 This meeting is being recorded. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you for joining today's FOIA Advisory Committee meeting. Before we begin, please ensure that you have opened the WebEx participant and chat panel by using the associated icons located at the bottom of your screen. Please note all audio connections are muted and this conference is being recorded. To present a comment via WebEx audio, please click the raise hand icon on your WebEx screen. The raise hand icon is located in the lower toolbar. You will hear a beat tone when you are unmuted. At that time, please state your name and question. If you are connected to today's webinar via phone audio, please dial pound two on your telephone keypad to enter the comment queue. If you require technical assistance, please send a chat to the event producer. With that, I will turn the meeting over to Dr. Colleen Shogan, Archivist of the United States. Ma'am, please go ahead. Thank you and good morning. My name is Dr. Colleen Shogan. I am the Archivist of the United States and I welcome you all to the fifth meeting of the fifth term of the Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee. I joined you less than one month into my tenure as the 11th Archivist of the United States. Since I took the oath to the Constitution, the same oath taken by every public servant, I have embarked on a tour of National Archives facilities across our great nation. Recently, I visited the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis and the National Personnel Records Center Annex in Balmyer, Illinois that serve as the central repository of personnel-related records for the military and civil services of the United States government, respectively. Reducing the pandemic-related backlog of veterans' records requests is one of my top priorities as Archivist of the United States. As I have told, the over 2,600 dedicated public servants who work at the National Archives our mission is straightforward and complex. Strengthen our nation's democracy through access to the public records we hold in trust. If there are no records, there is no accountability. And accountability is crucial to American democracy. Here at the Archives, we hold a great deal of records and trust. Our permanent archival holdings include 13.5 billion pieces of paper and 835 terabytes of electronic records. I can best describe 835 terabytes by sharing with you that that prefix, Terra, is derived from the Greek word Teros, meaning monster. So certainly every records agency manager and FOIA professional and the 121 departments and agencies across the federal government can relate to a monster number of records. Mammoth challenges such as these come with enormous opportunities which I encourage the committee to continue identifying. Since arriving at the National Archives, I was pleased to learn that one of my many roles will be to receive from the FOIA Advisory Committee sound and reasoned advice on improving the administration of FOIA across the government. Although you are still in your first year of a two-year term, I understand that today you will be discussing draft recommendations, a draft recommendation regarding the legal privileges that agencies can use to withhold information in records responsive to FOIA under Exemption 5. I look forward to reviewing any recommendations that you pass or consider whether today or throughout the year. Next month, we observe the 56th anniversary of FOIA's enactment. Upon signing the bill, President Lyndon Johnson noted in his signing statement that a democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the nation permits. No one, he said, should be able to pull the curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest. Thank you to the FOIA Advisory Committee members for all the work you do as requesters and public servants to strive towards a more perfect FOIA. I am confident that together we can work together to help ensure that the United States remains in President Lyndon Johnson's words an open society in which the people's right to know is both cherished and guarded. Now I'm going to turn this over to you, Alina, to begin the work of the meeting. Thank you so much, Dr. Shogun. Thank you. Hopefully you can stay for a little bit and join us in our meeting today, but if you have to go, we completely understand that. I want to welcome everyone as the director of the Office of Government Information Services, OGIS, and this committee's chair. It is my pleasure to welcome all of you to the fifth meeting of the fifth term of the FOIA Advisory Committee. It's hard to believe, but here we are. And I especially want to welcome our wonderful new archivist, Dr. Shogun, who is less than one month into her tenure. We are very excited to be working with her. Welcome to Lauren Harper, who hopefully has rejoined us. She was having some slight technical difficulties. Oh, Lauren, there you are. Hello. She has been recently appointed by the Acting Archivist of the United States, Deborah Stidow-Wall, in March, following our last meeting in March, actually, to fill a vacancy that had developed on the committee. Committee member, Aira Tansy. Aira, I know you're there. She has left the University of Cincinnati in late April to launch an archival consulting business. We're very excited for you, Aira. Because her seat is a non-designated seat, Aira will remain on the committee, and she is going to be fully engaged with the resources subcommittee. So we're excited to have her stay on. And last but not least, a change is ahead for Dave Collier. Professor Collier is leaving the University of Arizona, or have you already left? Leaving? In transit. And headed to the University of Florida, where he will direct the Breckner Center for Freedom of Information. So that's very exciting, David. But all the work you have ahead, and all the great worker students are going to be helping the committee with. Okay, I want to welcome all of our colleagues and friends from the FOIA community and elsewhere who are watching us today, either via Webex or with a slight delay on our NARA YouTube channel. All of our committee members' names and biographies are posted on our website. I have a few housekeeping items to go through, and then we will launch into our full agenda today. I am advised that committee members, Paula Chalmers, Stephanie Jewett, Adam Marshall, and Ben Tingo are unable to join us today. Kirsten, I'm going to turn to you as our Designated Federal Officer. I believe you have taken a visual roll call. I just want to make sure that we have a quorum. Can you please confirm that? We do indeed have a quorum, which is 13, and we have 16 today. So welcome everyone. Thanks, Kirsten. I appreciate that. Meeting materials are available on the committee's webpage. Click on the link for the 2022 to 2024 FOIA Advisory Committee on the OGIS website. We will upload transcript of minutes of this meeting as soon as they are ready in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act back up. Kirsten and I have certified the minutes from our March 2nd meeting, and those along with the transcript are posted on the OGIS website in accordance with the back up. During today's meeting, I will do my best to keep an eye out for any committee member who raises their hand if they have a question or comment. I encourage committee members to also use the all-panelist option from the drop-down menu in the chat function when you want to speak or ask a question, or you can chat with me or Kirsten directly. We'll try to keep an eye out on all those things. In order to comply with the spirit and intent of back up, I just want to remind committee members please to not put any substantive comments in the chat, keep it only to housekeeping or procedural matters, as they will not be recorded in the transcript of our meeting. As I mentioned earlier, we have a full agenda today. So we are not planning on taking a break. However, if we're running a little bit longer than anticipated, I may call for a short five or 10-minute comfort break. If a committee member needs to take a break at any time, please do not disconnect from the web event. Instead, I encourage you to meet your microphone and turn off your camera. Please send me and Kirsten a quick chat to let us know if you'll be gone for more than just a few minutes and join us again as soon as you are able. And a reminder to all committee members, please identify yourself by name and affiliation each time you speak. That helps us tremendously down the road with our transcript and minutes, both of which are required by the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Members of the public who wish to submit written public comments to the committee may do so using our public comments form that we rolled out earlier this year. We review all public comments and post them as soon as we are able if they comply with our public comments posting policy. In addition to the written public comments we have already posted, we will have the opportunity for oral public comments at the end of today's meeting as we do at every meeting. As we noted in our May 15, 2023 Federal Register notice announcing this meeting, public comments will be limited to three minutes per individual. Okay, any questions? Let me just pause for a second. I'm just going to tile back and forth, make sure our committee members are all good. I don't see anyone. I'm seeing some shakes of head nodding us. Great. Okay. Terrific. So on to our busy agenda for today. First, we're going to hear a briefing on the FOIA reference model from Goodbloom and Dr. Elliott Bosek of MITRE Corporation. We're very excited to welcome them today. We will next hear from the modernization subcommittee, which has at least two items, if not three, to bring to the full committee's attention today. I will let Jason and Gorka drive that part of the presentation. After that, we're going to hear from the resources and implementation subcommittees, both of which have been quite busy. They will provide us updates on their work. And as I mentioned earlier, we will close the meeting with a brief comment period from the public. Okay. I think we're running pretty close to on time. So that's good news. I am very happy to welcome from MITRE Corporation, David Bloom and Dr. Elliott Bosek. David is a senior data management and business process analyst at the MITRE Corporation. With over 30 years in information technology consulting, David began his career focusing on business intelligence, data warehousing, and data management. Since working at MITRE, David also led business process redesign efforts across civilian and defense agencies. Prior to MITRE, David worked at American management systems, Wipro technologies, Wipro technologies, David, sorry if I'm mispronouncing that, and decision path consulting. David graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor of science in information systems and industrial management. Welcome, David. And Elliott is a records and knowledge management engineer at MITRE where his work focuses on knowledge management, records management, and FOIA. He previously worked as a records manager and archivist at higher education institutions and he has a PhD in library and information science from Simmons University. So, David and Elliott, welcome. We are so very happy to have you here and I hope you will entertain questions from the committee as we go along in your presentation, but we are going to turn it over to you now and let you drive. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much, Alina. Can you hear me? Okay. All right. Very good. So, as Alina mentioned, we are going to talk about a business reference model for the Freedom of Information Act and focusing on a presentation of the FOIA reference model, which the MITRE Corporation developed through its independent research development program. As Alina mentioned, I've worked in records and records management a long time and currently I've been supporting FOIA projects at MITRE and I found the work very interesting and of course it's a process and a law that's vitally important to the health of our liberal democracy. So, if we go to the next slide, the questions that we're going to address are who's MITRE and why do we focus on FOIA? What can defining FOIA business standards? How can defining FOIA business standards address agency FOIA challenges? And what are the components of the FOIA reference model and how can it be used to establish government-wide FOIA business standards? So, MITRE is a organization that operates six federally funded research and development centers, as well as supports MITRE labs and has an independent research and development program. Together with government and public-private partnerships, MITRE works to improve the safety, stability, and well-being of our nation. Next slide. Federally funded research and development centers are organizations that promote objective collaboration to solve large-scale problems. They serve as long-term strategic partners to government, providing objective guidance in an environment free of conflict of interest. Today, MITRE operates six federally funded research and development centers working across government in a partnership with industry to tackle challenges to the safety, stability, and well-being of our nation. Next slide. MITRE works on a wide range of challenges such as air traffic collision avoidance and electronic health records to give just two examples. Next slide. So, why did MITRE focus on FOIA? So, we've supported agencies FOIA processes in various ways. This is included defining requirements for FOIA system acquisition, assessing FOIA agencies FOIA programs, enhancing programs processing and preparing interim solutions for agencies. And MITRE has also developed a natural language processing and artificial intelligence enabled FOIA assistant tool that streamlines exemption identification work. Our general observations from these engagements that we've had is that FOIA processing can be both very labor and time intensive yet inefficiently supported and that implementations tend to be agency-specific and vary in functional and analytic support. Look at the next slide. We've sort of thought about these challenges that we've observed. I'm sure many people at this meeting have observed into three areas. One is around the difficulty and challenges of meeting demand. The second area is around inconsistencies in release. And the third is around challenges with monitoring and measuring FOIA processes and activities in a way that can identify and enable opportunities for improvement. So, on the next slide. This sort of leads to the question of how can a government-wide FOIA business standards address those challenges? So, I think most importantly and centrally, they provide a common language that can empower agencies to be more informed and precise in their conversation amongst FOIA staff, FOIA solution and service providers and other mission support functions. Having agreed upon government-wide FOIA business standards can help enable agencies to identify inefficiencies and gaps in agency FOIA business processes and workflows to help them ensure that FOIA staff training is consistent and comprehensive, enable evaluations of FOIA solutions and service offerings, and make sure that those are thorough and systematic. Identify and integrate process touchpoints, data exchanges, and related technologies with other agency mission support functions. So, for example, FOIA systems, talking to financial systems are about FOIA fees. And identify resources needed based on activity and performance measures that are systematic and measurable and bringing those measures against concrete targets for FOIA business operations. Next slide. So, the history of the FOIA reference model. In 2021, MITRE initiated its work on the FOIA reference model through its independent research and development program. As that work at MITRE proceeded, in 2022, we engaged with the Chief FOIA Officers Council's Technology Committee to stand up the reference model working group, whose members are on the slide. That working group provided invaluable feedback to us to help validate and improve the reference model as we were developing it. That working group also published on their own a white paper about the reference model and that white paper is posted on the CFO Council website. And we published the FOIA reference model in January 2023. So just a few months ago. Overlapping that work as we were completing the FOIA reference model in November 2022, the Department of Justice Office of Information Policy was designated as the lead agency for developing the government-wide federal integrated business framework, or to develop the FOIA business standards. And this is something that was mentioned at this committee's last meeting and is highlighted in the Fifth Open Government National Action Plan. In January, a few months ago, MITRE delivered to OIP an initial version of the FIVATH FOIA business standards that were derived from MITRE's FOIA reference model. Next slide. So this is looking forward a little bit to what happens next with the FOIA reference model. As mentioned, that's the OIP and the FIVATH FOIA working group. We'll continue to draw on MITRE's FOIA reference model to incrementally develop the FIVATH FOIA business standards. There's a, that process involves review and feedback. This includes the business standards being posted on regulations.gov to get feedback from other agencies, other FIVATH functional areas, such as financial management, which I touched on earlier, industry and shared services, and of course the public. The FIVATH FOIA business standards will be reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget, and the business standards will be incorporated into federal solutions and service requirements, such as GSA's multiple award schedule. The FIVATH on your right, the wheel in the upper right-hand corner outlines the five functional areas of the FIVATH, and then the table in the lower right-hand corner outlines some of the connections and how the reference model is informing the business standards. So on the next slide, I'm going to turn things over to my colleague, David Bloom, who's going to talk about the reference model itself and our approach to developing it and some of its components. So over to you, David. Thank you, Elliot. Can you all hear me and see me okay? I'll take that as a yes, unless somebody does. Okay, thank you. So before we're going to spend this time on this section to talk about what this model actually looks like. We'll open it up and look at some of the pieces. It's a fairly dense document, and we're going to help you navigate that document so you have a better understanding of how you might use it, how you could reference it. Just real quick, how did I get into FOIA in the first place? Well, on a MITRE project, I was brought into an agency, part of which one of the divisions was using our dear friend and tool Excel to manage their tracking of FOIA requests. Not surprising necessarily, but I do love Excel and I've done a lot of work with Excel and it is by far no means the proper tool to manage the process. So I kind of got a glimpse from the, sort of maybe one of the worst ways to manage the requests and the process to having an opportunity to look at a more comprehensive approach and thinking about all the piece parts that could really go into a model for executing the FOIA process. So before we dive in, let's just be clear about when we say reference model, what do we mean? Lots of definitions out there. I've just picked these two, one from Carnegie Mellon, my alma mater, but I like these two because they kind of hit at two key points. So one is a division of functionality. We're talking about decomposition of a business capability into its smaller pieces and understanding how those pieces interrelate. It's really a focus on the what and not the how. And the second part, the second reference is Dodap. Some of you may be familiar with that if you're on the defense side. Dodap is simply an architectural framework for again, modeling business functionality. But one of the key aspects of Dodap is again to model it in such a way that it's not specific to a particular agency. It's really about the function, which is also what the FEBIF is going to do. GSA's FEBIF work that Elliot just mentioned. So these two aspects of essentially being the what and not the how and being applicable to multiple agencies is really the purpose. It's a business architecture. It's this description of business. It's this description of technology or how technology would necessarily be applied. Although there are hints in some of the reference model as to where certain types of technology may be advantageous. I keep wanting to hit my arrow button to move the next slide. I got it coming. So there are a few... Let's get back. There are a few principles that we wanted to adhere to to model this FOIA work. One is to use sound systems engineering practices. We are MITRE. We do follow that every day. But also to make sure that it's a description that can stand up to some scrutiny from a systems engineering practice. We also wanted to make sure that it was relatively easy to understand. While it is dense, the diagrammatics that we used used UML, a unified modeling language, which is notably easier to consume than some other techniques. We use use cases, which are really the activities that get performed. And in the model, you'll see there's literally hundreds of activities that get performed as the way we decompose it. And then user stories are another way of saying a business requirement. We used to talk about system shall statements. The system shall do this or shall do that. A user story is another way of doing that in a little bit more artful way where it talks about who's doing, who needs that requirement and why. And so that's the user story. So we wanted to have useful relationships and descriptions of the information. We did use some sequence modeling. These are workflow diagrams, but we very quickly recognize there is no one workflow. Every agency is going to perform things a little bit differently. So in our workflow diagrams, our focus was on key dependencies between the activities and not so much about a specific workflow. And in fact, you'll see in the model itself, we model workflow as a capability that can be extended and should be able to be extended if possible, especially for the larger, more complex agencies, that should be able to define their own workflows, especially in carrying out a particular request. We call those tasks. You will see more about that later. We used user stories, as I mentioned, to model business requirements. And we wanted to make sure that there was traceability between each user story, that each activity, and a requirement or one or more requirements in the user stories and the use case or the activity. So each user story is a requirement. Each use case is an activity. We wanted to make sure that as we described a requirement, something that the system should do, it was aligned to one of the activities we had described in the model. You'll see in the description, and we'll talk a little bit more about the roles, which are we call the hats that people can wear. We wanted to make sure that they were fairly specific and granular, and that's to allow both complex and simple FOIA shops to operate. We'll touch that on again a little bit. And then we also aligned the processes and specs to business functions or processes, key processes. There's about 26 processes that you'll see in a moment. We also wanted to make sure we follow some good data-driven approaches. There's some data models that describe not only the kinds of data you would expect to see in a case, but also the kind of data that you would expect to manage the process of the FOIA request itself. What information do you need to keep about a case? What information do you need to keep about the process that's going on around that case? And you'll see this in the terms of configurable workflows, communications, time accounting, and other areas. We also wanted to identify where we could find them, control vocabularies. You could think of them almost like the pick list that you would want to see if you were doing a dropdown. A good example here would be the exemption types. So whether you're talking about national security or the deliberative process, these should be standardized. They already are. So those are specific to policy. We also wanted to make sure that there was additional vocabularies that would be useful for process perspective. And so that level of standardization, which can be completely customized by any agency, would allow for more rigorous analytics and consistent analytics by having certain data that is tied to sets of values and not just random type. And then the same thing, similar with the processing of configurable rules and the processing of policies. Those are also user stories, but we sort of call those out separately so that they could be viewed as something that agencies would want to be able to configure in the data itself. We've talked about in the model that there is a need to integrate various FOIA data. It's the source data and the record keeping systems with FOIA repository and ultimately to the public records that get pushed into the FOIA library. Easy to do on paper, not so easy to do in real life, but we wanted to make sure we acknowledge that. And we've also highlighted some of the data exchanges that we think would be important, many of which, or some of which, you know, you already are doing, you're already managing between FOIA.gov and others and pay.gov. But we wanted to sort of call out others that we could identify that would be important. Those exchanges would likely be addressed in part or fully by the FIVF as well. And then we also want to focus on analytics, both advanced analytics and what we would call traditional business intelligence or performance management types of analytics. From an AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning, human language technology perspective, these are examples of where we think advanced analytics would play out and we've called that out in the document. Being able to search for records in source systems and FOIA repository, e-discovery can be certainly aided by advanced analytics, learning, you know, advanced learning systems, deduping source system records. I know that's particularly challenging when you have email threads and the like. Identifying likely exemptions and redactions. Now, our sister project here, another major effort that Elliot mentioned is the Mitre FOIA assistant tool, actually supports that. It's actually delving into that with artificial intelligence. And while our specifications don't specify the models or how to do that exactly, we identify where in the model those things would play out. Finding similar requests, analyzing the responses could help to have consistency in response. And then recommending processes and cues. So for example, when a request comes in, we need to route that to the right people, to the right process. Using AI could help with that as we start to see what kinds of text is coming through on the request. We could at least recommend using artificial intelligence to the intake function as to where that should go. And also tagging the request to aid in various ways. One that we'll talk about later is in proactive disclosure. So that's some examples of AI. Business intelligence is a little more traditional. It goes back to my old days, back in the 80s and 90s when we were doing this kind of work, but it's still valid today is how do we measure the process and the performance of those to continually improve. Again, Elliot hinted at that as well. We've indicated in the reference model a starter kit or draft set of that information as well. We'll take a look at that in a few minutes. This is a schema. We're not going to walk through the details, but essentially describes the kinds of information that is in the model. In this four major sections here, you'll see there's a functional model, a data model, a requirements model, and an interaction model. And so what we're describing are business processes. We've got 26 processes. They comprise over 300 use cases. Also we call them activities. And over 50 distinct roles, also called actors, depending upon the modeling technique you're using. There's over 400 user story requirements. So these kinds of things can be fed into acquisition efforts. They can be used to jumpstart a gap assessment, perhaps to look at see where we are, what kinds of things might we want to consider. And then we've got within those 400 40 configurable processing rules, 30 data classes. These are sort of what do we want to keep information about. And over 60 controlled vocabulary, as I mentioned earlier, those are things like the pick list, for example, that you might want to capture. And then the model is available as a PDF, but we also provide it through Excel and Visio. Those contain a lot of the models themselves, and those are actually downloadable. Just to point out the structure of the document itself. So there's eight sections with a series of appendices. You put the left side as kind of reading material, because I guess I feel like those are the high level information that's most consumable, but it is a reference model. And by that we mean you're not necessarily going to read through, you know, the details as a book. You can refer to it where it helps, but it wasn't meant to be done that way. It is over 300 pages. I would argue that the first four or five chapters are more readable. But this is the content that we have. There's an overview. We've got a description of the top level. We talk about the standardized exchanges, some relationships to other functional areas. We'll talk about that in a moment. A focus on the analytical capabilities and reporting. Again, that's sort of business intelligence here. All the detailed process descriptions. That's a fairly dense section. We've identified the bibliography, and then these are the appendices. So we'll leave it at that. You're welcome to leave through it. Some of the key features I'm going to talk about in the next few slides are the types of cases, what we look at when we say case management in terms of the content of cases. When we say configurable workflow to kind of give you a sense of that. The different records environments. A little word on proactive disclosure, since it's such an important part of where we are. And then a little bit on fee management just to clarify a few things. So there are different types of cases in the case. This is sort of a piece of work that we, we start with an open and we need to get it closed. It's as typically would go through some sort of a workflow to get it done. And these are categories. They blew our categories of cases. So we have the overall case. And then these are different types of cases. And we usually think of the FOIA request as a case. We also treat FOIA request item as a case. And what that means is it's kind of a, if a requester was asking for multiple things and they were really going to require, you know, two different types of search or two different, maybe even multiple responses, we might divide up the request into request items. And so that's all that is, that's all that means. We're calling a sub case as well. But also appeals and tracking litigations. Now with litigations, we aren't trying to model. The process of litigating in this document. That was never our intent. It's really about monitoring the activity that's going on in the peripheral because we need to know in FOIA, what's going on and how that will affect the outcome for requests. So what we do track is sort of kind of a case, a minimal case, I guess you could say. And then we have interagency actions like referrals, coordination, consultations. And different types of inquiries, request or inquiries and mediation types. So it kind of represents the overall taxonomy of case types that we are referring to in the, I'll call it the firm federal FOIA reference model. If you want to take a look at the types of information, there's a set of attributes, data elements that we have in the model that describe the case itself. We also know that those can relate to sets of notes and documents. And we want to track the communications that relate to the case. I mentioned process queue before, traditionally or minimally, maybe we say that we need to track those that are in a simple, complex or expedited queue. And that's a way to track the case, to manage its workflows, to prioritize perhaps the expedited. But in our model, we see no reason why an agency couldn't define more queues or sub queues. Maybe there's a first person, simple request, maybe there's a first person complex request. This idea that we could allow for extensibility is a theme throughout the model. We also talk about being able to configure tasks and actions that relate to the case. And then different types of people and groups of people may be involved in processing the actions and receiving actions and doing tasks, as well as capturing time sheet information. So it's kind of a summary view, gives you a sense of the types of information that we think could be relevant, but it's not all the data that you would see about FOIA. This is just focused on the case portion. The configurable workflow concept is sort of in two parts. The right hand side is what we would call the template, which is the idea that an organization could set up and pre-define its queues, which is at the top here, a processing queue that may have various actions, tasks and actions. An action is something that is done to someone, a task is something that you need to do. So an action might be a notification, a task might be, you know, you need to go get a certain mid-level approval before you can proceed or you need someone else to look at it, some subject matter expert. You could define a task for that. This would be sort of templatized so that for certain types of process queues that are defined, we already have that all configured. And then the left side is essentially drawing on that template, applying that template, and maybe even further customizing it as needed for a given request. And so that's why you see the FOIA case on the left side, because this is kind of the real deal. This is the actual, and the right side is kind of the pro forma that an organization might set up for as many queues as they want to be defined. In terms of records environments, in the forum, we talk about three major types, the record keeping systems, those cells, so that which we're drawing from. That's why repository, which is the internal set of records, some of which may or may not get disclosed or even released, but it is they were considered responsive. And then those that, a subset of those, not all of them, but a subset of those that may go from the repository into a public reading room, aka the library. And so this isn't meant to all go here, but just that that's the kind of a typical flow. So just just for terminology, these are the terms that we're using in the, in the reference model. We hit correctly disclosure in a couple of different ways. You know, it's a little, you know, it's hard to get into this when you don't see the whole model, but I'll just kind of call these out just briefly. There is a process called provide pre request support, which is really before a requester would even submit, will necessarily submit anything. The idea is to provide functionality that may perhaps reempt the need to even submit a request. So for them to know that maybe there's records published elsewhere to provide that kind of information some content, perhaps through a portal, being able to search effectively, search the FOIA library. Sure, that's it's not unusual. That's the typical. And then also this would be wonderful if we could get to this point where we could identify a request to identify where that information may be that other agencies may have. So in other words, I know you can kind of get that sense from us, from I think FOIA.gov. When you go on to an agency website, it would be great if there's some way to connect it so that someone isn't submitting a request for records that then have to get referred. We do that, but or not just referred, but maybe, you know, maybe it's the wrong agency. So, so, you know, having that information available could certainly help scoping inside the request. So at the beginning, when we're sort of getting our hands around the request, you know, we could determine whether some of that is publicly available. And so that's why we have request items, maybe some of the pieces of that request could be furnished available and some of it may not. So we can divide it up that way. And also to use topics or tagging, this is where the AI and machine learning could come in to help recommend in later phases when we were reviewing responsive records that perhaps maybe given agency policies and rules and that there's a need to proactively disclose that content. And that would happen in the review responsive records. Also the three times rule is done there. And then finally, you know, managing records applying any agency criteria. So being able to capture, you know, what the agency is viewing as proactive disclosure for themselves. You know, see management. I'm not going to get into the details of this. This was an interesting topic during our development, but just in terms of terminology, we have sort of routine payments, the ones that you, you know, you pay when you get, you know, you pay after you get the result. We talk about prepayments, which is prior to conducting the search advanced payment, which is for providing a response. We had to come up with the terminology. That's the terminology we're using just to keep them separate. And we do recognize that see management does vary quite a bit across the agency. Some don't even use fees. We're not trying to prescribe that you have to use this, but it is a, you know, again, a framework from which you can draw. All right. The top level of the model. I know you can't read this. That wasn't the intent of this slide. Just to point out that, and we'll look at this in a little more detail. We've got different agency actors, external actors, other agencies that have to interrelate through collaborations and coordination and referrals. Other agency components perhaps for misdirected, the FOIA request, the portal, government one portal, the narrow, OGIS ports, the AR systems where we deal with pay information. That's up in the upper right corner. And then of course the requesters, even though the requesters are shown in the upper left hand corner, they're really inside the system. We want them to be viewed as internal because they're partners or players. They interact, ideally interact with a functionality more directly than some of the other actors. So they're kind of viewed as internal. In terms of the processes, there's 26. We've got these core processes. The top level is really your traditional life cycle. We conduct an intake. We get it. We confirm that it's perfected. We scope and size it. We may estimate fees. We may not understand where that happens. We're going to search. We're going to review. We may have to coordinator or consult. We need to respond. And then there's payment processing and potentially an appeal. Some of the enabling processes, maintaining policies, managing HR, the HR as it relates to FOIA, managing the FOIA records environments, responding to referrals and coordination and consultations, modifying the scope of a request, which could happen from the requester or other or internal. Monitoring litigation. Again, not capturing and managing litigations, but monitoring them and then managing user accounts. Supporting processes we have is providing free request support, managing the records for product disclosure, maintaining request or dashboard, and providing customer service. And then finally overarching, monitoring, analyzing and reporting on FOIA performance. So without getting too hung up about how we separated these, because that's not that material, this is intended to reflect the full scope of FOIA activities. We'll see how that holds. This diagram is in the firm itself. I'm not going to walk you through all the details. Essentially what we're showing here is a set of dependencies that would be between those processes I showed you on the prior page. So how do these processes kind of interrelate with each other? This is not meant to be a sequence diagram. We're not necessarily following exact paths. But if you put yourself in any box, you could see that there's alternatives to where you might go from there. And that's a reflection of the different end points for any of these processes. We also identify common services. These are shared, essentially like shared services that would provide additional capability to the activities that are performed. And so we've mapped these services to specific activities where we felt they would be most useful. Things like email integration, using AI, ML, and human language technology to enable decisioning and search, review and redaction. We even have the FOIA processing clock being able to start and stop. The tolling is a unique service depending upon where you are in the model. Sometimes we're going to need to start and stop that clock based on rules. So that's also in there. In terms of roles, there's over 50. They seem daunting, but the roles are really based on the responsibilities because they're tied to the activities in the model. They can be used if you were defining a system from this model. They can be used to define system privileges. Who can do what? When we say who, we don't mean person. We mean that a person can wear more than one hat. They can service more than one role. So in a large organization, you might find that it's more spread out and people can do less in their role. Perhaps in a smaller organization, a person might wear multiple hats. Maybe they're not only doing the intake function, they're also doing some of the confirmation, the scoping and other pieces of the process. And that's fine. It doesn't hurt anything, but as I put down here, you can wear more than one hat, but you certainly can't tear a hat into pieces. That was the intent to have it to be fairly granular. It makes it easier to apply from a system standpoint. These are defined roles. You can take a look. I'm not going to walk through the details here, but this is the set of roles that we can have in the model. You can see everything from the requester, certainly there. You've got the appeals roles, different appeals roles, different authorized official roles, intake specialists, intake supervisor, et cetera. In terms of the data components, I mentioned that there's a core data model and we've got core data attributes that describe the case and some control vocabularies. We talked about business intelligence. I'll show you some examples of that. And then opportunities for standardizing some data exchanges that go outside of connect for it to other functions. This is a conceptual data model. These are the major data categories or entities about which way we need to keep information. These are not low level elements. They're groups of data. Each one represents a collection of information and each of those collections is modeled on a diagram that shows how those collections would relate to each other. From a BI perspective, we followed some basic principles that we can decompose a process into the things that we'd want to do better or improve. We call them BIOS, but essentially, we're trying to achieve something. We're trying to improve our performance. Performance measures are the ways or the actual indicators of how well we do against those. I'll show you an example here in the next slide. But this kind of framework was used in the model. I think this might be a little hard to read, but given one example under scoping and sizing the request, improving the accuracy of the estimated effort is an improvement. If we want to do a better job of our estimation, we need data to be able to do that. We have performance measures that align to that improvement. Again, because we're running late here, I'm not going to go through all the details, but you can find all this content in the firm. Again, another picture of the measures. We have the business process here in the blue. We have the improvement in the italics and then the specific measures underneath of that. And then the dimensions are the ways that you'd want to be able to slice and dice that measure. So I'd want to see the number of appeals by year, by component, by appeal, this position, et cetera. We've also indicated which ones are required for DOJ, which ones are not yet, perhaps are not, and any other information about the DOJ descriptions and the citations. So it represents a fairly comprehensive view, but it goes, it's intended to go beyond the DOJ reporting. We outlined some of the data exchanges I mentioned before. Some of these, you know, we already think that we're doing, right? So we already coordinate with pay.gov. There's already feeds that happen there, but as you can see, some of these empty sets at the bank are not there for interagency, mostly interagency communications. So that might get addressed in the pivot. And so that could be helpful. And then we have in the document a little dissertation on each of these other functional areas that FOIA essentially needs to communicate with or interact with. So records management, AR, human resources, litigation, and of course user account management. This is really an IT, we'll see an IT function or partially an IT function. The process flow diagrams. So this is a description pulled out of the document describing this process. This is the conduct request intake process. Again, there's 26 of these processes. And each of these little boxes are the activities being performed with, again, we indicate which roles are performing those activities. We indicate whether some of them are automated and some of them are manual, some of them might be partially automated, requires a human to do it, but some of them could be fully automated. But that certainly would be up to an agency to determine. Again, these are not meant to be prescriptive. We're not saying you have to have this kind of interaction between these organizational entities, but these reflect largely the dependencies that would need to be taken into account. And so again, we've given you the Vizio diagrams that could certainly be amended or extended for your own purposes. And then another view of that is the use case diagrams. These are the same set of activities really highlighting the who. There's the little figures on the left and right. Who's touching these boxes? Not so much about the sequence. That's not really the intent here, but really who can do what and then are there any dependencies between some of the activities? Similar to the prior diagram and this diagram, we have an entry point and we have exit points. These are possible exit points depending upon the scenario that comes out of the conduct request intake process. But you'll see that in all the diagrams is the in arrows and out arrows. And then this is an example of the, this is the list of activities we just saw on the prior diagram. So these are the ones that, these are the little boxes on that page. And I highlighted the create and log a new case because the next page is essentially a description of that. So again, every single, let me just go back for one second. Every single activity with which there are several hundred include a description which is on the left side of this page from description all the way down to the supporting services for each of those activities. And then one or more user stories using sort of like pro forma requirements. In this case, it's just the system doing this, but typically it would be like, you know, as the intake specialist I need to do this or as the reviewer I need to do that. And so that's how we've, that's how we've modeled this information. So I know we're just at the hour here at 1101. That is what I wanted to share with you. Again, it is a lot to, a lot of content, but I think if you kind of focus on the first few sections, it would probably help to introduce the content and then you can decide how much you want to go into the detail. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it and if there's any questions, I guess we will entertain you. David, thank you so much, Elliott. Thank you so much. I suspect our committee members may have some questions. So I'm going to turn it over to them to see who wants to go first. I want to invite Alex or Jason. Jason, do you want to go or do you want me to hop on this? You can go first Alex. Okay. Thank you for this presentation. I think I might need some time to delve deeper into some of these slides as they are indeed very information rich. I'm curious as looking into these diagrams, the processes that you're digging into here, do these derive from research looking at how this currently works or is this an idealized schematic that describes how processes could or should work at agencies? If so, what would be the next steps? That's a great question. So I'll take that, but Elliott and I are going to each take different questions. I'll take this one if you don't mind, Elliott. If you want to add to it. So yeah, we do actually speak of that in the document. We talk about idealized yet realistic. While we look through all the guidance and everything that is in the various documents available to you all use on a daily basis, the intent was to make it as all encompassing as possible. So without regard to incrementally what would be better to implement or automate versus others, the intent was to be a super set of all possible capability so that an agency when they're looking at that can decide, well, no, we don't need to automate this or that piece. We're simple enough. We do this hand manually. That's fine. Idealized in the sense that it is a super set of as much functionality as we could muster. But also that it is an expression without waste. The processes are designed to show no recycling, for example, idealized in that sense. And if you were modeling a current process, you might see some organization might have handoffs that perhaps could be streamlined. So we've kind of taken all that out and that's partly why we call it idealized. We also talk about it being realistic. And by that, we mean that there are technical solutions available to automate the things that we think could be automated. And also that we wouldn't expect any changes to the law to be necessary to make that happen. So to be clear, this is an idealized set of schematics that in theory agencies with complex processes could adopt and adapt and apply to their systems in the future. Yes, that's exactly right. Okay. So in that vein, I have a follow up question. On your slide of proactive disclosure, you talked about the relationship between foyer.gov and data.gov and the situation where in theory, requesters would be able to search for information that's relevant to what they're looking for. I didn't see any reference to the Open Government Data Act or Enterprise Data Inventories maintained by agencies. Are you aware of that statute of what it requires of agencies? Do you want to take that? So I think the process specifically addresses those particular requirements in the reference model. The model is articulating and modeling exchanges between foyer systems and other systems and there may be additional systems, additional system communication that is necessary. Okay. If you'd like to follow up and discuss that, I'd be certainly interested in doing that. I was involved in working on that reform years ago with the idea of being that agencies using the chief data officers that now exist to many of them would systematically catalog assets in and then would proactively disclose them and make them searchable through their websites in machine learning formats so that requesters would be able to find them using search engines using data.gov, which you did reference and that those would all be tied together as we've discussed earlier in other previous committees and recommendations. Implementation of that act has not fully moved forward because of the lack of guidance from OMB. It certainly would be useful to hear from you all how much impact that lack of guidance has had and how and where agencies could develop a more holistic approach where requests move from where they come in from foyer.gov through case management systems and are disclosed as structured data through foyer libraries which are in theory are indexed and findable through data.gov because that's not currently the case. So thank you for your presentation. I learned a lot. I'm going to have to go through the white paper next. Thank you. Okay, thanks, Alex. Jason. Can you hear me? Yes, loud and clear. This is an outstanding effort on the part of MITRE and I appreciate that on page 18 of your 300 plus page report you said you were informed by the FOIA advisory committee's work in past terms. So I have two things to ask. One is how do you envision MITRE interacting with federal agencies to implement the recommendations on all these processes? Is MITRE just, I understand that you're working with a small group on business requirements, but if an agency approached MITRE, would you have the time, resources, effort to assist them in figuring out how they could improve their processes using this model? That's my first question. And the second is, are you open to this committee's observations, recommendations, recommendations with respect to an improved model in a 2.0 version? And picking up on Alex's point, there's an information perspective to the FOIA reference model where there are many other statutes, including the Federal Records Act, but many others that come into play when thinking about FOIA. And so it seems to be that that kind of perspective might improve what is already an outstanding product. Thank you for those questions. Thank you. So I think in terms of MITRE working with individual agencies, so that is worth that MITRE engages in through its six FFRDCs that it operates. So certainly when MITRE works with individual agencies about FOIA programs, it would use the reference model to help inform that work and help agencies address the problems that they are addressing. I think in terms of the work going forward and opportunities for improving upon the reference model, I think that's where there's a conversation to have to work closely with the OIP's Federal Integrated Business Framework to figure out what's the appropriate vehicle for continuing this line of work around articulating FOIA business rules and business requirements that take in as you mentioned and are able to triangulate the full range of laws and regulations that touch on federal records and their access and dissemination. Jason, any other questions? No, thank you. Okay, any other committee members have any questions for Elliott and David? I believe this is Bobby from OIPBJ. I just wanted to thank both David, Elliott and the MITRE for all the work that was put into this and helping us really accelerate tremendously our effort with the FIBIS and just tag onto what you just mentioned we're finalizing right now that work with the CFO council and then our next step would be in this summer as you mentioned publishing those for public comment so that would be a great opportunity for not just everybody in the public but the FACA to also provide that type of feedback. Thank you for the opportunity to share this with you. Yes, thank you very much. Okay, anyone else? Seeing any nods or hands being raised or anyone waving frantically? Does anyone else have their hand raised? So much for coming today. You're welcome to go off camera and hang out with us for a while longer or go back to work, whatever you would prefer. And I know that we will definitely take a closer look at your paper and folks will look at the PowerPoint presentation and we'll follow up with any questions we may have. So thank you again. Thank you. Okay, terrific. Okay, so with that I want to turn to the next part of our agenda which are subcommittee reports. I can attest to the fact that the subcommittees have all been extremely busy. Everyone is working very hard. I just want to thank everyone for that. It's very meaningful that everyone is so engaged and it's definitely helping the work of the committee overall and it will make all the recommendations that much more meaningful. The modernization committee I believe is up first according to what Kirsten told me. So I follow whatever she tells me and I want to turn it over to co-chairs Jason R. Barron and Gorka Garcia Malin. So over to you gentlemen. Thanks Alina, can you hear me? Wonderful. Good morning. As we just alluded to my name is Gorka Garcia Malin and I'm the FOIA Officer and I'd like to introduce to you to help. Together with Jason Barron I co-chair the advisory committee's modernization subcommittee and today our subcommittee brings two items for the advisory committee's consideration and the first one is a proposal for a more precise application of exemption slides in government redactions. The answer should be discussing with our partners today who knows but at least we'll take off a conversation. And the second item is a draft model letter on which we wish to solicit feedback and not just from our fellow advisory committee members but also from agencies FOIA requests the community and the public at large. The modernization subcommittee would then take these recommendations and finalize the language of the model letter and then bring it back to this committee or for the consideration and potentially both at a later date. I should mention by the way that anyone wishing to follow along with our proposals can see the proposal and the documentation on the advisory committee website under today's leading materials and the recommendation is labeled modernization subcommittee 23 and the three documents are attachments A and B on their website. So regarding the first item Adam Marshall who is our fellow advisory committee member he couldn't be here today he's from recorders committee for freedom of the press and he's spearheaded an effort to improve how agencies assert exemption slides. So I'm going to present this on his behalf we've spent and he's been particularly involved we've spent many months of delicate crafting to bring to you a proposal on how agencies asserted exemption slides and that's for when the exemption is being asserted in a document in part or in full. So as we know the three most common privileges cited in connection with exemption five are delivered a process of privilege and the attorney work product privilege. Unfortunately, requesters rarely know which privilege is being cited to when exemption five is applied and this is in contrast to other exemptions so for example, exemption seven similarly captures a multitude of basic political information so it has an exception has six subparts A through F. In those cases, agencies actually cite the specific subpart that's being asserted so what our subcommittee is proposing here what you seek to remedy is this despairing and it's not a simple matter of formal function here the reality is that without further understanding the basis for a given exemption five redaction a requester has very limited information to evaluate and understand redaction and in many cases in our shared experience they do whereas if they had more information maybe the exemption the redaction said this is a connection with the attorney client privilege, maybe they wouldn't so to resolve this what we're proposing is that agencies specify particular B5 privilege being invoked in any given redaction exemption seven and if the record is being held in full maybe the specific claim can be cited in the determination letter right now before we move forward with our discussion, the modernization subcommittee obviously knows that agencies leverage a wide variety of technologies while applying redactions and that may impact what the redaction look like and limit what agencies can do so just generally our proposal seeks that agencies find some way of identifying the precise basis for exemption five redactions and for those working again to follow along what we're proposing and it's just an idea right this can take any number of forms what we're proposing is on Meras website and it might look something like a redaction the redaction for instance citing deliberative process might be in the text in the box in the redaction box it might be B5 dash DPP for the deliberative process privilege right and one that's based on the attorney client privilege might be B5 dash ACP for attorney client privilege I hope that provides a sufficient context to support a discussion now by the advisory committee and of course Jason and I look forward to any questions this proposal may prompt Jason do you wish to add anything no that was very well said I do want to thank Michael Heiss for being the prime mover of this and Adam Marshall for doing the draft of this recommendation excellent point hi Bobby I think you have a question yeah no I was just going to say this is yeah thank you Bobby from DOJ I think this is great we do it agencies should be marking the documents so that you know which privileges are applied and I would even go a little bit further I think the you have the three main privileges than an other as a marking I would suggest and I would think that even if it's that you should specifically mark it with that privilege and not so that there's any guessing as to what the other privilege is so presidential communication privilege is another one that should just be marked as PCP but I think this is this should be an important it's an important practice that agencies should be able to convey to their request or under exemption 5 what privileges they're applying thank you Bobby we've got two hands up I don't know who was first Michael or Gopende so you guys find it out amongst yourselves Michael first okay go first I'm sorry was that me to go first yes okay thanks actually I think Bobby covered it I was going to say that I remember at the first our first meeting as the FACA that this issue was was raised and you know Bobby raised a good point then that you know of course B5 encompasses a wide array of different privileges that would exist in civil discovery sort of litigation context but there are these big three and so the I appreciate the modernization subcommittee having as part of their proposal this other bucket but I do take Bobby's point that I just heard now which is to the extent agencies can give additional color on the other bucket they should I think that makes a lot of sense so I appreciate you Bobby for commenting on that part that's it okay Gopende go ahead thank you yeah I definitely agree with the previous comments I think this is excellent I just had a question in terms of the research for this recommendation were there any examples of agencies that are already doing this that could serve as a model for other agencies and bureaus well I can address that so at NIH we try to provide as much specificity as we can when we're labeling redactions but it's it's not always simple practice and so I would say that this provides a sort of a very simple approach to providing this sort of clarity because I think sometimes at NIH we try to provide a little you know even more detail and that just really slows things down so at a certain point we just go back to this B5 B5 B5 just to make things a little bit smoother this is a nice balance at least from the perspective of NIH where we're providing enough information so that a requester can weigh whether it's a challenge no appeal to whatever the case may be because sometimes the context is not sufficient to understand whether there's something that's being held because it's attorney to client privilege which is rarely challenged or maybe the more traditional B5 in a pre-decisive deliberations. Amanda to your point we have a comment from one of our attendees this is FOIA request at the nuclear regulatory commission that person says that they add a note on the document that is seen by the requester citing which B5 privilege is being used but agrees that changing the globally would cause more efficiencies I wanted to share that too Lauren please go ahead thank you to the modernization committee for this I think this is a terrific idea we get a lot of B5 denials and we rarely see which privilege is being identified the one thing I would love to see particularly when it comes to the deliberative process privilege is with that kind of ping that this is what's being cited also saying dear requester there's a 25 year sunset on this just so you know any kind of additional information like that to help inform the requester that there are kind of different sunsets for that for well there is a sunset for the deliberative process privilege I think would be really valuable that's a really valuable comment for the next part of our recommendation right because we have a proposal for a determination letter and maybe that's something that could be incorporated there that's a good point next one I saw Katrina said Katrina go ahead please can you unmute no I saw I finally learned how to unmute okay so the question of the comment that I had was and I agree with the person who mentioned about the nuclear regulatory commission we do cite in our letters what we're using b5 what b5 what portion b5 we're using and what I think you're saying is where we mark b5 on the document you want us to put something in the also by that b5 the the I don't know the guide that you had or whatever how you all had planned it out and the question I have is if this is if this is something that because sometimes when we do these things or we talk about these things you know make a recommendation again there's no there's no way that we can as a committee try to force anybody to do anything my question would be with the Department of Justice then require this as something that would be like sort of a requirement under b5 to actually have this done or would this just be a best practice kind of thing because then I'm not so sure that we would get sort of get the bang for your buck about what you're trying to achieve and that's just the comment I have Bobby any thoughts on that? Yeah so thanks Katrina so the recommendation is for us to consider issuing guidance so that's definitely what we'll do but I do think it's important that the requester know what privileges are being applied especially if there's multiple privileges being applied so they know what redactions those privileges are and if we see a situation where maybe if only deliver a process is being applied well then it's clear that all the exemption 5 in the documents are DPP but I think it's important I think it's something that we should be doing so yeah Thanks Bobby Absolutely Katrina did you have anything else you don't have to still raise I just want okay thank you alright I'm looking around anyone else have any other questions on this part of the modernization subcommittee's presentation I want okay Jason work work back over to you for the next issue Well Alina is it timely to take a vote it is entirely up to you the subcommittee co-chairs in terms of how you want it to proceed would you like for us to go over the voting procedures if you believe that it is time to take a vote I'm fine either way we could do it today or we can do it our next meeting I would say we strike while the iron is hot okay Kirsten would you like to go over the voting procedures to remind everyone is the DFO or do you want me to do it I can do it happy to do it so voting procedures any member of the committee can move to vote on the recommendation although the motion does not need to be seconded let's continue our tradition of seconding the motion as per Alina there are three ways that motion can pass it can pass by unanimous decision which is when every voting member accepts abstention is in favor of or opposed to a particular motion there's general consensus which is when at least two-thirds of the total cast total vote cast are in favor of or opposed to a particular motion I've done all the math ahead of time so if it comes to that I will not have to spend too much time doing math and finally general majority which is when a majority of the total vote cast are in favor of or opposed to a particular motion okay terrific and you want to have any questions Tom have you have your hand up please go ahead my hand is up to move the motion be adopted by the committee okay thank you Tom do I have a second I second okay thank you Alison okay let's please take a vote all those in favor of this recommendation please say aye aye aye anyone opposed please say nay not hearing any nays anyone wishes to abstain this is Bobby from OIP consistent with how I voted before and particularly since this is an OIP recommendation I'll abstain okay so noted Kirsten are you good on the vote count I am good on the vote count it sounds like it is 15 to 0 with Bobby abstaining Alina you're voting I'm okay I'm a yay you're a yay okay you're a yay okay 16 to 0 the motion carries okay great great work everyone our first recommendation cast everyone should be very proud thank you for that okay let's move on to the next item Jason is that you or is that Borca and we actually have two items and the proposed model agency determination letter which Borca mentioned is at attachment B in the materials available publicly on the website is a proposal that was drafted by Adam Marshall for us in the subcommittee and I want to thank Adam particularly in absentia and the proposed determination letter is not being proposed for a vote today as Borca said we have put up a proposed letter as a model for comment we can talk about it today among the committee and but we really would wish to have the FOIA community public at large agencies to have time to review it and so that we can as a subcommittee and as a committee receive feedback and then come back with a tweaked model letter for a vote at the next public meeting so the proposed letter I don't intend to go through it in detail there is a current variation in determination letters that agencies send MITRE talked about inconsistency and release as part of their presentation this morning and that is certainly the case with determination letters many agencies do a very good job of setting out what are the elements in this model determination letter other agencies supply what I have found as a FOIA requester you know less than complete and transparent responses on all the points that are raised in this letter so this is really a best practices proposed model so what does it cover well the issues that are for most of the letters how searches are conducted what to say when there's a complete denial of full withholding of documents and other matters that do an explanatory job of walking through what a requester needs to know including on their rights for appeal and whether any referrals have been made by an agency fee waivers and other matters but on the particular matter of search and explanation the one of the keys to this model letter is that there would be a better explanation of what kind of search was conducted to locate responsive records including a search methodology what keywords were used if there was an electronic search where the agency search in terms of locations or repositories that were searched and as a result of these searches what was the volume of responsive records that were located and after completing review what is the volume or other descriptions as to how many of those records were responsive in terms of explanations the model letter goes through a framework for explaining partial grants or partial denials and in each case we give examples of what a response should consist of so for example we have an example here where an agency might say pursuant to exception 5 and the deliberative process privilege noted as B5 DPP this agency is partially withheld 91 pages consisting of the content portions of 36 internal emails with attachments regarding recommendations on a new agency policy and then it would also include in the termination letter that the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by the deliberative process privilege because with a concrete explanation of that those kind of descriptions are not in my experience and I believe it to others to judge in your experience the kind of information that is received in the first determination letter that a requester gets and so with that I'm going to stop you can all read the model letter our proposal is that everyone in the public and agencies and have 30 days give us comments on this letter I defer to Alina whether 30 days means July 8 which is calendar days or 30 days means business days which would be July 20 but that's the proposal of the subcommittee for a time frame for comment and then we would look at the comments and come back with a revised letter so now I open it up Gorka if you want to say something and then committee members you captured it perfectly thanks Jason business days seems consistent with FOIA so how about July 20 does that sound fair to everyone for comments okay anyone have any questions or comments on oh Michael's hand is up Michael go ahead please thank you yeah so I think the only thing I would say with this letter I think it's clear but just in case I just wanted to note and I think this is I think this is fine with everybody who knows is that on the your right section I think it's clear that that should apply whether the agency is doing a full grant or a full denial or a partial grant but I just you know want to you know respectfully to all the various people in government on this call or whatever that you know it to the extent that it may not be clear right because some people on the agency side might say hey we're granting you in full I mean you know what what's what's your deal you know we're getting it in full it's up to the requester right to determine whether or not that you know their full grant so I think that appeal rights I don't just think this I think it's I think it's the case that appeal rights should attach and the language should be present in the letter even when there's a full grant and to the extent that this letter makes that clear and to the extent it matters if it's clear or not that would be the one thing I would add on this because I do personally think it's important that request request for community have have noticed that they have the right to appeal even a full grant because and I think it's good for the agencies too because if we don't do that I think technically you know they they don't have an ability to exhaust or administrative remedies so they can go to court and that wouldn't be the great greatest thing for the agency also so I would just you know I think it's clear but just in case I'm putting it on the record now I think if anyone has an objection to that it might be interesting to hear. Okay thanks Michael I I certainly don't have an objection and I think that's consistent with the guidance that OIP has been giving out for years but Bobby I'll let you speak to that. Yeah no that's that's fine I would just say more generally my reaction to the to the template and I appreciate I think it's a great idea to open it up and just have more detailed feedback that you can get that we can't do in this forum and expanding it beyond just everyone on the committee. I think for sure and I consider our guidance to provide as much context to the requester that's practically feasible in the initial request letter and that's more practical in some cases than others for example if it's like a you know one single type of document or as opposed to many redactions over different types of many different types of records I think there's there's definitely probably room for improvement in describing things I would say probably more generally so that requesters know you know generally how a agency approaches how did they conduct the search I like the suggestion Lauren had made about including the information that there is a sunset privilege for a little bit of process and those types of things but I think there needs to be a practical balance because the the paper makes it seem that this would cause a lot of efficiency with less appeals but I would argue that a level of detail which this is kind of approaching almost like a mini declaration or a von that would slow down the process and would not be maybe practical so I think there's a balance there where we want to make sure we're giving as much information as we can without slowing the process and I think that's something maybe to consider just more generally Thanks Bobby Luke I think your hand up was first and then Lauren and then Kirsten hopefully I got the order correct Luke go ahead please I'll go very quickly I was just going to Michael's suggestion to provide the appeal information for a full grant for a different reason as a requester often times it's happened a number of times where I'll get a full grant but it's because the agency interpreted the scope of my request a certain way perhaps more narrow or just somehow different than what my intention was and so I can see for another reason I have had to appeal a full request even though it might not seem very often so I just wanted to second that suggestion thank you Great thank you Lauren please go ahead Thank you all for working on this letter I went through it with great interest I have a comment that I'm also happy to submit in writing when we open it to public comment I the section where it specifically talks about the following locations or repositories were searched as they were determined to be most likely to have responsive records I think as a requester something like that is most useful when the requester is aware of the universe of repositories or records databases that are searchable so I think a parallel effort that might be outside the bounds of this particular letter would be examining if we could recommend that agencies on their FOIA websites list things like their organizational charts or their major record systems or repositories and things like that to really help requesters determine gosh do I think that that was also the best place to search for those records so that's my major comment but I thought this was a terrific effort and I look forward to submitting some comments in writing as well Okay perfect segue to Kirsten who was going to just inform everyone again about the way to submit public comments Great yeah Thank you Alina I put in the chat to everyone a link to our public comment portal so you can just go to that site you can see the drop down to FOIA advisory committee and then you could submit your comments and as Jason said we'll be accepting those and sharing them both with the committee and publicly so and OGIS will also be tweeting and blogging about it so if you're a member of the public and you have some comments please submit them and for those of you who can't see the WebEx chat it's www.archives.gov forward slash OGIS forward slash public dash comments so thank you for all of that I'm looking around to see if anyone else has any questions on this item don't see any hands I don't see anyone leaning forward eagerly back to you you said you had a third item to present yes and I'll do it quickly another proposal from our subcommittee is that coming from the FOIA advisory committee and whoever wishes to sign it would be a letter about FOIA.gov interoperability the deadline coming up in the sunset of FOIA online and what we have proposed is that a letter be sent to agencies that highlights best practices in the implementation of the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 which mandated that all agencies accept FOIA requests through FOIA.gov and configure their case management systems to be interoperable with it by August 2023 as outlined in an OMB memo in 2019 and particularly to a prize chief FOIA officers of a recent initiative taken by the Department of Homeland Security to proactively engage stakeholders and the public regarding its transition from FOIA online to a new case management system and modernize its system for first party requests as part of a renewed commitment to open government so the letter points to DHS as a model for doing an FAQ and we would hope that Alina and others would consider this proposal and determine what is the best form for sending a letter out rather expeditiously given the August deadline with respect to FOIA.gov and the sunset of FOIA online. Okay, thank you so much. Any other questions or comments on that third item? I would just share what Jason's concern about the expeditious nature of this. I think as I've expressed publicly and privately there are ongoing concerns and considerations associated with the sunset of FOIA online. I've heard directly from OIP that the interoperability question of FOIA.gov appears to be fairly well-addressed in terms of agencies moving forward and making sure that their case management systems are in fact interoperable with it as mandated by OMB guidance in 2019. As we talked about in the past I think it would be very helpful if OMB would come and talk to the committee about how they're helping to administer the FOIA and the steps they're taking to modernize the effort as mandated in the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016. We had a terrific discussion because of the efforts of OGIS to get EPA staff to come and talk with us about the decisions behind sunsetting FOIA online. But I have not seen a shift from them or other agencies with respect to public engagement, request or engagement regarding that shift. I think it would be extremely meaningful if the FOIA council could make an ongoing effort to vastly increase public engagement around this shift to make sure that there are no requests that are lost and that requesters who are using that system are not surprised by it. As people who visit for online know and if they see it right now there is a guidance that we need to download the records. But it is my ongoing concern that we might see some loss in upholding their right to know and their right to get responsive records. The extent to which the whole U.S. government could be using its considerable communications resources I have not seen it here in terms of a change. So I hope that you and Bobby will consider publicly and privately messaging agencies to step up request or engagement so that everybody knows what is happening and there are no surprises which could further diminish public trust and government at a time but I don't think anyone can afford that. Thank you Alex. Appreciate that. Jason and Gorka that completes your presentation for today. Correct? It does. It will come as no surprise that I wish to acknowledge Alex as someone who really pushed our subcommittee to make this proposal. Gorka, I'm sorry did we talk over you? That's what we have for you all today. Okay terrific. So I want to move on to our resources subcommittee. Thank you Paul. I'm not able to be with us today so over to you Professor Johnson. Thank you Alina. So we have a number of items to provide updates on. So at the last meeting Paul discussed the interviews that the resource subcommittee was undertaking with high level FOIA officials and these interviews focus on questions about technology training financial and staff resources. We've conducted to date interviews and to reiterate from Paul's previous comments we're trying to focus on a mix of agencies in terms of size, jurisdiction for example, agencies that may be more likely to handle classified documents and also a variation in regards to the manner in which the agency FOIA offices are organized. We expect to wrap up these interviews prior to the September FOIA advisory meeting because the interviews are still ongoing. We don't want to provide a lot of detail yet in terms of the responses. We don't want to contaminate the interviewee pool but we will say something that has come up multiple times which should not be a surprise is the importance of retaining a qualified FOIA staff. So in relation to the interviews we are also trying to get the perspective of FOIA professionals through the administration of a survey. The survey will be administered at the American Society of Access Professionals the ASAP natural training meeting New Orleans June 27 through the 29. The target of this survey are FOIA professionals on the ground who are working and processing FOIA day to day. So this includes processing request responding to public inquiries and also dealing with appeals. This survey contains 25 questions and takes approximately 10 to 15 minutes to take based on a test run that we've conducted. Most of the questions are adapted from the questions that we develop in the interviews but we also ask questions about how much time individuals are spending on litigation. How do they feel about the training they received and whether they've considered leaving or staying in their position. So this is to get at these concerns about staff retention. And luckily I haven't mentioned this to you Alina. UGA actually approved the survey. It went through the IRB. So it's good to go in terms of building it at the ASAP meeting. And of course the goal here is while the resource subcommittee is working on a number of issues that we think are important we want to make sure to get a feedback from those who are in the trenches doing the work regarding what their key concerns are. So in addition to the interviews and the survey another issue that the committee has discussed in multiple meetings is the issue of a FOIA repository. And this idea of a repository was put forth in a previous recommendation I believe the 2018-2020 term. But we felt that this issue of a repository became salient once more with the sunsetting on FOIA online which of course allowed users to search for documents that have been released from various agencies subsequent to previous request. So there are as we know FOIA e-reading rooms but the repository could make the search process could potentially make it easier for requesters and allow them to have a wide variety of documents in one portal. So in our examination of the FOIA repository we spoke to multiple officials from EPA, OIP the consumer finance protection bureau and also other members of the dating working group of the chief FOIA officers, counselors, technology committee who were also exploring this the FOIA repository conversation. And these conversations have been very informative we've discussed the benefits the downsides of the potential repository the challenges such as who would own it the development and maintenance of technology and what's necessary to allow for an efficient search if such a repository were to exist. And through these conversations we actually had a detail discussion about the FOIA wizard tool which is in development right now by OIP and DOJ which isn't a repository but of course has the goal of allowing users to search for information that's in the public domain. So this discussion is ongoing but it's definitely been complex and layered and very informative and there's more but I guess I'll touch on one other thing which is I think kind of a big chunk and that is the issue of budgeting it's hard to discuss FOIA without discussing funding and something that comes up a lot in discussions of FOIA is the fact that for most agencies FOIA does not have line item status funding. And the concern here that some have raised is FOIA has to compete with other agency priorities for adequate funding. But the question we are attempting to explore and this is early on is to what degree would a line item status for FOIA improve the allocation of FOIA administration implementation? Would FOIA officials find this beneficial? Would there be some challenges? How would the implementation benefit? To paraphrase a comment raised by Lauren Harper awhile back would line item status change the culture around the way in which FOIA is perceived and processed as a priority? So these are questions that we don't necessarily have clear answers to right now but we are working on understanding more about the ways in which various agencies structure their FOIA funding so we reached out to various agency officials who are involved with budgeting specifically to get their perspective on this issue and we hope to have in the near future a discussion with OMB about a general budgeting discussion kind of taking a step back and talk to us about the budgeting process and various ways in which to approach it. So I think I will stop there. There's more but I think that was enough. So thank you. Okay, anyone else on the resources subcommittee wish to add anything to the great presentation we just heard? The mandate is a great job. I don't have anything to add. Okay, thanks Lauren. Any questions for the resources subcommittee? For comments? Well thank you so much for that presentation. So last but not least we have our implementation subcommittee. We have co-chairs Dave Cooleyer and Katrina Pavlik-Feenan. David, I'm not sure who's presenting. It's you or Katrina but I'll turn it over to both of you and take it from here. Thanks Alina. I'm Dave Cooleyer, soon to be University of Florida. I have a one page we have a one page summary posted on the committee website so I don't really need to go into it for time's sake but basically we're gleaning through those past 51 recommendations and identifying which ones still need more work. We have a lot more information gathering to do this summer likely a survey interviews with agencies gleaning data through chief FOIA officer reports and annual FOIA reports from agencies and by September I think we'll have a pretty good idea. I will be continuing the research into fall but we should be able to provide for the committee at least an initial list of where the recommendations stand and where we're headed so that's kind of where we are and thank you the past three months staff, Alina and Kirsten as well as Bobby and DOJ very helpful in helping us take that first pass to figure out where things stand on these recommendations so thanks to everyone and great work by the subcommittee. Katrina did you want to add anything else or any other subcommittee members? No, I just think everybody's done a great job and working really hard on this so I want to thank everybody on the committee. Well, thank you all. Okay, any other questions from the rest of the committee for the implementation subcommittee not hearing anything or seeing any hands up just looking one more time David, thank you and by September you'll be in Florida, yes? Yeah, by this time next week I'll be there enjoying the balmy weather. Yeah. Tucson will miss you. Tucson will definitely miss you. Okay, so we're done with the subcommittee reports I just want to pause here to ask if anyone has any other follow-up questions or comments or any discussion issues they wanted to bring up generally among the committee members. We're actually ahead of schedule today but I'm happy to give time back to everyone. Jason has his hand up. Jason there please go ahead. Thank you Alina I'm trying to lower my hand there go. So we heard from MITRE today and there are two points I want to raise. One is that we saw that there is a 300 page document as a framework that they have developed. I would be very interested in hearing from the government representatives on this committee whether they are able to take that document and talk to people at their agencies about how agencies could evaluate it and implement it aside from any kind of business requirement process that may take months or years for MITRE to work through. And related to that there was a reference made by David and Elliott to a separate sister project. I've had the privilege of working with a different team at MITRE headed by Carl Branting on research on Exemption 5 in particular and to some extent Exemption 6 and 4 to develop a FOIA assistant tool that they have a prototype for that they have been discussing with various agencies in terms of use. I would also be interested in whether the government representatives on this committee would be willing to engage with MITRE to explore the use of this tool in their own FOIA workflows. So in generally just speaking of this Katrina, we work closely actually with MITRE on a few things and we have in the past that some of the components at DHS worked with MITRE so modernizing and updating the workflows in FOIA so so we do utilize the FFRDCs for that type of work within DHS in multiple different components so we are looking into things like that so this is something that we're familiar with if that's about all I can say I'm sorry I didn't want to put Michael on the spot but maybe Michael could speak to any progress I'm trying to try out that AI tool but I'm sorry I heard Gorka speak first so Gorka I was going to add I actually talked to MITRE a couple years ago when they started their B5 effort and my intention was to collaborate with them the pandemic has brought such an onslaught of requests that my shop is entirely too busy to contemplate this right now I'd love to work with them I just have their bandwidth right now but I look forward to doing that in the future Hi this is Patricia with EPA we Jen Mumblo in my office is trying to get the approval to work with MITRE to test out the FOIA assistance tool that Jason mentioned we're in the process I've gotten clearance through ethics but now we just have to work out on an agreement and unfortunately right now my office is in the throes of implementing our new FOIA case management system so I don't think we'll be able to tackle this until probably in the new fiscal year but we would very much like to help and we're really really interested in this FOIA assistance until I think it could be a game changer in the FOIA world I think it could save a lot of time and energy and I'm on the resources subcommittee and one of the things we always have to look at is how can we work smarter and this is an opportunity to do so this is Bobby go ahead please I was just going to say and I know you may have been going to say the same thing but this has been socialized through the CFM council and there are a number of agencies trying to get to the point where we can work with the tool but we certainly are very interested in it and want to make sure that the MITREs could work because it puts a good use and this is Michael EOC to Alina's point we've had I can say that we've had we've had a couple meetings with MITRE where they've introduced the product and and it's moving through internally here and so I don't know exactly the timeline or anything like that but we're relatively small agencies so I think that I'm looking forward to it moving through the process and reaching out to MITRE in the not too distant future okay thanks Michael and thanks for letting me put you on the spot I appreciate that okay any other comments from anyone else from the government side in response to Jason's question or anyone else who wants to comment here or see anyone else Jason do you have any other issues that you want to bring up I appreciate all the comments and I think everyone knows that I am an evangelist on the subject of machine learning and AI and so we will have more to report on in the modernization subcommittee as time goes forward on those subjects okay we look forward to hearing all of that thank you okay anyone else have other topics that they wanted to bring up today Alex's hand is up Alex please go ahead I would love to propose that by the time we come back in September next public meeting when we'll have seen what's happened with FOI.gov and agency case management and FOI online that we do something of an after action report and I would like to propose that OGIS go back and look at agency websites and reading rooms in the interim as I will be doing as well to see how many of them have acted in response to the excellent work that OGIS did in seeing how many of them have active reading rooms how many of them list FOI.gov on those pages and how many of them are complying with the mandate of section 508 with respects to their disclosures and are structuring and publishing data on an open government webpage I'd also like to propose that we come back and look at how many of them have revived their slash open pages for those agencies as well as people know if they attended our last meeting the United States has a new national action plan for open government of which FOIA plays a role and Bobby has talked about the great work that OIP is doing to work on its commitments there's going to be a dialogue over the next three months in which US civil society members are going to encourage the US government to add additional commitments to that plan in advance of the open government partnership summit in Estonia and given that the US government is now in the steering committee of the open government partnership again it's the hope of many people in civil society that that will result in market improvements to the administration of the FOIA it's a particular interest as we've discussed in our subcommittee that a component of DHS might be investing in modernization which is something that I think the committee has put forth great recommendations before Secretary Muorakis asked his advisory committee to put forth recommendations in open government believing that it's central to improving the mission of DHS and one of the recommendations was to modernize the USCIS system which many people may know people use to get records first party records under the FOIA and my hope is that perhaps we could have a discussion about that then and to see what prospects are for a similar approach in terms of agencies reassuring open government plans that make a holistic combination of transparency, accountability, participation, collaboration to improve the relationship between the requester community and agencies which I think it's fair to say is not as good as that could be and I say that as a representative of the requester community and I'm very grateful to all the members of the committee who continue to participate in good faith in these discussions and hope that when we come back we can look and see how things are going and perhaps encourage other agencies to take similar steps to re-engage in open government and to form advisory committees that include civil society like this one so that we can make progress in some of the ways that perhaps I was hindered over the last decade. So that's what I'd offer in that. Thank you for that opportunity to share. Okay, thanks Alex. Kirsten, do you want to respond to Alex's question or is there a thought list that he has thrown down to us in your compliance team? Sure, sure. Thank you, Alex, for that thought and I can say that we do plan to follow up at some point on our websites report it's something I think we were discussing just yesterday so stay tuned. I don't know but I can we can promise it'll be done by the next meeting but it is something that we will look at again. So thanks. Thank you. If that's something that the requestor community can help with, that's the sort of crowdsourced engagement that might be a useful place to start. If OGIS would be willing to share open data of the agencies and the places that it looked at that might provide a useful starting place or a map of what's already done helping us all to build on it because it was terrific and really useful work and I don't want to misrepresent whether agencies have actually acted since you did that work but it would be really helpful if we could arrive together in a collective understanding of which agencies have linked to FOIA.gov which ones are accepting requests as mandated under the law seven years later which have active FOIA reading rooms and how their engagement with the requestor community is healthy or not as evidenced by that change and again thank you for your collaboration on this I think the work of the Ombuds office is invaluable in this area. Thank you. Two just real quick things with that assessment which we published I believe in November of 2022 I believe we published a spreadsheet of our findings and where we went so you can, it's out there you can see what site we visited there's nothing secretive about it and there's nothing sort of behind the scenes on it the second thing and I don't want to put Bobby on the spot but I know that OIP is looking at this whole FOIA.gov interoperability issue and that's something that we can expect more from criminal IP. Got it. I just found that spreadsheet to post. Thank you. I see Lauren's hand up Lauren go ahead please. I was just going to follow up on Alex's comment and say the archive would especially National Security Archive would be especially happy to help any effort if civil society input was required. The FOIA.gov issue and even agencies just mentioned on the website was the subject of FOIA audit for Sunshine Week so if help is required or would be appreciated please do let us know. Bobby you don't have to respond but if you have anything I've mentioned before we asked about interoperability in the CFI reports our summary and assessment which would be issued in the upcoming months will score agencies that are compliant with the guidance and note which ones are on track and then we'll be expiring soon. So we'll have that out soon. Thank you Bobby. Have you evaluated which agencies don't accept requests from FOIA.gov I know that members of civil society have pointed out to me that the CIA does not. Yeah so that is interoperability so in order to be interoperable within the guidance there's still some time they would be accepting requests going through FOIA.gov to their system Intel agencies early on that was the more challenging ones for us to implement interoperability but we've made a lot of progress and advancements and are helping those agencies get on board I don't have the numbers but I think it was 110 agencies right now are interoperable and then we have a small handful some just decentralized agencies that some of their components have not yet become interoperable or have the exception like the CIA but we're working directly with all of them to be able to help them meet the interoperability standards. For the purposes of public understanding what are the consequences of agencies not complying with that law? Well I don't have a gun that I can point to agencies so we'll continue to work with them to be able to make it obviously agencies have responded over 110 agencies are already compliant within the time frame that they were supposed to be compliant. We at DOJ and at OMB are working to make sure agencies are meeting the standard. I don't anticipate that we have significant issues especially with the progress that we've made. Okay, thank you perhaps we can discuss whether DOJ needs more statutory authority for enforcement or of compliance in the future. I'm always happy to discuss anything related to FOIA in my office and like I said we have a really great working relation with agencies and I think that's indicative of the response we've had with getting agencies interoperable. It was not an easy task it never is with a big change like that and implementing new technology but I think we've not had problems working with agencies. Thank you. Okay, we're right up on our 1215 mark, actually 1216. If no one else has any other comments that we want to discuss as a committee I propose that we move forward to our public comments a section of our meeting. That sound good to everyone? Yes, seeing no, thank you for nodding that means you're still with us, that's great. Okay, so we have now reached the public comments part of our committee meeting. We look forward to hearing from many non-committee participants who have ideas or comments to share particularly about the topics that we've discussed today. All oral comments are captured in the transcript of the meeting which we will post as soon as it is available. Oral comments are also captured in the NARA YouTube recording and are available on the NARA YouTube channel. Just a reminder, public comments are limited to three minutes per person. So with that I'm going to turn over to Kirsten first and checking with her to see if we have any questions or brief comments that have come in via chat throughout our meeting. Thanks, Elina. This is Kirsten. We had a couple of comments from committee members, Alex Howard and Lauren Harper, but both all of those been read into the record. I think this was noted earlier in the meeting there was a FOIA professional from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who talked about the B-5 issue and they note, he or she says, I added a note on the document that is seen by the requester citing which privilege is being used, but changing it globally would cause some inefficiency. That is all I have. I don't know if Dan has anything that I may have missed. Can I just correct that comment? I think the commenter said it would cause greater efficiencies. Yes, it would cause greater efficiencies. Thank you, Elina. I just wanted to clarify that. Thank you. Dan, anything on your own? I have nothing to add. Thank you so much. Michelle, can I turn it over to you? If you want to provide instructions to any of our listeners today for how to make a comment via telephone could you please do that right now? That would be great. Absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, as we enter the public comment session please limit your comments to three minutes. Once your three minutes expires you will meet your line and move on to the next commenter. If you are joined via phone audio pressing pound two will enter you into the comment here. Once again each individual will be limited to three minutes. So Michelle, do we have anyone who wants to comment? Yes, it looks like we do have someone. I'm going to unmute Gretchen. You are unmuted. Gretchen, you may go ahead. Thank you all so much for the work you are doing and for the opportunity to speak. And my apologies for being through layer and status. I apologize if it's hard to hear. My name is Gretchen and I'm a co-founder of the environmental data and governance initiative or edgy. And my comment is regarding the decommissioning of FOIA online. I'd like to first thank Alex Howard for his comments earlier in this meeting about the lack of public communication about this decision, because that's exactly why I am here today. Because there have not been opportunities for this far-reaching decision and what will come from it. My organization is deeply concerned about what this implies about the federal government's commitment to transparency, although I will say obviously you all are doing amazing work as well. So I'm here to urge you as the official voice of the requestor community and out of it for FOIA innovation to ensure that agencies do not retreat in their transparency but actually utilize this as a moment when they are investing in new FOIA portals and as this whole FOIA business model is being developed to utilize this as an opportunity to invest in more efficient and more effective dissemination of public records. And edgy would be so glad to work with you on drafting any guidance for agencies. We have three central and honestly very simple recommendations. First, to make all completed requests public. This includes all requests that have been made public through FOIA online over the last decade and all requests to come. But truly make good on the Obama era ideal that a release to one is a release to all. Because the efficiencies that can be cleaned by both requestors and agencies are obviously significant. Second, make the records more accessible. Requiring people to download enormous and obscurely named PDFs to have a sense of what is held within them that only imposes an accessibility hurdle that could disproportionately impact lower income individuals and small organizations like mine where people have older voices or mobile devices. It also makes extensive research of previously disseminated FOIAs impractical and that seriously reduces the potential positive impact the public availability of records will have if they are not more accessible. We suggest creating zip files of smaller PDFs adding a naming convention and a legend, a very simple legend about what is held within the different documents. We also recommend developing a browser based viewing option so that people don't have to download large files in order to have a sense of what is within them. Third, enhance the search functionality. Several of the features of the search function in FOIA don't appear to work and so many more could be added. I'm really excited about the concept of the FOIA wizard that I've heard about but I'll say this, it doesn't need to be done by AI. It doesn't have to wait for that. Provide opportunities for requesters to supply the needed metadata for searches. Ask them for the key words the statutes, the offices. Improving the search functionality could transform the utility of public posting of records. Gretchen, thank you very much for your comment. Your time has expired. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. We are going to... Are we ready for the next commenter? Yes, I was just going to add Gretchen has also submitted written public comments which we have posted on our website and Kirsten has provided a link. Alex, you have your hand docked. Did you want to address anything Gretchen just said? I do. Thank you very much Gretchen for your comments on this count. I had hoped that we would see more change from the EPA on this count after they came and spoke to the committee in terms of their public engagement, the use of social media or indeed hosting forums that are public with the requesters, evidence that they had engaged the requester community directly. I would say that they did come to the committee. I would also say that your comments with respect to a release to one release to all policy for FOIA is something that was advanced and discussed by the committee and has been recommended in the past and that the Department of Justice repeatedly pushed back on for years when I came to the committee and that I hope that we all will make a recommendation that they in fact do adopt such a policy now, that I strongly agree with you that records that are disclosed to one person should be disclosed to everybody through agency websites and with FOIA online going away that this is an opportunity for every agency to invest in not just a FOIA library but an ongoing structured disclosure of information as open government data as is mandated under the law and that the hold up for that is clear leadership in the Office of Management and Budget working with OIP to make sure that that is an ongoing concern so thank you very much for raising your voice in this I hope that your voice improves as you beat Larygitis in the future. Thanks Alex. Michelle tells me we have another caller on the line but Kirsten is learning me to the fact that Michael's hand is up do you want to comment in response to what Alex just said? Yeah I feel like I need to just on behalf of the Commission here at Equal and Point of Opportunity Commission the vast majority of our 13,000, 14,000 requests FOIA requests are for charged files and it just will not happen that a release to one will be a release to all I'm sorry it won't and why won't that be because of Title 7 confidentiality it's just literally against the law for the Commission to do that so I have to say that the federal government is not necessarily a monolith there's a lot of different agencies with a lot of different workflows a lot of different equities a lot of different kind of documents and I would hope that that resonates with both the requester community and with within the federal agencies because like I said at least as far as the Commission is concerned there's just absolutely no way we could do that with charged files. Okay thanks Michael Appreciate that comment Michelle back to you I believe we have another caller on the line We certainly do caller your line is unmuted you may go ahead you have three minutes for your comment Caller you'll need to unmute your line we are unable to hear you unable to hear you I don't know if you have your device muted but we are not able to hear you at this time we're unable to hear that caller I'm not sure why if they hung up they might dial back in but we were unable to hear them Okay if they dial back in please let me know I also want to encourage the caller to submit comments via our online public comments portal they're always welcome to do that Alex just commented I feel obligated to read it out loud because we're not supposed to be putting substantive comments in the chat the fact that EEOC cannot do this with charged files does not mean agencies across the federal government cannot do so with their responsive records that's exactly what's been happening with FOIA online okay thank you Alex okay I don't believe we have any other public comments so we need to read into the record Michelle was that caller able to call back in it looks like they're trying to join let's try again caller go ahead your line is unmuted you have three minutes we're unable to hear that caller I'm not sure why that is but caller we're unable to hear you so go ahead and enter your comments the instruction that Alina left for you okay thank you Michelle we can move on we can't hear the caller any other callers on the line I just want to make sure before we start moving to wrap up our meeting yeah let me double check I do not see anyone else with their hand raised no caller on the line thanks Michelle I appreciate it okay I think we're ending pretty much on time which is great and a little surprising because I know we had a lot of content today in our meeting I thought it was a fantastic meeting by the way I think there was a lot of great information that was presented to us today and that we all shared amongst ourselves I want to thank all of the committee members for the hard work that's been going on so far and for your continued work in the next year so hang in there don't give up we're just in the midway stretch I just have a quick announcement about our annual open meeting that OJIS will be hosting virtually in this space next Tuesday June 13th it's going to be a very brief one 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. we're just going to review our annual report which we anticipate publishing in the near future and we will also have time for any interested persons to present oral or written statements at the meeting those who wish to present oral statements will need to register via Eventbrite to participate via our WebEx platform and again oral statements will be limited to three minutes for individual okay I want to wrap up this meeting today to thank everyone again for joining us I hope everyone and their families remain safe healthy and resilient we will see each other again virtually in this space at our next meeting Thursday September 7th 2023 beginning at 10 a.m. Eastern time so with that we stand adjourned thanks everyone have a great day everyone that concludes our conference thank you for using event services you may now disconnect