be more efficient so again we have this almost mirror of the responses another item that I found interesting but not surprising is that requesters roughly 50% of them willing to narrow the scope of their request and in my experience I found that to be true a lot of requesters are willing to narrow the scope of the request once they understand what the records are and the availability and then another interesting point was over 90% of the requesters before they filed a FOIA request were doing research before they filed that request so that they could have properly crafted FOIA request those were some interesting responses the one that was the most interesting to me I'll have to say was among FOIA agency professionals the question was asked if they had a magic wand to fix FOIA what would they do and the top response was to fix internal process which I found very interesting and then the second the second largest response was allow more time to process cases which a lot of us would like much more than 20 working days to get a request out so those were just to give you a highlight about some of the responses so what I'd like to turn your attention to is recommendation 5 that would be the next 5 Kirsten thank you recommendation came out of the time volume committee and it's to recommend that OIP issue guidance to allow agencies requesting agencies to have mandatory FOIA training for their employees and also an additional recommendation that OGIS and OIP undertake a study of the agency's current training requirements so the committee came up with this recommendation based upon the responses from the survey that both the FOIA agency professionals and the requester community thought more training would be helpful it's also interesting to note that under the FOIA the chief FOIA officer required to offer training to the agency staff so while DOJ offers training and ASAP offers training this is really to have really provide more training within the agency or to encourage folks to be able to attend the different DOJ training next slide please Kirsten this recommendation one is the committee recommends that OGIS undertake an assessment of the information that's made on the FOIA agency's website and for OGIS to also provide guidance on how agencies could improve their online descriptions of the process and again this goes back to the survey where a lot of requesters are not familiar with the process and so the best way to address that is to have the best in the brightest websites that we can really explain the process clearly to the requester next slide please Kirsten okay recommendation 13 this recommendation is that agencies conduct a review of their staffing and their technology maybe every two years to identify the resources that they need to handle the FOIA request demands I really was so pleased when one of my colleagues made this recommendation at the end of last the fiscal year when I completed the FOIA annual report I have started this process and I personally have found it helpful in managing workload and making recommendations regarding staffing needs and new technology so I really like this recommendation the next recommendation this recommendation is it's the the subcommittee recommends that OGIS and OIP have agencies identify certain records that are frequently requested by first parties and requesters and to implement a process records accessible without requiring individuals to have to go through the FOIA process it's kind of interesting because this recommendation and the next recommendation came out of a subcommittee where we're looking at what other countries were doing with their Freedom of Information Act requests wanted to try and find ideas from other countries but what we came to stumble upon was Professor Margaret had done a presentation for the committee on first person FOIA and through her research she came to find that a good portion of FOIA requests are filed by first party requesters and so we thought wouldn't this be great if we could find a way where requesters are going to be able to get their own records with having to go through FOIA and some agencies have some process the FBI for criminal background and checks we have a process in place also the veterans administration has a veterans benefit management system where veterans and their legal counsel can use that to obtain the records so the next recommendation recommendation 15 this one we're recommending that agencies try and provide a way to allow information be provided to the public outside of FOIA including on in online databases where the records basically go to the part of the agency's mission and two examples that we have for that one is the copyright office has a public catalog of all the copyright registrations and by having this this catalog available it really has cut down on the number of FOIA requests that they need another example is from the U.S. from the U.S. consumer protection safety commission they have a public database regarding safety of consumer products again having that available significantly decreased the number of FOIA requests that they have received the next recommendation is the committee recommended that OIP collect information through the chief FOIA officer report regarding agency's standard operating procedures and the thought behind this again was we look back to the survey where a lot of federal FOIA professionals felt that their their magic one wish was to fix the FOIA was to fix internal processes and so by having a well-drafted standard operating procedure that's going to have processes in place and confusion and frustration but also very, very helpful in training staff and training new employees and so that's how we came up with this recommendation those are all of the time volume recommendations the next ones come from the vision subcommittee which I was also a member of the vision subcommittee and the vision subcommittee I'm a lawyer so I'm not used to doing this but we came up with a mission statement to set us on the right track for this subcommittee and so I won't read it all to you but I will point out that our strategic plan was to raise the priority of FOIA within the executive branch reconsider the model of OGIS within the FOIA community increase accountability for transparency manage expectations between the community and stressing the need for increased and continued financial support that's quite a visionary mission statement I'm really proud that we were really able to look into all of these measures the majority of which we came up with recommendations so the first recommendation this is the committee recommends that OGIS and OIP together help agencies in establishing briefings for senior leaders especially during transitions or when you have new leadership in and this type of training our thought would allow leadership to have an understanding of FOIA the resources and the obligations and also to educate leadership on the expectations of the FOIA process as well as records management and you know the goal here is to ensure that senior leadership understands their responsibilities but by having DOJ and OIP create a training together that's really going to assist agencies in educating their leadership because when you say this is a training from DOJ and the OGIS together that I believe would speak volumes to leadership versus the FOIA officer trying to encourage a training. The next recommendation for this one the committee recommended that OGIS and OIP examine the FOIA performance measures that are in the agency performance plans in order to encourage agencies to include FOIA in their performance plans what's up behind this is if you do have FOIA metrics or FOIA performance measures in your agency performance plan your leadership will be more invested and also have a better understanding of your FOIA process and then the second part of this recommendation is after OGIS examine the measures that they submit the results of their assessment and any recommendations that they have to Congress and the president. So the next two recommendations again are from the vision subcommittee but these recommendations instead of directed towards agencies or to OGIS and OIP therefore the chief FOIA officers counsel. And the first one we have we propose to the chief FOIA officers counsel that they recommend agency leadership annually issue a memorandum reminding employees of their responsibilities under FOIA and I can I can tell you that I've was at DOE and USDA when the secretary issued such a memorandum and it was very powerful and it really it really helped inform the employees of their the importance of FOIA the tight deadline that they were under and in many of the offices we're a little more understanding about the pressures we're under and we're able to better work with us. I've also been at NLRB we've also issued a similar memo during sunshine week which is a nice time of the year to issue such a memo. So our thought is that if the chief FOIA officer for each agency comes back to the agency and recommends this type of memo that that the leadership would be amenable to such a memorandum and the next recommendation that is directed to the chief FOIA officers counsel is for the creation of a committee for top agency collaboration and the goal for this committee would be to would be to research revenue resources for FOIA programs also to promote initiatives for career career trajectories for FOIA professionals and then lastly to recommend models to align with the agency resources and the goal of this recommendation coming from the vision subcommittee is to ensure that FOIA programs are well funded and it's a really it's such a creative recommendation and I know in the past committee the prior committee similar recommendation was made for a technology committee through the chief FOIA officers counsel and that was greatly successful so I look forward to seeing what this committee comes up with. So next the vision committee came up with recommendations for congress and the first recommendations to congress the committee recommended that congress engage more in oversight of the FOIA and the problems with implementing the FOIA and encourage congress to hold more hearings and also to strengthen the office of government information services with more authority and expanded resources so again the goal of this recommendation was for there to be more government oversight FOIA administration and the thought behind holding more hearings in congress on FOIA was so that problems could be discussed and then we could identify solutions to these problems and the other thought with strengthening OGIS giving them more authority and more resources is in the short time the operation of OGIS they've really been able, they've really had a huge impact in the FOIA community and to be underfunded and underauthorized it's hard, it's difficult for Congress to be FOIA across the government and then the second recommendation that the committee had for congress was to ask congress to properly fund FOIA offices and ensure that agencies receive the resources in order to do their job and again the goal here for this recommendation is to ensure that FOIA programs are well funded it's interesting to note that in the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 agencies as well as OGIS had more duties and responsibilities under the FOIA and it specifically said in that act that yes there's more tasks but there's no additional funding so I think this recommendation really tries to make up for that and as you read the report there's some ideas under this recommendation about what could be done and one is that congress could require that the FOIA office be a budget line item for agencies and that way congress could directly appropriate FOIA funds for the last of these recommendations to congress Thank you Patricia so many questions I heard you say OGIS quite a lot I just wanted to let all the attendees know that we at OGIS have already started meeting to come up with a strategic plan for implementing these recommendations and mostly through forming partnerships with colleagues here at the National Archives partnerships with the Office of Information Policy over at the Department of Justice partnerships with the FOIA Officers Council which Alina chairs so I just wanted to let folks know that we are on it I also wanted to let everyone know that we will be posting a stream of this meeting on our YouTube channel when it becomes available when the stream becomes available Patricia, a question for you the same one I asked Jason of all of these recommendations that we've just been through which one is your favorite and why? Okay, that's tough because I like them all but well like absolute favorite one is the last one that I discussed and that's about having Congress provide more money for the FOIA Officers I think if we have more resources we would better meet our 20-day working deadlines so I'm a huge fan of that one but another one that I absolutely love is the idea of agencies being able to look for records that first-party requesters ask for and to try and find a different process for individuals to be able to get their own records instead of having to go through FOIA which oftentimes there's great delays and difficult for them to get their records in a timely manner Great, thank you I have another question and that is what ideas do you have for implementation of some of these recommendations for the typical FOIA Officer at an agency somewhere in the government? Yeah, that's a great question Well, first of all I think for training I will say this I think you can do some great in-house trainings with your FOIA team but also now DOJ has a lot of their trainings available virtually online I think for those of us in the DC area we're a bit spoiled because we get to go to the OGIS and DOJ trainings and folks not in the DC area don't have that availability but now a lot of things I've heard you all recently say that you're going to try and do your dispute resolution training online and I think that right there you can knock off the training I will say this we had OGIS come to our agency and do a dispute resolution here to our agency and it was really helpful but the other thoughts that I had were for your FOIA website that I think is is an easy fix I think if you can work with your OCIO team and use the DOJ guidance DOJ came out with a guide so website guidance I believe 2.0 which is really helpful as well as guidance that they have in their assessment toolkit I think it provides a lot of help and these are things that hopefully with the website wouldn't cost you too much money but the other thoughts that folks can do with money is doing the assessment of staff and technology to identify your resources for your future FOIA demand that can be done by the FOIA officer and her staff another item that doesn't cost any money would be to work with leadership for your chief FOIA food for your performance measures in the agency performance plan again that doesn't cost anything and another no cost item is the memo on the importance of FOIA having the secretary or the agency had send that out and even if you do it as a manual item during sunshine week in March would be great and this was a recommendation that was put out by OGIS I believe back in 2012 2013 and I believe NARA started it so those are some no cost items that you can really implement now and you can take the report and give this to your leadership and I think it will help you be able to implement some of these items okay that's great I love the emphasis on no cost at least in terms of financial resources yes yeah nobody no one has to Google money you know it's always hard to say it's going to cost but when it's free it's almost a no brainer right so I am going to turn this back over to Jason to talk about some future recommendations but before I do Jason do you have any questions for Patricia about what she has just gone over I think Patricia has done a great job the I think Patricia and I talked about how the next FOIA advisory committee can help with implementing some of these recommendations and so Patricia do you think that that the FOIA advisory committee can play a role in helping agencies to get to make progress well that was a recommendation or a suggestion that was put into the committee's final report and I and that was one of your suggestions Jason and I love that suggestion I mean it's great for the committee to come up with all these recommendations but you know a recommendation is great but you need some help to get them implemented and so I love the suggestion to have this next FOIA advisory committee assist with the implementation of these I hope it does I do too Jason over to you for the past, present and future right so we had a section of the report that looking to the future and the archivist David Ferriero has been looking to the future for some time back 2012 he spearheaded a managing government records directive that really changed the course of how email went from print of paper to an electronic process after 2016 electronic management and set up a deadline at the end of the decade for making further progress towards electronic government and then more recently Mr. Ferriero and OMB issued M1921 and that memo transitions to electronic records which is cited several times in the final report is talking about the future talking about how we get to 2022 and going digital both at NARA as well as managing electronic records of government. What this recommendation purports to do is to ask the archivist to continue in taking a leadership role particularly on what is increasingly thought of as data strategies so that they incorporate FOIA access and federal record keeping. This dovetails with the earlier recommendation about a CDO officer and officers reporting to the CDO council it is pretty clear to a number of us that where the hockey puck is going over the next decade and that is increased tension and emphasis to data and data strategies and a life cycle of data. It is enormously important that the frameworks of FOIA that have been with us since 1966 and the Federal Records Act which goes back to 1950 in its current major form and even before that get incorporated in notions of that and incorporating in conversations about data strategy going forward and so one would like to see references to FOIA and the Federal Records Act in various OMB memos and whatever products are coming out and I think the archivist can continue to play a really visionary and a strategic role in that and so that is one of our look to the future recommendations. Next slide. So the last recommendation 22 report is really looking to the future and what we are saying is that the archivist should work with other governmental components and industry in kind of R&D and research into AI to artificial intelligence and the machine learning to improve FOIA and to improve searches through electronic record repositories. Wouldn't it be nice to the FOIA community if a through an algorithm through machine learning could make your job easier by identifying those records in a greater collection that are, that may have sensitivities to them, that may have exempt material that is subject to withholding either in whole or in part. This is an aspirational goal but I think it's within the capability of current machine learning technologies and I think there's if we can harness various components of government that already are involved in a large variety of AI activities under an executive order that's been issued in this administration and just generally because they see what the future is we can point practical applications to record keeping auto classification and FOIA in terms of filtering content that would add search that would all be great and so we wrote this in as something that pointing to the work that's clearly going to come over the next few years. Great thank you Jason so that is all of the recommendations and we want to turn it over to Q&A but before we do I have one last question for both of you and that is can you talk a little bit about how your experience has been serving on this term FOIA advisory committee? For me it was really an honor to be on this committee and I have to say it was one of the highlights of my career. On this committee I served with other federal government, federal government FOIA professionals we had some historians and professors representatives from Mutfrock and Pogo and Tom Sussman and Jason were huge resources for us and I learned so much it never would dawn on me to come up with a mission statement and what a beautiful thing that was and many of my colleagues came up with recommendations that never occurred to me and they were fantastic ideas what I do love is that everyone on the committee was very passionate but we were united in a common goal and it was also interesting to me that federal agency folks and the requester community folks they had advocacy for the other they understood each other's struggles and at the end of the day we really are there for a common goal and the requester want their records in a timely manner and agencies want to provide these records in a timely manner so to be able to work with this group and try and find some real positive solutions was just a wonderful experience I'm grateful that I had the opportunity Thank you Jason What is your experience? So I think I've already said that I loved working at the National Archives and it was a great joy to be able to come back into an environment where I'm working with all of you and OGIS Alina and Kirsten and Jesse and others and Martha and then working with other federal agencies as part of the advisory group I came in with some degree of skepticism as to how much we could accomplish I think the surprising thing to me and something that was terrific was that the group that comprised the third term came up with 22 recommendations that if implemented could really make progress in this area they're not small board they are thinking about ways that systemically we can improve FOIA throughout the government and so I'm very happy with the efforts that across the board that have been made and I found the time to be very interesting and I look forward to watching the work of Alina sharing the next term Great, well thank you Jason I'm now going to open it up for questions Jesse, I don't know that we've gotten any via chat but I just wanted to let all participants know that if you have a question you can please chat it to us in the chat box or our event producer to go to the open the phone line Absolutely ladies and gentlemen so as a reminder to submit a written question select all powers from the drop down menu in the chat panel answer your question in the message box provided and send alternatively pressing pound two on your telephone keypad will enter you into the question queue you will hear a notification pressing pound two will enter you into the verbal question queue Alina, while we are waiting did you have any questions for Jason and Patricia? No, I think they both did an excellent job of presenting these different recommendations I'm not sure if you pointed this out but we had the privilege of working with Jason and Patricia along this Abbey no time on drafting the final report and one of the reasons that I thought Jason and Patricia would be ideal in presenting these is not only where they great participants in the process and very informed participants but knowing all the nitty gritty details of the final report making sure all the eyes were dotted all the teeth were crossed they definitely put a lot of labor into that process I am very thankful I know Patricia you are too Yes, indeed and just one thing Jason mentioned Jesse Kraft who is the National Archives Historian we were lucky to have her detailed to ODIF for the past several months to help with advisory committee duties and that's been very helpful So any questions? Oh right I currently see no questions in the question queues of the telephone Okay so we've got a shy audience today I'm actually going to ask a question if I could Going back to the very beginning of this discussion Jason you mentioned the silos and you mentioned the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act and how they define records differently Can you discuss that at all? Well those definitions are not exactly the same for one thing the two sides have a slightly different scope FOIA covers the executive branch and not the legislative or judicial branches the Federal Records Act covers not only the executive branch but portions of the legislative and judicial branch so what is defined as a Federal Record is a little broader but the definition itself agency records excluded from that are personal records under the Federal Records Act there are different a different way of thinking about it there's Federal Records, there are non records so there's that in my view they're very, very close and it is unfortunate that they're dealt with in agencies by usually by different people and different processes without a hundred percent knowledge for example let's just pick one of my favorite topics capstone so capstone is a policy that's a voluntary policy that agencies have adopted for e-mail and the question I would have to the FOIA office the FOIA officers on watching this is to what extent are you aware of what your agency is doing with respect to capstone policies and to what extent you're incorporating thinking about searching against capstone repositories for FOIA request the records officers know all about it or they should your agency has implemented FOIA officers may or may not know and that's come out in various surveys and reports so that's one area that you can see that there's a divergence in terms of the cultures and thinking about but the thing that we've talked about in this webinar is it's really trying to bring closer together those communities by incorporating some elements of records management into FOIA in terms of the training and otherwise and so there you have it okay great thank you it sounds like an area worthy of a further look so I don't see any questions in the chat box Alina and Michelle do we have any on the phone there are currently no questions in the queue okay super well I will turn it back over to Alina then thank you Jason and thank you Patricia around a virtual applause for both of you I wish we were in McAllen theater at the National Art Cog doing this in person but alas we are not but thank you thank you all right thanks very much Christian do you want to advance to the next slide public comment yes that's it that's why that is the next slide yes so at this time as we always do in our public meetings we leave time at the end for anyone who would like to offer any public comment I will say that we have received one fairly lengthy comment from a member of the requester community we are going to post it online unless we have already done that please check our website click on the annual cheating link and click on this year's annual report and you'll be able to see it there at this time I want to open up phones none of the chat to anyone who wants to make any comment if you could state your name and affiliation that would be great so please let's go ahead and Michelle can you just remind everyone one more time how they can chime in by phone absolutely so once again ladies and gentlemen to be able to make a comment please press pound two on your telephone you will hear a notification when your line is unmuted at that time please state your comment or question once again pressing pound two we'll enter you into the question here okay thanks so I'm going to ask our Kirsten do you see any chat comments or questions in our chat box I don't see any again I think we have a shy audience today I think you're absolutely right I think we do have a shy audience I don't see any maybe we scheduled this for Monday morning and that was a mistake because people are still clearing the cobwebs from the weekend so next time we'll do it in the middle of the week again any comments that we received today or even after this meeting if anyone has the opportunity to watch this hopefully we'll be uploaded on our YouTube channel at a later point anyone to submit any comments please submit them to OGIS Open Meeting at nara.gov so not having heard anything else Kirsten you want to flip over to the next slide that is the last slide Alina okay where we say Uncle Stan wants your ideas yes right so again we invite everyone to visit OGIS's website and social media for more information about all of our activities and how you can participate at this point unless Jason or Patricia or Kirsten have any parting words I'm going to pause for a moment any parting words I have none okay Jason maybe quiet for once Jason any parting words alright thank you and thanks to Kirsten you did a wonderful job moderating I want to thank everyone again for joining us everyone and their families remain safe healthy and resilient and we will see you again for our kickoff meeting of the Florida Advisory Committee on September 10th which I predict will likely be virtual so thanks everyone have a great rest of your week take care thank you thank you thank you that concludes our conference thank you for 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