 This meeting is being recorded. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you for joining today's Chief Foyer Officers' Council 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. Please note all audio connections are currently muted and this conference is being recorded. You are welcome to submit written questions or comments throughout the meeting which will be addressed at the Q&A session of the meeting. To submit a written comment, select all panelists from the drop-down menu in the chat panel, then enter your question in the message box provided and sent. To make a comment via WebEx Audio, please click the raise hand icon on your WebEx screen which is located above the chat panel on the right. This will place you into the question queue. If you are connected to today's meeting via phone audio, please dial pound 2 on your telephone keypad to enter the question queue. If you require technical assistance, please send a chat to the event producer. With that, I will turn the meeting over to Alina Fimo, Director, Office of Government Information Services at the National Archives and Records Administration. Alina, please go ahead. Thanks, Michelle. Next slide, please. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our virtual Chief Boy Officer Council meeting. I hope everyone has been staying healthy, safe, and well. I am Alina Fimo, Director of the Office of Government Information Services, OGIS and Co-Chair of the Council. Let me introduce my Co-Chair, Bobby Tolivian, Director of the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice. Bobby, Bobby, you're on mute. No amount of practice helps with that. Thank you, everyone. Good morning and thank you for joining us, either via WebEx or the live stream for our meeting today. We're looking forward to our great agenda. Agreed. Bobby, thanks. We're excited about our agenda today in a couple of minutes. Bobby will be introducing the Associate Attorney General of the United States, Benita Gupta, who will provide opening remarks. Next, you will hear welcoming remarks from Archivist of the United States, David Theriault. I am sad to report that this will be David's last CFO Council meeting as he retires at the end of this month after a long and illustrious career, having spent the last 12 or so years as the 10th Archivist of the United States. On behalf of the CFO Council, I want to thank David for all of the support he has given us. We will definitely miss his extraordinary support for improving the FOIA process. I also personally want to thank you, David, for all your support of FOIA and the CFO Council and congratulations on your retirement. After our welcome remarks, Alina and I will each provide an overview of the work we've been doing in our offices and share some updates. Then you'll next hear from the Council's two committees, the Technology Committee and the Committee on Cross-Agency Collaboration and Innovation. We'll have the two co-chairs of both committees join us later this morning along with a few members of the committees. I also want to make sure we put a plug in. Once you see the committee's great work, hopefully that will inspire more volunteers. So we're always looking for more volunteers. And if you'd like to volunteer for one of the committees, please reach out to either Alina or myself. Thanks, Bobby. During the course of the meeting, we will pause to check in to see if there are any questions from our agency FOIA colleagues that come and be a chat. So please feel free to send in your questions or any comments. We are also simultaneously live streaming today's meeting on the NARA YouTube channel, and we will be monitoring the chat functions both on WebEx and YouTube. So we want to encourage our agency colleagues to please chat any questions or observations or comments you may have, and we will read them along the way as appropriate. An important reminder, if you are on WebEx, please be sure to chat to all panelists to ensure your comments are seen by everyone who's participating on the panel side. Bobby. As we have, thank you. And as we have in our prior meetings, we've reserved time today at the end of the session for public comments. We'll be opening up the telephone lines at the end of the meeting for the last 15 minutes. For any oral questions or comments from the public. We ask that you limit your comments to three minutes to ensure everyone gets equal opportunity. Once your three minutes expire, the event producer will mute the line so that we can move on to the next commentator or other questions or comments pending in the chat. Alina. We are monitoring the chat on WebEx and on the NARA YouTube channel, as I mentioned earlier. And we will read out loud any appropriate questions or comments we receive from the public during the public comment period. I also want to note we have received several written comments submissions in advance of today's meeting, and we have posted them on the CFO Council webpage on the OGIS website. I also want to note that the chat function in both WebEx and the NARA YouTube channel is not, I repeat, not the proper forum to submit extensive public comments. The chat function on both platforms should be used to ask clarifying questions or provide brief comments or questions that we will consider reading out loud at the end of today's meeting. You may submit public comments at any time by emailing CFO-Council at NARA.gov and we will consider posting them on the OGIS website. The chat function on both platforms should be used to ask clarifying questions or provide brief comments that I mentioned earlier that we will read out loud at the end of the meeting if appropriate. Finally, a reminder that the Council meeting is not the appropriate venue for concerns about individual FOIA requests for individual issues with regard to FOIA. If you need OGIS assistance, you may request it by emailing us at ogisatnara.gov Thank you and with our housekeeping rules wrapped up it is my distinct pleasure to introduce our first welcoming remarks from the Attorney General of the United States, Linda Gupta. I want to thank the associate for her time this morning and all of her support for FOIA. Thank you, Bobby for that warm welcome. Good morning and thanks to all of you for joining us today for this meeting of the Chief FOIA Officers Council Spring Meeting. On behalf of the Department of Justice I want to welcome back the Chief FOIA Officers and all of the agency FOIA officials who manage the day-to-day administration of the FOIA. During the department sunshine week event last month, we were really proud to recognize many of the FOIA professionals at your agencies for their exceptional service to FOIA administration. I also want to welcome the members of the public that are joining us today. Throughout my career outside of government, I have personally relied on the FOIA's disclosure mandates and have seen firsthand the really critical role that the FOIA plays in ensuring government transparency in public participation. Your continued feedback is critically important to us because it's really through the FOIA that journalists, advocates and ordinary residents remain informed well enough to make real our ideal of a democracy governed by the people and for the people. At DOJ we take very seriously our responsibility of encouraging government-wide compliance with the FOIA. The Attorney General reinforced this commitment during Sunshine Week by issuing new FOIA guidelines that I hope all of you have seen. The guidelines cover many issues and I just want to summarize a few highlights. The new guidelines strengthen our commitment to administering the FOIA with a presumption of openness. Importantly, the Attorney General's new guidelines emphasize the FOIA's requirement that even where an agency could technically withhold information based on an exemption, the agency should nevertheless disclose the information unless the agency can identify the foreseeable harm or legal bar from disclosure. And to further reinforce this requirement, the guidelines provide for the first time that agencies should confirm in response letters to FOIA requesters that they have considered the foreseeable harm standard when applying FOIA exemptions. Agencies are also strongly encouraged to make discretionary disclosures of information where appropriate. The new guidelines also emphasize ways that agencies can help the public get information faster in a more accessible format, such as by posting online proactive disclosures of matters of public interest as quickly as possible, making websites searchable and easy to navigate, and updating information on FOIA.gov, which is the federal government's central website on the Freedom of Information Act. The guidelines encourage agencies to look for ways to remove barriers to requesting and accessing government records and to reduce FOIA processing backlogs. Agencies are encouraged to closely examine whether FOIA searches, reviews and productions are being handled as efficiently as possible and whether there are categories of records that can be readily accessible to requesters without requiring a FOIA request. Finally, the Attorney General's guidelines highlight the important role that we on the Chief FOIA Officers Council serve to ensure that the FOIA is being administered efficiently and effectively. The successful next generation FOIA tech showcase event in February and the follow-up workshops for agencies on FOIA technology in March are just two examples of the way that this council can provide a valuable forum for agencies to share their experiences and best practices in administering the FOIA. We have a great agenda today and I look forward to hearing about the progress of the council's two committees. But as I close, I just want to also repeat how grateful I am to the members of the council and to the dedicated FOIA professionals who work tirelessly to administer the FOIA. We know that the last couple of years during the pandemic have made your jobs harder and the department stands ready to help you. Together we can make the government and ensure that the government is open, transparent and accountable to the people we serve. To David Ferriero who needs no introduction, the archivist of the United States. But before I do, David, I just want to congratulate you on your upcoming retirement most well-deserved after serving over 12 years as our country's archivist. You have led the National Archives with a deep, deep commitment to the principles of transparency, accessibility to the public and open government and we are deeply grateful for your leadership and vision. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for those kind words. I join you from the National Archives flagship building in Washington which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. You might wonder about the purpose of land acknowledgement statements as it is one I often repeat in my public remarks. The National Archives and indeed other archives, libraries, museums and universities have a particular role in the nation as cultural and educational institutions to create historical representations that are true and factual. Land acknowledgement statements are one way of doing that. Chief FOIA officers as senior officials you play a crucial role in overseeing and ensuring compliance with a statute that is the bulwark of our democracy. The Freedom of Information Act. While Congress passed FOIA nearly 56 years ago the Declaration of Independence preserved and proudly displayed here in the National Archives mentions public records which are at the heart of FOIA. In a list of grievances against King George III America's founding fathers noted that he convened legislative bodies in places distant from the depository of their public records. Today thanks to technology physical distances no longer the barrier it was when our nation was founded. The National Archives is committed to digitizing 500 million pages of records and making them publicly available online by October 1st 2024 so anyone with a computer can access them and we are well on our way at more than 170 million today. At the same time departments and agencies across the government are working hard to move toward a fully electronic system. In the last few years FOIA professionals have spent much of the past two years seeking creative solutions to the challenges presented by a global pandemic. Indeed today's meeting of the chief FOIA officers council marks the 7th time the council has made a commitment to the community and to the community. FOIA professionals have spent much of the past two years seeking creative solutions to the community. The next meeting marks the 7th time the council has convened in the virtual space to share updates and collaborate on ideas for administering FOIA. Finally this is my last meeting of the chief FOIA officers council. I retire at the end of next week and deputy archivist Debra Steidle-Wall will be the acting archivist of the United States. We will continue to drive openness and cultivate public participation thereby strengthening our nation's democracy. Thank you chief FOIA officers and members of the public for all the work that you do every day to make the FOIA work efficiently and fairly thereby strengthening our nation's democracy. Thank you and back to you Bobby. Thank you so much David. Next we'll move on to the next slide and we can move on to the next slide. Thank you again. Today I would like to start our meeting by providing some updates from OIP of course as the associate attorney general mentioned. We have new attorney general FOIA guidelines and so I wanted to highlight at a high level some of the other points that are made in the guidelines. I will then cover FOIA reporting and data as well as some new training opportunities and resources, reminders about FOIA.gov and also I wanted to highlight a few of the recent government accountability engagements on FOIA and lessons we can all learn from those engagements. Next slide. As the associate attorney general mentioned the attorney general's guidelines were issued during this past Sunshine Week and I'll go over some of them first and foremost. I want to ask that we all be pleased to be sure to share these guidelines and make sure that all of our FOIA professionals across the government have seen them and reviewed them. OIP will provide guidance on implementing the guidelines but agencies should review each section in relation to your FOIA administration and please reach out to us if you have any questions before the guidance is issued. You can reach out to our FOIA counselor service 202-514 FOIA. As addressed in the guidance OIP will also issue new chief FOIA officer reporting guidelines that incorporate the new AG FOIA guidelines. Next slide. So there are four main sections of the new department of justice FOIA guidelines and so I'll highlight some important points from each section. First and foremost that addresses applying a presumption of openness that take that providing a presumption of openness that considers the likelihood of foreseeable harm and discretionary releases when making disclosure determinations. New in the guidelines the department of justice is asking agencies as the associate mentioned to confirm that they have considered the foreseeable harm when considering exemptions. Now we've received questions on this on this point in particular how agencies should articulate this standard in their administrative response letters. Agencies can use the language that is in the memo itself advising requesters that they have considered the foreseeable harm standard when reviewing records and applying exemptions. And of course the language is applicable when agencies are or had the opportunity to review records for disclosure. The next section of the guidelines prioritizes proactive disclosures which has long been an area we have tried to continuously build on as a key way of promoting open government. Among other things the guideline encourages agencies particularly when records are frequently requested to post those records on their website as soon as feasible. Next slide. The next section of the guidelines focus on removing barriers to access in a number of different ways. First by asking agencies to examine if there are ways of information could be provided by the public outside of FOIA more efficiently. This is the area we may focus on in the upcoming chief FOIA officer reports. In addition to proactive disclosures the guidelines note that FOIA websites should be navigable and records should be easy to find. We do have guidance on agency FOIA websites on our guidance page of OIP's website and we'll continue to keep this as part of the CFO reports. However, this is an area we continue to study and plan to provide further guidance on in particular with regard to agencies posting of records in their FOIA libraries. Timely disclosures are another key element of removing barriers and access to agency chief FOIA officers and agency chief fores are asked to undertake a comprehensive review of their FOIA programs to ensure that searches, reviews and productions of records are conducted as efficiently as possible. We have several resources that are available for agencies to review their programs including our self-assessment toolkit which is on the CFO's page of our website and we'll provide further guidance on this as well. And finally, the guidelines emphasize good communication. We have multiple guidance articles on this and of course it is a key part of our guidance recently on mitigating the challenges of the pandemic. I urge everyone to consult these resources. Next slide. Finally, the guidelines focus on fair and effective FOIA administration and emphasize the role the important role of the chief FOIA officers are asked to assess their FOIA administration and the allocation of resources for FOIA. As noted, OIP will issue new chief FOIA officer guidelines this year. The AG guidance also re-emphasize our lands amongst any principle that FOIA is everyone's responsibility. Everyone in the agency has a role to play and it is important that everyone have the proper training to understand how to meet their important FOIA obligations. To that end, we're excited and I'm excited and I'll go over in just a bit new e-learning modules that will help agencies accomplish this. Next slide. I also want to touch base on reporting. I want to thank all the agencies for their annual and chief FOIA officer reports. I know and we know firsthand at the department the amount of resources and time that goes in to providing these reports, which is really important to making sure that our administration of FOIA is transparent and that we can continue to improve on FOIA administration. The ANO FOIA reports are data is all on FOIA.gov and as you can see this fiscal year we've regained, we're back to having high demands of requests receive them processed as well as agencies continuing to proactively post lots and lots of records that are required to be posted on such an A2 of the FOIA. We're looking forward to soon issuing we're finishing up our summary of the ANO FOIA reports, which will provide a detail breakdown of every part of the ANO FOIA report, so please stay tuned for that. We're also issued by the summary and assessment of our agency chief FOIA officer reports and we'll be in touch with your agencies as we have in the past on the assessment to make sure that everything has been scored correctly. Next slide. As I said, we're really excited to have our finalizing and we'll be soon releasing next month that we'll release the first two modules but standard e-learning modules that provide tailored training to the entire government workforce and certainly these resources can be used by our agencies to fulfill the attorney general's guidelines of ensuring proper training is provided to all the workforce. First two modules being released by next month include a executive briefing course for senior executives and the important role that they play, both in understanding their obligation in the FOIA but also providing support to their agencies in FOIA administration. FOIA then for federal employees, which is a primer for all agency FOIA, all agency personnel on the of the FOIA and their involvement in search and some review of records. Finally, we'll have a detailed FOIA for FOIA professionals that will provide training on all aspects of the FOIA from the procedural requirements to exemption applicability. All of these will be provided in a format that can be uploaded in your learning management systems. We are also looking to have it made available online for agencies that don't have learning management systems. So please stay tuned for more updates where we hope that these will be very helpful resources to you and your agencies. Next slide. Of course with training, OIP continues to provide comprehensive FOIA training and we have a number of trainings that we're hosting this summer. Registration typically opens one month in advance for these courses. So please if you're interested please register as soon as they open up. They do tend to fill up. We also provide tailored training. So if you want us to provide more tailored training to your agency or groups of agencies, we're happy to put things like that together as well. Again, please contact us either by phone or email. We are also excited to working with GHS putting on a FOIA summit on May 4th, which will include a series of panel discussions on some of the emerging issues, recent emerging issues, including agencies and how they're modifying their FOIA plans and process in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and our re-entries. Best practices for leveraging FOIA data to strengthen FOIA programs are a more detailed review of GA FOIA reports and recommendations and FOIA litigation trends. Next slide. I also want to make sure to provide a reminder of agencies interoperability obligations. So as we've had agencies now become interoperable, we want to make sure that you're continuing to monitor your contact information and information about your agency on FOIA.gov. As that information changes, please make sure that your account agency manager is updating that so that it reflects on FOIA.gov. Also in particular with all the work in the area of technology and agencies going to new case management systems. If you are changing case management systems, please make sure that you're integrating that and making the change as necessary on FOIA.gov. Of course, please reach out to us for any matters regarding FOIA.gov. You can email us at the national.foia. portal at usdoj.gov and we will be happy to work with your agency on your interoperability obligations. Next slide. We're also very excited to be really close to being able to launch on FOIA.gov our designated page for the CFO Council. Currently, OIP and OJs are posting on two different pages on our websites. This will have the CFO Council page be on a prominent location on FOIA.gov, which is the government centralized website for FOIA, but also will hopefully help and should help with duplication efforts and the resources for maintaining and posting all the information on the website. Next page. Next slide. Finally, I wanted to, as I said, review and just highlight some of the recent government accountability office engagements. There have been three reports that have been issued by GAO over the past few years. And by most of the time GAO focuses on select agencies, I think there's lots of lessons learned that we can all take and takeaways that we can take from these reports for our own FOIA administration. January 2021, GAO issued a report examining Exemption 3 statutes. Of course, Exemption 3 is not an exemption that agencies can not apply when the elements of the statute are met. However, OIP provides a number of resources I wanted to highlight for agencies to help with the application of Exemption 3 so that we can ensure that we are properly applying that to the information that we're protecting. First on our OIP resources page, we have a list of Exemption 3 statutes that courts have found to qualify under Exemption 3. So if you see that statute on that list, we know that we have support. That is a proper Exemption 3 statute. Next, we have a running list every year of the statutes that have been cited in agencies' ANO4 reports. And during the ANO4 process, when we put together, when we validate your ANO4 report, we conduct an analysis of new Exemption 3 statutes that appear to ensure that we believe that they are proper Exemption 3 statutes. So if you see an Exemption 3 statute on this list, you can be assured that not only is it been cited by another agency, but it has been undergone a preliminary analysis by OIP. And of course, our FOIA council service is always available if you have any questions about a specific statute or whether material fits within a specific Exemption 3 statute. Second, in March 2021, GAO conducted an engagement and produced a report on FOIA's proactive disclosures. These are the proactive disclosures that are required by subsection A2 of the FOIA. And the main takeaways from this reports were agencies documenting procedures to ensure that they are implementing these proactive disclosures requirements, and also accurately tracking the proactive disclosures for their ANO4 reports. In response to GAO's recommendations, we have last year updated our ANO4 report handbook to provide more detailed guidance on how to track these proactive disclosures, including different examples of how different types of records should be tracked or reported. Next slide. Finally, the last GAO report which was just issued January 2022 focused on agencies FOIA administrations during the pandemic. Some of the key takeaways, the agencies that GAO looked at, they found that they were adjusted in adapting to the pandemic in several ways, including by adopting many of the principles and OIP's guidance, which focused on maximizing efficiencies and effectiveness of your FOIA program the best way you can, using interim releases and multi-track processing, good communication with the requesters, reassessing technologies, and using proactive disclosures. GAO's recommendations in this report largely focused on backlog reduction plans, and particularly plans that defined performance goals, performance measures, planned actions, milestones, and the responsible office and officials for implementing the collection plan. OIP is also implementing one of the recommendations regarding our reporting metrics, which we will see in the upcoming chief FOIA officer report guidelines, focusing on metrics that concern unusual circumstances and the impact of litigation on FOIA. Next slide. With that, I can briefly pause for if there's any questions before we move over to our next presentation by the technology committee. Murphy, our Deputy Director Commodus, are there any questions in chat that have come in while Bobby has been presenting? There have been no chats from agency personnel that have come in yet, only public comments at this point. Great, thank you. And Bobby, next slide, Michelle, please. I believe I have to go next. Yes. Sorry. Before we move over to the technology committee. That's all right. I have a few comments that I just wanted to go over. Next slide, please, Michelle. First, I want to talk to everyone today again about estimated dates of completion, EDCs. It's something that I've spoken about in the past and as I shared in my testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, we have continued to observe a sharp increase in the number of submissions for OGIS dispute resolution related to delayed FOIA requests. In our role as the FOIA ombudsman, we saw the number of requests for OGIS assistance involving delays jumped 73% of fiscal year 2021. That in itself may not be surprising given the extraordinary times we have been experiencing for the last 25 months. But what was more surprising to us is that for 85% of these requests for our assistance involving delays, a requester was asked for and was unable to obtain an EDC, 85%. That's a lot. Next slide, please. So as we discussed at our CFO Council meeting last fall, OGIS issued an assessment on FOIA's requirement that agencies provide a requester with an estimated date of completion upon request in the earliest days of the pandemic. And we highlighted our efforts to make sure that they didn't get lost in a shuffle since we published them in March of 2020. But they definitely bear revisiting again today. Next slide, please. Our assessment found that agencies were challenged even before the pandemic began to provide EDCs and that agency responses to such requests were mixed. Next slide, please. We also issued an advisory opinion stressing the importance of compliance with FOIA's EDC requirement. And next slide, please. We also issued a FOIA Ombuds Observer providing requesters with tips for obtaining an EDC. And all of these can be found on our OGIS website. I've included the links on each one of these slides. And by the way, the entire PowerPoint slide deck that we're previewing today that we're running through is available on the OGIS website under the Chief FOIA Officer Council part of the webpage. What OGIS has been observing is that the pandemic has taken what was already a significant issue and it has compounded it. Increasingly as OGIS staff works on requests for assistance involving delays, we are hearing from agency FOIA staff that they are unable to provide an estimated date of completion for a variety of reasons. The struggle to estimate processing time may point to opportunities to improve how your agency processes FOIA requests. At last November, CFO Council meeting, I called upon chief FOIA officers to consider ways to ensure that FOIA professionals have the necessary resources to provide EDCs to FOIA requesters. I am reissuing that call today. FOIA leadership, please consider ways to support your FOIA staff as we all emerge from pandemic operations, particularly with regard to backlog management. Specifically, we encourage you to look at our assessment and identify tools that could assist your frontline staff in more easily providing an EDC. As we said in our assessment, support from agency leadership is crucial to their success in meeting FOIA statutory requirements, including providing EDCs upon request. Chief FOIA officers who are required under FOIA to support efficient and appropriate compliance with FOIA and recommend improvements to implementation are in the best position to ensure such support. We also want to hear from all of you about what you're experiencing. What are the obstacles to providing an EDC? What new challenges are you facing on the front lines as you're dealing with requesters who are asking for EDCs? I just want to remind everyone, it is in your agency's best interest to provide an EDC. As we explained in our advisory opinion, agencies that do not provide an EDC actually face an increased litigation risk. As we've always reminded everyone, an EDC is just an estimate. It's not a set in stone, but it's also the perfect opportunity to communicate. It's an opportunity to set expectations and open negotiations with the requester. Bobby, anything else you want to add to EDCs? Yes. Yes, thank you, Alina. I just want to echo everything that you just said. We do have guidance on estimate data completions. I'll actually just post it in the chat on WebEx. I can't agree any more on the importance of providing these estimates. And it goes back to also the importance of communication with requesters. I think that's one of the silver bullets of being able to have a happy requester, have a happy agency, and avoid litigation. In our guidance, we also have a number of different ways you can come up with an estimate date of completion, because we do understand it's challenging depending on where you are in the FOIA process. And then I'll also just say that if you are having a challenge in providing estimated dates, whether it be for category of requests, types of requests, or individual requests, you can always reach out to us on our FOIA council service and we'd be happy to help you formulate that estimated date, but I think the worst thing we can do is not provide one. Thank you, Elena. Thanks, Fabio. Thanks very much. No problem. Next slide, please. So this is one of my favorite pictures I like to run whenever I have the opportunity. It is the last time that at least I remember being in the McGowan Theater at Main Archives Building in downtown D.C., where we're all together meeting in person. So this is a picture of the third term of the FOIA advisory committee. One of several ways that OGIS tries to improve the administration of FOIA is through our work on the FOIA advisory committee, which I chair, and on which Fabio has been serving as an active member. The FOIA advisory committee was established in accordance with the U.S. Second Open Government National Action Plan that was released on December 5th, 2013. And we run the committee with the purpose of helping OGIS identify procedures and methods for improving compliance with FOIA. The committee serves to provide recommendations to the archivists of the United States for improving FOIA. We have had three complete terms so far, 2014 to 2016, 2016 to 2018, and 2018 to 2020. And we are currently in our fourth term, 2020 to 2022. We're in the home stretch with two more public meetings coming up. Four subcommittees co-chaired by a government and non-government member. Legislation, process, classification, and technology have all been actively engaged and meeting on a regular basis. A number of recommendations have already been passed this term and a few more remain to be discussed in our next meeting. So far, this entire term, we've been virtual. Hence, the picture that I still love to have up there. Next slide, please. OGIS has created a terrific recommendations dashboard in order to keep track of the great work the committee has done since its inception in 2014. The link is up here. Please visit the dashboard when you have a chance. And as I just mentioned, the current term of the committee has already passed a number of recommendations, but since the final report has not yet been finalized and presented to the archivist, we are holding off on updating the dashboard until everything has been finalized. So please turn your attention back there, hopefully by the end of June, and we will have everything updated. Next slide, please. Please tune in if you want to see the FOIA advisory committee in action. You can register through Eventbrite via our webpage at archives.gov forward slash access, or you can tune in via the NARA YouTube channel. The last two meetings of the FOIA advisory committee were taking place Thursday, May 5th, 2022, and Thursday, June 9th, 2022 is our final meeting of this current term. Both sessions will start at 10 a.m. and will run through approximately 1 p.m. I also wanted to call attention to the fact that we will be holding our August annual public meeting on Wednesday, May 18th, starting at 10 a.m. By that time, we anticipate having our annual report published on our website and ready for review and we will feature highlights from the report during the public meeting. Next slide, please. I just want to let everyone know that as the archivist announced at our April 7th committee meeting, there will, in fact, be a fifth term of the FOIA advisory committee. Very exciting. Once our charter is approved by GSA and signed by the archivist, we will put out a call for nominations for committee members, both government and non-government, for the 2022 to 2024 term. So please be on the lookout for that. Follow our blog post and our Twitter account for more information. Next slide, please. This is our contact information. Please follow us on our blog post and Twitter accounts. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. I'm going to ask Marka very briefly if there are any questions that have come in during my presentation that have come in during chat from any FOIA professionals. Yes, we got a question about DOJ training modules. DOJ, go ahead and provide agencies with system specs ahead of the May release so we can begin working with our internal IT and plan for rolling out to employees. Thank you, Martha, and thank you for that question. Yes, we can absolutely get that and what we'll do is we'll try to advertise that through our contact list. Great. And then we just sort of got a comment about EDCs. Guidance on the house and best practices to calculate an EDC cannot be circulated to agency FOIA professionals and discussed enough. Pardon me. We consider FOIA ombudsman blog post on how to calculate EDCs in the near future. Particularly as more and more agency employees return to the office. Thank you. Thank you for that comment, Martha. And yes, we will continue discussing it. I think it's a very important topic and we will definitely focus our attention as we continue to spot the issues. So thank you very much. Martha, that's it for any other comments? That's it from our agency folks just to clarify for the public. We will be doing public comments at the end. We're focusing on comments from agency professionals relating specifically to the topics that we've come up with. We're talking about during the meeting for right now. Thanks, Martha. Okay, Bobby, back over to you. Thank you, Alina. With that, now I'd like to introduce Michael Sarich and Eric Stein, the co-chairs of the Technology Committee for all the great work that they've been doing. Thank you so much. Good morning. I'm Michael Sarich, the director of the Veterans Health Administration FOIA program and I'm very happy to have my co-chair, Eric Stein. Thank you, everyone. Next slide, please. So just a little bit of background about the Technology Committee. We've been around for a few years and we have our initial origins are showed on the slide here, so we won't go through that, but I do want to highlight we've spent the past few years growing a group of about 40 members from about 20 different departments and agencies and we've really focused a lot on the deployment use of technology agencies and demystifying technology. People hear technology it's a little overwhelming and yet it's such a big part of our lives, especially in the pandemic, post-pandemic world. Little did we expect a few years ago that we'd be going to full remote and the technology issues and challenges that we're faced with now. So we have an excellent committee wonderful engagement among the members and we've kind of moved into a new phase of the committee. We initially had a series of charters that will talk about working groups, seven groups and we are now in the process of kind of the next phase of the committee and we'll go through those different working groups later in the presentation. We're also going to highlight and discuss the next gen FOIA tech showcase and that was an event where we worked to connect FOIA professionals with private sector to achieve a few objectives. One was to expose government FOIA professionals to the different technology and options that are out there and available specifically for case processing, doing search functions, leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence or AI. Also it presented an opportunity with many agencies that will be losing their FOIA case processing system and FOIA online to seek other opportunities and see what's available as they gather their requirements. So some of the work that the committee does is to even help frame FOIA professionals questions on where to start with the technology issue. Is it about the software that they use to do FOIA case processing? Is it about the user experience or customer experience from using a FOIA website? Is it about searching archives of records? Is it about the integration of IT applications? So the technology committee when we started Mike and I as co-chairs a few years ago we kind of cast a wide debt and we continue to do so. So our first plug if anyone here is interested in joining us please contact OGIS or OIP or you're welcome to contact me and Mike also we welcome FOIA professionals from federal agencies it is a very inclusive group for those of you as the chief FOIA officers being mindful of our audience there's a lot of different technical issues throughout the FOIA community and we've learned that one size does not fit all with technology solutions so as we continue to kind of raise awareness of issues sometimes raising awareness is the starting point sometimes that actually is enough to help us put different FOIA professionals in touch with one another to help work together. We are a body and a forum that is seeking to provide practical solutions highlight and identify best practices and try to find ways to work better especially in this age that we're in where a lot is data driven and so much is reliant upon technology. So in a moment we will go through our next gen FOIA showcase but just want to highlight again we have about 40 members from 20 agencies and even if any of you as the chief FOIA officers think you may have employees who are interested in joining us we meet at least once a month working groups meet once or twice as well so it's a pretty nominal time commitment and I think it's a big return on investment for a time commitment such as that. We have public websites available both on the OGIS and OIP websites so the links are available here and I just also want to add before we move on we really really take feedback seriously we receive it from whether it be private industry, federal agencies or the public, anything that's come in to us we have shared with the committee and we do want to emphasize the importance of transparency as a group that's working to help improve transparency in the government. Our most recent meeting even included a very brief discussion of the Attorney General memo that was recent guidance that was recently issued and how can we leverage technology and our working groups to help achieve the vision in that document. So, please go to the next slide please. All right, so you've heard mentioned the next Genfoyer showcase. This was a multi-month effort where we worked to provide a forum for government professionals to meet with private sector just a private sector, the private sector, different companies, different technology, different capabilities. Here's how the event worked. We sent out actually we believe it was the National Archives sent out a request for information or an RFI so that it was open to all different companies to participate and what we asked companies to do was to create a paper laying out their capabilities of their technology focused around a few different areas, search capabilities, case processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence and so forth. And after that two-page paper, the companies that submitted the papers were invited to produce and create a five-minute video and with that five-minute video we screened them and then we had a two-day event where 18 different vendors were able to present their five-minute videos and then take questions from government FOIA professionals for 25 minutes. It was two days, we had hundreds of people register. I want to say about four or five hundred folks register and having attended all the sessions myself, the average participant rate was about 150 to 250 FOIA professionals per session and this worked I think because there were bite-sized chunks of 30 minutes per company, five minutes to stream the video live, 25 minutes for Q&A and then it ended. I am very fortunate we have a member of our tech committee here, Gorka, who's going to walk us through in a minute some more details about the next gen FOIA showcase and more specifics about how those two days unfolded and then a follow-up event from the Department of Justice as well. I just wanted to point out that on this slide here we provide information, a link about the FOIA tech showcase, the papers that were submitted by those companies are publicly available it's the name of transparency we shared all those papers and you can also go and see the five minute videos so whether you missed the event or you're thinking about new technology or agency for FOIA case processing or search features you can go and watch those videos anytime because they're posted on NARA's YouTube channel so with that I do see that Gorka has joined us here so if we go to the next slide please wonderful thank you Eric thank you Mike can you hear me yes we can Gorka over to you all right lovely well apologies it's been a little bit hard to log on but here I am and what I want to do is thank you all for the opportunity to discuss two first of a kind FOIA events that were organized by DOJ NARA and this technology committee the technology committee continues to explore new ways of helping the FOIA community with technological solutions that will render our work more efficient more effective and more accurate so for example I co-chair a working group that seeks to help agencies identify the best FOIA review platform for their agency now as we all know especially those folks that are involved in FOIA technology not all platforms fit the needs of every agency right so all gone through in the technology committee is this grueling due diligence process that involves searching just the web you know for any off the shelf solutions that might work whether it's a FOIA specific solution or not first you go through the process of looking for a platform that will help you and then you realize that you don't really even understand your needs right so what the technology community is doing together work that will help the FOIA community understand what their needs are get the right stakeholders involved early on and then to take some of the lift off of that due diligence process because this is a daunting process looking for the right solution so the technology committee in conjunction with OGIS at the National Archives and the Office of Information Policy at DOJ hosted an event again the first of its kind it was a two day event in which 18 companies were given 30 minutes each to showcase their products for the federal agencies across the government and to address any questions they might have so it wasn't just a straight presentation and cut to the next presentation we gave the audience an opportunity to interact and interact they did now these were companies we did a lot of research and we gave as many companies as possible the opportunity to come with prepared presentations it was all very professionally done and to answer the audience's questions so ostensibly right there we have this resource where people can go and understand what the universe of products are at least as of the time of the presentation and those took place those presentations that took place on February 9th and February 10th now those videos are graciously being hosted on the NARA website and in fact they are linked in this slide so if you want to take a look that's a great place to go and the key going into the first of a kind event the next gen FOIA Tech showcase was understanding that agencies have different needs there are agencies for example that process a great number of forms they're all the same in every form you redact fields 3 and 17 and for that AI is fantastic right there are other agencies that rely heavily on e-discovery for example so what we did is we organized those two days into presentations that focused on those specific needs so some videos touched on companies that focused on e-discovery others on case processing tools others on redaction tools AI we covered it all and so the goal here of course is to provide this information to the FOIA community so they can better understand the universe of products out there I feel like a lot of the people that come to us for help don't really understand what's possible and so before they commit to any one platform they can take a look at this wonderful resource these videos that are hosted by NARA and better formulate their requirements before they head out into the wilderness and try to find a product that fits their needs and the key here was the event was so successful he had so much interaction with the audience with all of these FOIA agencies that had very nuanced questions questions that were very particular to their needs national security redactions these types of things that we felt the best to prepare a follow-up event and so on March 31 we organized a panel of speakers like in the first event we had great participation from the audience I think for the follow-up we had 267 registered attendees and the level of engagement was again extraordinary we had some questions queued up for ourselves just in case we heard crickets only opened up the mics but the audience jumped in immediately and so they had questions on general strengths and weaknesses of various platforms but more specific questions about how can you customize a particular commercial office shelf solution to maximize productivity in your given agency that questions about e-discovery data exporting from your systems to a new cost solution questions on customer service how to manage downtime which is a huge question that we have when you're relying on a third party to manage your entire system your entire program and so these these events proved extremely successful I believe that Mike and that Eric are thinking about doing this again because these are wonderful resources but we understand that the market evolves these companies are constantly improving and new companies are coming online all the time so thank you for the opportunity to highlight these two wonderful events and thank you to OIP and to OGIS for helping us organize them thank you very much thanks Mike okay next slide please just to start off here I think Gorka's presentation speaks to the real strength of our committee which is the incredible commitment that our members have to bringing these tools and resources to the larger FOIA community I'm going to highlight some of our current efforts now and one of them is one that actually Gorka works on so he could comment as well we cover the FOIA advisory committee to ensure that we're not duplicating work and where there's synergies we can leverage those and amplify the work of both groups in order to get tools into the hands of the dedicated FOIA professionals across the federal family I think as we heard earlier as Ms. Gupta said these folks are working extraordinarily hard and anything that we can do to lighten the load a bit even just a little can be critically important so I'm going to give a quick read out on how the tech committee has worked to do just that and these are our seven previous working groups first up is the five way compliance and collaborative tools group but this group focused on what is a necessary effort but unfortunately is it often a pain point for FOIA programs and this group served to bring ideas related to five way compliance to a wider community and explore the interagency collaborative tools and their impact on the FOIA process one of the great benefits of these working groups is it provides as Eric mentioned at the start kind of a forum or for an opportunity for FOIA officers and FOIA professionals that can share similar challenges and together we can overcome those similar challenges and we've seen a lot of progress in a number of areas just based on these groups of dedicated professionals getting together on the artificial intelligence front we provided forums on AI for FOIA professionals this group was formerly led by Nick Wittenberg and we all know that AI has the potential to transform robotic process automations or operations rather like routinized redactions and through things that of course are increasingly allowing us to do like technology assistant review or TAR we're looking to explore new and additional forms that we'll get into in the next slide as we talk about the evolution of these working groups FOIA classified information work groups is obviously protected by B1 so I can't share any of that information because it's strictly classified I'm just kidding. Those guys are the work in the intelligence community is difficult especially in the pandemic setting where the ability to go into a SCIF or secure facility to process these FOIAs and meet the statutory deadline the challenges that these folks have worked through tirelessly through the COVID-19 pandemic is really incredible and kind of an unherald story in the FOIA community FOIA searches provided a great working paper at the end of FY21 and something that they did which I found incredibly interesting is that they use survey methodology to help determine best practices for requesters and for groups they found that there's a significant gap in the understanding of agencies' abilities to search some of their electronic archives and databases it's not a one size fits all as we talked about earlier with the cost processing tools and other tools technology pieces that different agencies have it varies across the federal family strategies and tools that we use really varied there's no one size fits all you can't go to one agency and then expect that the next agency is going to have the same thing because resources vary across across the federal family and you know searching email as a great example is still a challenge for many folks and FOIA searches working paper help put people on the right path to move forward in that area FOIA online and FOIA express as we all know FOIA online the popular program is Sunsetting and agencies will be looking for tools this group kind of collapse of FOIA online and FOIA express and we'll have new life as we'll talk about here in just a second in the next slide as the FOIA IT platform led by Dorka and Virginia Burke from the Peace Corps we're looking forward to continual help of agencies that are looking to move into new cost products or a new way to process their FOIAs and the FOIA Next Gen Showcase will hopefully be helpful for that and future meetings and form like that should be helpful as well and finally the video review and redactions group much like the search group, the video review and redaction group published a well received paper and shared the findings there chief among those was a call to work with your IT groups and your agency when you begin to acquire video technology and understand that agencies have an affirmative obligation to produce video records in a timely manner this new technology that comes in we want to make sure that we're working with our partners and for example the CIO shops to make sure that we think about FOIA and that we're mindful that as we create these federal records that people are going to appropriately request them and it's going to fall to us it's our obligation to make sure that we're processing them in a timely manner and releasing those records so that's kind of a look back if you will in some of the great work and each of these working groups are filled with dedicated FOIA professionals, 40 plus folks that are coming together to share stories, to share ideas and to share solutions for the wider federal family so we can move to the next slide please we'll talk about some of the upcoming enhanced working groups that we have and we'll kick it to Eric to talk about the search AI group great thanks Mike so just to reiterate the charters from our previous working groups are all still available on the website on the public website so are those papers that Mike just mentioned so those are available to the public they're not just available for federal agencies as we continue to do our work as a larger technology committee we realized that there was our we kind of took certain working groups to their limits or there were opportunities to combine certain groups and to look at new areas with technology emerging and evolving we wanted to make sure that we were staying contemporary as much as possible so the first working group listed here is the search and AI working group we are very happy each of these groups I believe have chairs now so and leads point of contact from different agencies to bring diverse perspectives and also to have FOIA professionals pursue their passions in these areas and help address these challenges as well so another call of any of these if your agency has background expertise or is just interested in any of these areas please contact us either to learn or help us learn because a lot of it is Mike said it's a form to collaborate but we also have to figure out which questions to ask and through those questions that curiosity we tend to really make a lot of progress so search and AI artificial intelligence are looking at the search challenges large volumes of data and records electronic records and the different tools that are out there each of these working groups are working on new charters that will be publicly available in the months ahead so we combined our search and AI groups from the previous slide on to this one and to one group and they'll be looking at so much as data driven now moving forward how to look at leveraging AI which agencies are doing it or how to even get started if your agency is interested and that includes asking for the resources needed to maybe acquire new technology. Mike over to you. Sure thanks another area of key concern as we mentioned with the sunset and FOIA online enhancements and improvements in commercial off the shelf products is FOIA IT platforms. Virtually every federal agency that processes FOIA uses some sort of electronic case processing tool and some sort of tracking database to help facilitate the annual DOJ reports to OIP that need to happen and to track their work and to make sure that they're responding appropriately and building administrative case files and the like making sure that FOIA shops have the ability to evaluate and identify and learn as Gorka mentioned not just doing a Google search and then trying to figure it out is part of the FOIA IT platforms mandate moving forward and we're really pleased that as I mentioned Gorka in Virginia will be working on that and be able to provide agencies with actionable tools and evaluative measures to be able to look at these FOIA case processing systems and see where that work goes we're really excited to see where that goes in the coming year and with that we'll kick it over to data working group there sure thanks data working group I mentioned data with the search and AI group or search and AI are going to be looking at kind of how to find records and data and information the data working group is going to look at the different data reports that are available from different systems how to make data driven decisions for FOIA leadership and maybe just recommendations about data in general data standards and so forth so this is a new group a completely new area there's a lot of interest in data and while data of course is foundational and important for artificial intelligence and searching this group is going to look at metrics data reports and how to better inform FOIA professionals and their leadership on their capabilities and what's needed to be successful in the future Mike? Thanks and I'm going to take IT integration and FOIA compliance for several working groups with kind of similar similar challenges as we look to see the amount of integrating first on the IT integration piece to be able for FOIA professionals to be able to work in a collapsed environment in terms of getting records from the IT systems and then the dual challenge the appropriate challenge that many agencies have in terms of FOIA compliance with posting that data Bobby mentioned earlier about FOIA disclosures and GAO interest in proactive disclosures well a big piece of that is FOIA compliance making sure that the records that you do post proactively are available for those volubilities so finding that information on the IT integration piece that FOIA professionals being able to go out and grab it produce it and then publish it to put it to make that information available and transparent that as we all do illuminate the operations of the federal government is a key piece so those two groups will have a big lift ahead of them and fortunately on the FOIA compliance piece we'll be able to pick up the work of the previous working group and kind of roll it on and look to some new tools in the coming year and then for the classified group there Sure so we have not been able to meet in person because of the pandemic so we're looking forward to having our this is one of the groups that carries over from our previous list of working groups we've done as much as we could in an unclassified environment but we look forward to getting together this year in person or through secure comms to discuss some of the challenges facing the classified records and work that's done on classified networks and systems so we're looking forward to seeing with this group can come up with like I said not met in person and one thing I did want to mention about the technology committee I see we're running short on time here so we have about five just under five minutes left we do meet virtually so and then we'll continue to do so so that's the plan and that has been pretty effective and I think that with the exception of maybe the classified working group our meetings are virtual so Mike over to you for best practices Sure and quickly on technology best practices agencies are always looking for ways to optimize their operations and those include things like things that we've seen like using the issues and the ubiquity of zooms and Microsoft teams and other tools keep in mind that those are often whenever someone presses record like on this on this meeting we're creating a record and the public has a right to receive those records under the FOIA so understanding how to to properly on the one hand educate everyone in the agency as part of our part of our roles as FOIA professionals to educate our to educate our teammates that hey you're creating a record this is going to be subject to the FOIA so you know proceed appropriately and accordingly same with challenges that folks may have in large scale for example excel productions that's come up quite a bit in terms of how do I get all of these roles you know appropriately redacted and so they can't be unredacted and so they can't be the people can't find the metadata in there and how do we do that and again what happens in these working groups which is so powerful is you have groups of similarly situated FOIA professionals with the same challenges so that's why we encourage folks if you have an interest in technology please come join us because it's a great opportunity to talk about similar challenges that you have and get you know workable solutions either in that immediate meeting or through the incredible network of FOIA professionals on the larger committee to really solve challenges that you face every day in your practice and we're really excited to kick it over to Eric on the FOIA reference modeling group I think we'll have some comments here on this as well in terms of what we're looking to accomplish on the FOIA reference modeling group with Mitre Yes just for the sake of time here we will have a charter for each of these including the FOIA reference model working group and this is a project where we're going to be partnering with Mitre on developing certain standards for FOIA technology so I would encourage everyone to check out our website and that charter comes out we'll be happy to have additional members of the committee join to help our existing members next slide please alright so just as we wrap up here we have several things underway we want to plan for future tech committee events and that includes sessions and topics for FOIA professionals we did an A of artificial intelligence 101 session a couple of years ago there's a follow up session for next gen so we're looking for different ways to provide practical opportunities for FOIA professionals to collaborate and also learn from one another and sometimes it's also just raising the issue and teeing up an issue so the committee can explore it we're updating our public website and we're soliciting feedback so if there's any feedback please send it to OIP or OGIS or to me and Mike and anything sent to OIP and OGIS is forwarded to us so thank you Bobby and Alina and we're always looking for new members so Mike if you have any comments from you otherwise I'm going to say thank you everyone Mike? Yeah, I'd like to echo that as well a huge thanks to the real power of our committee which is our members, the membership that we have is incredible and as Eric mentioned the lift isn't all that great but the contributions are vital so if you want to have a voice in how technology proceeds in FOIA and you're a FOIA professional by all means please join us we have incredible partnerships with Alina and Bobby it's just a great group to be associated with and I'm really grateful for everyone's continued work and efforts on the FOIA Tech committee so thank you guys all and thank you Gorka for today's presentation so back over to you Alina and Bobby Thanks, thanks Eric and Mike Mark I understand we have an agency question yeah it's real quick do you have any participants who work for a state or local agency we do not at this time have any state or local but I think if anyone on a state or local has a question or contribution maybe that's practice that they want to share we'd be delighted to hear and communicate with them on that topic I'm sure okay great thanks very much Mark thanks again Eric and Mike great job keep up all the great work we really are very very grateful for everything they're doing and technology is where it's at so hopefully you'll have some more volunteers knocking down our doors to join the various working groups thanks so much alright thanks very much so moving on to the next part of our agenda I am very pleased to introduce our co-chairs of our co-cackey committee Michelle next slide please oh I'm sorry and there's the follow-up slide very important if you want to get in touch directly with Eric or Mike are their email addresses so we talked to them directly so now next slide Michelle okay so I want to introduce our co-chairs of the committee on cross-agency collaboration and innovation co-cackey it's really a mouthful but we have chosen to keep that acronym it seems to have stuck so I'm really pleased to present Michael Bell from US Department of Transportation and Avi Mosheim from US Consumer Products Safety Commission thank you thank you so much Alina and thanks everyone for joining us today my name is Avi Mosheim and I'm here with Mike Bell my co-chair on co-cackey Mike are you there I'm sorry I thought you were going to start your introduction I just wanted to introduce you first well thank you I'm not going to say too much about the committee to start off with I don't want to step on anyone's toes subcommittee chairs I'm going to talk a lot about what's going on I'll just say that we're a young committee we just celebrated our first anniversary so we're still really in the beginnings of our work and so we would love volunteers as well we cannot promise all the cool computer stuff that the technology has we've got a lot of spreadsheets and slide rules and we're the people committee so you're going to see that we're working with a lot of the job descriptions and what goes on in the office so we would love to have you contact any of us and we would love to have you and I will turn it back to Avi for the introduction about what we do oh great thank you very very much yeah like Mike said we're in our second year of existence and we are joined by so many dedicated FOIA professionals on our three subcommittees which we'll talk about today we're here from our subcommittee co-chairs today we always welcome new members to help us brainstorm solutions to those everyday problems that face FOIA offices you can find more information about us on the OGIS website Mike and I will also put our email addresses into the chat so if you're interested in joining have questions about membership we meet on the second Tuesday of every month and currently virtually and that looks like it'll continue for a while so yeah please please feel free to join us and even just sit in on a meeting to see what we're all about so Mike and I are joined today by our subcommittee co-chairs next slide please and that is Nicole Rementer and Madeline Ben-Nostrin they are with the GIS subcommittee Madeline could not be with us today but Nicole will be presenting the subcommittee Shantay Stanley is with the pandemic virtual FOIA offices subcommittee and Brandon Gaylord is with the resources subcommittee he could not be here today either but I'll be reading his slides for him and hopefully I will do at least almost just go to job as he does a great job telling everyone about the resources subcommittee next slide please so as I said we have three subcommittees and it's the government information specialist professionalism subcommittee they review and promote initiatives for clear career trajectories for FOIA professionals building on the GIS job series in coordination with existing agency efforts and there's the pandemic virtual FOIA office subcommittee we reviewed lessons learned from the pandemic to transform FOIA offices that they thrive in virtual and hybrid environments and then FOIA resources subcommittee which provides information on accessing revenue streams and resources that particularly benefits smaller agencies next slide please so Kilcatchy has been up to a lot in our first two years we're working on charters and mission statements which we should have up on the OGIS website in the next few weeks a couple of our subcommittees are drafting surveys which they hope to have out in the next month or so and the resources committee in particular is organizing a best practices workshop for the end of the calendar year and we will tell you more about that now but let me hand it over to Nicole to tell you all about the GIS subcommittee, Nicole Thanks so much Abby can we go to the next slide please Good morning my name is Nicole Rementer I am an attorney advisor in the national FOIA office at the protection agency I co-chair the government information specialist or GIS professionalization subcommittee along with Madeline Van Nostrand next slide please it should be a no surprise that the FOIA professional is at the heart of the government's successful implementation of the statute and its underlying policy values in 2012 OPM created the government information specialist series or the 306 series it was created to specifically address the work performed by FOIA and privacy app professionals and recognize the professional nature of FOIA work in the last decade however federal records, technology and other cross cutting issues have made FOIA work even more complex than the days of sharpie markers and whiteout tape and so has the typical career trajectory of a FOIA professional as recommended by the 2018 to 2020 term of the FOIA advisory committee the GIS professionalization subcommittee was established to look at what what FOIA professionals do and what they want in support of their career development if and what obstacles are preventing FOIA professionals from furthering their career in FOIA and what different agencies are doing to support their FOIA professionals to guide our work we set our mission statement to advocate for the advancement of the GIS profession through transparency and standardization across the federal government perhaps one day people will respond to the question what do you want to be when you grow up with a government FOIA professional next slide please in support of our objectives the subcommittee plans to focus its work in the following five areas first recruitment strategies these are in no particular order hiring and retention strategies uniform t-scale assignments key competencies for FOIA professionals and FOIA professional certification testing next slide please since our report out from the last chief way officer council meeting we have finalized the subcommittees charter and our short term deliverables we held meetings to tackle and brainstorm the development of our first deliverable a survey of employee FOIA professionals to gather baseline data on what the typical FOIA professional confronts in their career development and job satisfaction including supports and obstacles to help ensure the survey efforts provides quality data on this very important issue the subcommittee has consulted with multiple specialists to advise on best practices and pitfalls to avoid and conducting surveys next slide please the next steps in our efforts will be to wrap up the survey development and disseminate the survey to FOIA professionals government-wide our target is this year 2022 we will then examine the survey responses and then we also plan to conduct interviews with leaders and experts on an ongoing basis and continue to gather information to support our objectives thank you so much for your time and attention to hear about the great work that FOIA colleagues on the GIS subcommittee have been doing and we appreciate the council's support of our efforts for my FOIA professional colleagues I hope you will complete the survey when it comes out and Avi I will now turn it back to you thank you Nicole and now we are going to hear from Shante on pandemic virtual subcommittee next slide please good morning my name is Shante Stanley I am the chair of the pandemic virtual FOIA office subcommittee next slide please the pandemic virtual FOIA committee mission is to analyze and review the capability of FOIA professionals to effectively work from a virtual environment during the pandemic and post-pandemic the committee will compile best practices in order to improve the virtual work experience for FOIA professionals next slide please the long-term goal is to compile a list of best practices and lessons learned from a survey in order to sustain a virtual work environment during and post-pandemic at this time the committee is generating questions to send to FOIA professionals for feedback and applying changes to the committee's charter which will be published the committee's plan deliverable is a list of best practices and lessons learned focusing on the most effective procedures for the transition to a virtual environment that can be used during and post-pandemic thank you and back to Abby thank you so much Shante and now I will read out for our resources subcommittee next slide please next slide please so as I said Brandon could not be with us today but I will be filling in for him he is the resources subcommittee chair next slide please so the purpose of the resources subcommittee is to identify opportunities for standardization of a variety of resources including procurement vehicles and procurement of vehicles and technology for example that should be made available to FOIA offices to increase efficiency and ease of use across government agencies especially smaller FOIA request or service centers next slide please they have three main objectives to identify and highlight resources that are already standardized compile reference materials and training sessions to help agencies explore new and existing resources and identify opportunities for resources to be standardized to increase efficiency and ease of use across government agencies next slide please they are really looking forward to conducting a best practices workshop at the end of this year to inform the FOIA professional community on best practices and innovative methods for using and sharing resources so anyone who is interested in participating in that or helping Brandon and his subcommittee prepare for that definitely get in touch because that's going to be very exciting if you have successfully implemented scalable shareable resources they would love to hear from you contact them at the cfo-council at nar.gov email address so even if you're just thinking about it but you're not sure definitely get in touch I know that that subcommittee meets I would say once a month and they're picking up the pace to about two times a month now to get ready for that workshop so definitely drop them an email if you're interested in getting involved next slide please and with that I will hand it back over to Mike great thank you Abbey I appreciate it and thank you to all the subcommittee chairs and members who have done all this great work over the last year like we said at the very beginning our kakaki committee is only about a year old we celebrated our first anniversary meeting back in March and the one thing we wanted to do was just start off with a clear direction because we know that once you get started down a path it's hard to correct the course once you're way down the path so we really have spent this last year brainstorming trying to come up with good ideas and trying to see exactly what the FOIA community could benefit from so we really think that the issues that we're covering from the three subcommittees they're going to be important not just to FOIA professionals but also to the requester community because you know it goes both ways you know you can't have one without the other we see the passion from some of our requester out in the community and in the FOIA professional ranks we have to match that we have to respect that and to make sure that we treat their needs as well so I think what we come up with on our committees are going to be beneficial to everyone when it comes to GIS everyone is going to benefit from having the best people in government information specialist slots it's really tough to recruit, develop and then keep those kind of people just last week I was interviewing someone for a recent grad pathways position which I actually learned about that program a lot from our resources subcommittee and from some research that they did and I thought that might benefit our office and this is a really sharp girl she graduated college in three years grad student international business and I'm trying to tell her the benefits of why to start out in FOIA because it was something that she never gave a thought of as Nicole said she didn't really dream about being a FOIA professional when she was growing up or even in college so I was just telling her some of the benefits about some of the technology you know as we are trying to pick up technology in the government but you can use some of the best software out there and it really gives you good experience working with these kind of systems and just telling her how she would learn a lot about the government and if she's interested in finances we receive a lot of requests in our office regarding travel and budgets and things like that so trying to sell her on that but then finally I just wanted to convince her that if you take this position I will consider a success if two years from now I recommend you for another government job or else in the government and you get it and this is just a start to your career so the GIS subcommittee is really going to try to find a way to get those good people into the government and I think we could all use tips on that I know before our committee I could as well and then with the virtual office and pandemic subcommittee we're all starting to go back into the office now at some level some more days than others and no office will be the same as it was before the pandemic or even during the pandemic, we're changing again and this subcommittee is really coming up with ways that what should we take from that we learned in the pandemic and then translate it now as we're going into this hybrid sort of role that all offices are so this is going to be something that we're really going to look at and try to get feedback on what works best and what we'll translate over because we learned one of the ones we're discussing was there's different levels I want to say levels but some people are going back say one day a week some people can still work remotely 100% and that may create some inequities between offices when they're trying to compete for FOIA professionals you can lose a good person if they want to work somewhere that has 100% telework while your office they have to come in for one or two days a week so these are issues we're going to look at so that FOIA offices can address it ahead of time and have a good plan to how to deal with it and the resources subcommittee already mentioned how they helped educate me already on the pathways program with FOIA resources are so important because so much of what we're asked to do is unfunded and we have to find ways to scrimp and save and find ways to do all that and some agencies have it easier than others because they don't have the money and the resources like we're very lucky at DOT we were able to acquire FOIA express last year for our entire department all 11 operating administrations some of the smaller offices can't do that because they just don't have the resources it's almost like baseball which just started you have the New York Yankees that can spend $240 million on the team and then unfortunately I'm a fan of the Baltimore Orioles and we look for spare change under the seats to fund our team now while that's okay in baseball we want to make sure all FOIA offices have the equal opportunity to get the resources that they need to succeed and that's what this subcommittee is going to do and it's going to try to show everyone how to get those resources and just educate them on what's out there second bullet here laying the groundwork that's what we're doing right now we've really been working behind the scenes right now as Teddy Roosevelt would say we're in the speak softly phase of our operation we're really trying to prepare before we actually do anything and as you learn from some of the subcommittees we are about to start maybe the big stick phase as we start reaching out to government people agencies and professionals to try to get information and really hear what you guys are thinking out there and what you guys need from us before we get too far down the line because that's how we're going to guide what we do which is probably what this subcommittee is going to last you heard about the surveys those are really good ways that we can get broad statistical information really get some numbers out there we can probably create some pie charts and graphs out of it so we really appreciate if you could answer that if you receive one of the surveys but then we're also going to dive deeper into interviews our teams are going to go out there we're going to speak to you in person we'd love to meet with you virtually or in your office just some way to really then go deeper than what the survey is going to ask so that's going to be coming out as well before the end of the year we're going to have some resource workshops as you saw that's going to be good to have some interaction we're going to try to show what we've already learned we're going to get out there and just let people know what we're doing and get feedback as we go and actually I'm going to get a little rogue now I just thought I'm now going to lobby so I'm going to give you ASAP people a warning ASAP leadership we're going to lobby for maybe we should have a town hall meeting or something during the national training conference you know we can give us a little side room or something and we can there and listen to both requesters professionals everyone if they have any ideas or maybe even a table outside where all the software people sit or who knows maybe I'll just if they don't allow that I'll just sit in the hotel bar all day talk to people about FOIA but that's an idea maybe we'll do and because we really do what we're going to do next is just try to listen to everyone out there so be prepared to hear from us volunteer if you'd like to take part but we really do want to hear your voices as we move forward in this so I think you can see a lot of good work coming out because we've got a high bar with the technology committee I joked about their computers earlier but we really want to be as productive as they've been and we think that what we're focusing on is really going to benefit the FOIA community so that is all I have oh I see Abby's pop back in or you know take questions with me if there's any out there okay yeah any questions that popped up during our presentation Martha I'm going to ask whether you've seen any chat questions that have come in either on WebEx or on our YouTube channel yep nothing that came in regarding this presentation thank you hopefully your great presentation has inspired lots of volunteers I just want to thank both of you for the great work you've been doing my favorite line though today is going to be Nicole's I'm really going to be striving to look for people who want to grow up to become GIS but I think that's just great and it's something I'm actually particularly passionate about so I'm very excited about all the opportunities Mike by the way I believe you owe Michael Sarich a drink or the other way around we ended up having to swap our agenda and you let the technology committee go first right exactly it shows you a drink so at the training conference please be there and you'll be seeing both Mike's taking a drink anything else you guys want to add or should we say goodbye I don't have anything I would just say goodbye and again we'll put our email addresses into chat feel free to drop us an email and we look forward to hearing from you okay thank you so much for all your time today take care we did have one question come in it sort of towards the end yes and it was similar to the other can local county employees volunteer to be with this group or is this restricted to federal FOIA professionals I don't believe it's restricted to federal FOIA professionals so we would welcome local and state FOIA professionals to take part I think it would only enhance the discussions and lead to more robust solutions to all the problems that we face so definitely so Javi I'm just going to interject and say oh sorry we definitely disagree only because this committee is chartered under the chief officers council which is designed for federal chief officers that said we certainly would welcome input from folks who work at the state federal or local level I think I mean at the state or local level rather I think we could really benefit from those experiences and we definitely want to hear from them so hopefully perhaps during the survey period they may be able to give input but I'm not sure we're going to be able to accept a volunteer Bobby can you chime in on that and tell me if you agree or disagree with that Bobby you're on mute that's right and so you didn't even hear my thank yous as well so formally I don't we wouldn't add outside the executive agencies members as part of the council or the committee but that said we've had engagements both at the committee level and at the council level with public and civil society I think similarly we could have engagements of local and local and state officials and cross collaborate here from them they can hear from us so it's something that we can consider maybe as part of a you know like a separate engagement part of a meeting or there's interest so if there is interest I think please reach out to us and then we can maybe coordinate something like that there's no such thing as it too much knowledge but I also want to thank Mike Abby Nicole Chante also the entire coca-cola committee on all the great work on these really three important cross cutting issues I know agencies are looking forward to the progress of this committee and we'll find the work very helpful valuable so thank you so much thank you take care Michelle next slide please alright so with that we have now reached the public comment section of our meeting as we promised we were leaving time for that at the end of the meeting we look forward to hearing from any members of the public who have ideas comments that they would like to bear regarding the committee's work please find everyone that you may also submit written comments please email them to cfo-council at narra.gov any oral comments will be captured in the transcript of the meeting which will be posted as soon as it is available Alina Thanks Bobby we just want to remind our commenters to please limit your comments to three minutes once your three minutes expires so we'll mute your line and move on to the next commenter we will also be asking Martha if there are any comments in chat that have come in that can be read out loud during this public comment section so with that I'm going to ask Michelle our event producer if she could provide instructions for our listeners for how to ask a question or make a comment via telephone Absolutely So ladies and gentlemen as we enter the public comment session as Alina indicated please limit your comments to three minutes once your three minutes expires we will mute your line and move on to the next commenter in terms of how to get into the public comment queue please if you're joined via Webex please press the raise hand icon which is located right above the chat panel on the Webex window and enter you into the queue if you are joined to today's meeting via regular phone audio please press pound two on your telephone keypad to be recognized Okay thank you Michelle for that at this time Michelle do we have anyone queued up on our telephone line Yes we do I'm going to unmute the first caller Call your line is unmuted you have three minutes for your public comment Thank you My name is Chad Garland I'm here in my personal capacity on a matter of public concern regarding FOIA compliance and transparency namely a defense department policy that violates the FOIA rights of federal civilian and military personnel and particularly the staff of Stars and Stripes newspaper who are members of the FOIA press At least five DOD memos sent to FOIA professionals since 1991 state that while any person may file a public records request a quote representative of the federal agency unquote may not DOD has not defined representative of the federal agency nor has it cited any statute regulation or directive that does but these memos apply that phrase to Stars and Stripes personnel without qualification and these memos have been cited to deny employees personal rights on an unknown number of requests over the past 30 years but well more than a dozen In March last year a new DOD memo provided that while Stars and Stripes reporters may file the FOIA FOIA request as individuals their request must be denied if they fail to show proof that their federal employer gave them permission to make a request not on its behalf let that sink in DOD says that because Congress expressly granted FOIA rights to any person certain persons must get agency approval to file FOIA requests in their capacity as persons the FOIA doesn't authorize such identity-based rules but DOD claims that the statute requires this policy and that it has no discretion were that true it would affect far more federal employees if not all of them as the FOIA's terms apply government-wide agencies would have published implementing rules to that effect in the federal register but DOD hasn't even published its policy there nor does it enforce its policy equally against all DOD employees despite regulations requiring that only laws and directives affecting all DOD employees will affect Stars and Stripes personnel where other DOD unabashedly singles out Stars and Stripes reporters who differ from all other DOD employees and that regulations require that they be treated as members of the free press not government officials yet DOD has told me outright that it considers them agency representatives exclusively because of their press status any other federal employee may make a FOIA request in the personal capacity of DOD has said but not those who self-identify as members of the press whether in their request or otherwise as it's designed to implement this policy is clearly discriminating against federal employees for how they use their first amendment rights and it must be rescinded and to ensure FOIA compliance and transparency I think all agency rules should affirm that when invoking FOIA federal employees must be treated as any person asserting their private rights unless the request explicitly state otherwise I've submitted written comments to provide for the details. Thank you. All right, thank you sir. Your free minutes have expired. We're moving to the next caller in queue. Before we get to the next caller Michelle I just want to acknowledge Mr. Garland thank you for your comments. We did receive your written comments. I believe they came in today we will review them and post them as soon as we possibly can and thank you again for your comments. Michelle I'm sorry go ahead please. All right we're back to unmute the next caller in queue. Mr. Hammony may go ahead with three minutes. Yes, can anybody hear me okay? Yes. Yes, please go ahead. Okay I'm going to jump right into seven recommendations that I've made. There are more that have not been published but the first one is to post the contemporaneous FOIA logs second is OJIS review records in camera and lease them third OJIS be able to do binding arbitration fourth is require amending past annual FOIA reports and raw data those are massively false every year DOJ knows it you got to amend the last report and put that up there too so everybody can see how bad they are. Number five DOJ, OIP and OJIS refer egregious cases to the office special counsel. Number six OJIS do statistically significant samples of FOIA raw data they just sample a few records every year and number seven is increased funding and authority for both OJIS and DOJ OIP and in support of these recommendations I refer to DC district court 16-421-KG KBJ overseen by now Supreme Court Justice Kajangi Brown Jackson and this specific issue I want to talk about is Walter Reed FY 2013 annual FOIA report raw data to Pumat and there are seven other FOIA requests in that litigation it involves a parent false official statements and decorations admitted alteration records during litigation admitted destruction of records material false quarterly and annual reports those are apparent. In my May 27, 2014 and September 15, 2014 appeals of a B5 denial of my April 1, 2014 FOIA request to Navy View Med seeking Walter Reed FY 2013 FOIA report raw data and forwarding correspondence I say this FOIA request of my appeal have bearing on the accuracy of FOIA reporting the annual FOIA report to the United States Congress and potentially on the integrity of FOIA processing DOD then added B6 B7 they removed B5 with withholding for the whole log and they stated they removed B7 and B6 have been reduced from 53 to 15 cases and that that log was going to be released. It has never been released despite a court order the after the fact that you really altered log in addition to B6 contains B4 B5 and B7 that were never cited in any VONDEC index or defense memo after eight years and six years of litigation I still do not have those raw report data to show you how much Walter Reed Navy and DOD were cooking the books what I have is a materially altered 16 page FOIA processing log that does not comport with the 17 page log cited in DOD's VONDEC Thank you so much for your comments sir Thank you again, thank you back in for moving on to the next caller Soledad please go ahead Soledad go ahead and unmute your line on the WebEx audio screen you have three minutes alright I think Soledad is having some issues with her audio okay thanks Michelle have you unmuted Soledad we can't hear you alright I think Soledad had issues with her audio okay we'll come back to that caller I'm just going to take this opportunity to ask Martha if we have any comments that need to be read out loud we had a couple comments related to I think probably best answered by our tech committee we had one commenter say that they would like for the public to be allowed to attend the next tech event as the public has an interest I don't know if Eric or Michael would like to speak to that issue a little bit and why those were events that were kept to FOIA professionals sure hi Martha I think the event in general the tech committee works to empower FOIA professionals and seek solutions within federal agencies that said we're collaborative and like to seek opportunities to work with different groups we did so with the next gen FOIA showcase to partner with other agencies in the private sector to kind of see what's available following federal acquisition rules and so forth so I think if there are opportunities for us to engage with the public more we can explore that definitely and in the meantime if you have any ideas or recommendations please send them into us so let us see what's possible and definitely want to be as collaborative as possible and I think we would benefit I think Abby mentioned it's very collaborative outside perspectives it's just finding ways to make sure we can both achieve the mission of the group that we have and also seek as much outside of engagement and participation as possible so I hope that answers the question thank you that's all I've got for right now Alina okay thanks Michelle back to callers do we have any other callers queued up yes we do have an additional caller in queue Paul you may go ahead your three minutes starts now yes this is Robert Hammond I want to continue so I I got a bond index it said a 17 page log then I got a 16 page log that dog don't hunt the logs that are entered into evidence contain dated alterations to FOIA request as late as 30 September 2014 that's a year after the close of fiscal year 13 it's after do these reports are finalized after I sought the records after my administrative appeal and apparently during litigation three dated alterations site litigation which was filed on March 2nd 2016 are those alterations to the log the static finalized FY 2013 processing log also post litigation in addition to the ones that were admitted I could have been altered the DOJ handbook states each agency is ultimately responsible for the accuracy and completeness of the Daniel FOIA report DOD states in litigation immaterial because the FOIA provides no private cause of action or remedy for any inaccuracy of incompleteness of annual FOIA report data chief FOIA counsel what say you in violation of law is still not released at FY 16 raw data and the 17th defense health agency data does not contain any case numbers the FOIA improvement act requires FOIA raw data to be posted and I've been seeking this stuff through specific FOIA request for years and I can't get it so what happens is the original Walter Reed and Nate Bumed static records after first stating that they never received reports of Walter Reed Bumed now states that they destroyed them records Bumed properly destroyed were subject to FOIA and narrow GRS required preservation and remain so so how to altered records get into litigation who knew what and when the appell authority is also agency counsel I'm not a lawyer but I don't think you should alter official static final report records or destroy them when sought under FOIA or altered bond index material DOJ, OIP I have a recommendation for things to refer to special counsel this may be one I sent numerous correspondences to Walter Reed's FOIA for chain of command and those holding responsive records to preserve them for judicial review DOD admits destroying records including certified mail records after I sought them and apparently post litigation start DOD's response again in material does not require preservation of records huh CFO counsel must verify that agencies cannot knowingly destroy records sought under FOIA and cite the violations of federal statutes for doing so then there are material misrepresentations that agency counsel email documents to plaintiff counsel when he did not unlike DOD I preserve every record thank you so much for your comments have expired thank you okay calling back in thank thank you I just want to say with regard to reporting I want to defend the departments work on this and especially my teams particularly the amount of resources that go towards data validation very incredibly proud of our team and also agencies for the amount of resources that we put into making sure that the data is accurate as much as possible I don't think there's possible 100% accuracy with data ever but we continue to strive to making sure we can validate and make sure we have the cleanest data that's statistically insignificant for any kind of data validation areas and I will say that every time GAO has done an engagement they rely on the data in FOIA.gov and in doing so they do a vetting to make sure that it's reliable and accurate to rely on as we said this is in the form for specific requests and I can't speak to any of the specific requests but of course I know that myself my office and I would just have made them so we meet ourselves available for other specific inquiries and we try to be as responsive as we can so I thank the caller I just want to provide those comments Bobbie Martha I just wanted to do one last check in any other comments or questions on the WebEx chat or the NAR YouTube chat so Mr. Hammond put in a request to give a comment to Ms. Gupta without understanding that she actually did not stay on to the meeting but perhaps I can put it to you Bobbie basically the question was whether DOJ FOIA compliance mission should actually move to GAO and so this would not necessarily be publishing annual reports but GAO would audit and assume FOIA compliance the FOIA compliance function well I would say GAO already has an audit functioning and as the associate mentioned as the AG mentioned we are very proud of our unique role in ensuring the effective and efficient administration of the FOIA and so are proud to do all the things that we need to ensure our guidance, our training, our advice to agencies is applying the FOIA with a presumption of openness and that agencies are fully and faithfully applying the law as it is in the statute and case law and DOJ policy so I think our roles are complimentary as is our role with OGIS thanks very much Bobbie so I know we're at 12.01pm we've scheduled this meeting to go through noon we've gone through our 15 minutes of public comments I want to thank all of our public commenters I just again want to remind everyone we have posted an extensive amount of comments from public commenters on our FOIA chief FOIA officer council portion of the OGIS website so I want to invite everyone who's participating today to please go read all of those comments with attachments so at this point we're going to be wrapping up and we very much hope to see you again later this fall for another CFO council meeting Bobbie I haven't mapped out exactly when that's going to be but please stay tuned for further announcements on an exact date and time as well as registration information I want to thank all of you again for joining us today I hope everyone and their families remain safe, healthy and resilient and take care of yourselves and Bobbie over to you thank you Alina and thanks everyone for joining us it was a really great meeting today both the agencies and members of the public on the WebEx and live stream but a special thanks of course to all of our presenters who did a great job today really informative session and meeting of the committee and a special thanks again to the FOIA professionals who are volunteering their times to the two committees another last minute plug please if you're interested volunteer and also let us know if there is something you'd like to see the committee address some type of something you'd like an item you'd like us to address at the next CFO council meeting