 Ladies and gentlemen, about to begin today's webinar, please stand by as I connect the line. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you for joining today's Chief FOIA Officers Council 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 currently muted and this conference is being recorded. To present a comment via WebEx audio, please click the raise hand icon on your WebEx screen, which is located above the chat panel to the right. This will place you in the question or comment queue. If you are connected to today's webinar via phone audio, please dial pound 2 on your telephone keypad to enter the question queue. If you require technical assistance, please send a chat to the event producer. With that, I will turn the meeting over to Alina Simo, Director, Office of Government Information Services. Alina, please go ahead. Good morning and welcome as the Director of the Office of Government Information Services and Co-Chair of the Chief FOIA Officers Council. It is my pleasure to welcome all of you to the second meeting of the Council this year. I would like to introduce my Co-Chair, Bobby Talibian, Director of the Office of Information Policy in the Department of Justice. Bobby, you're on mute. Thank you, Alina. It happens every time. Thank you, Alina. Thank you everyone for joining us for a great agenda today. It's great to see everyone, some faces virtually and lots of names virtually. So, looking forward to a great meeting today. Great. Thanks, Bobby. So, we are pleased that so many people are able to join us today. We are aware that the Federal Register notice we ran for this meeting ran a bit late. It posted on October 28th due to our unfortunate series of events because of some unanticipated issues. We are still happy that over 200 attendees signed up for today's meeting. And this reflects all the ways that we strive to provide public notice of our meetings outside of the Federal Register, including the OGIS blog and our Twitter feed and both the OGIS and OIP websites. As so many people had already registered, we felt it was important to keep this meeting as scheduled because we have some very important updates to share with all of you today. And anyone who misses this meeting or wishes to go back and listen to portions of it may do so at any time. We are live streaming the meeting on the National Archives YouTube channel, and it will be available later for anyone who wishes to watch. Thank you, Alina. Alina and I will provide an overview of the work today that our offices have been doing and share some really exciting updates. And then I'm excited to have my colleague, Lindsay Roberts, Chief of OIP's Compliance Staff. OIP's Compliance Staff supports our government-wide work, and she will be providing some exciting updates regarding foyer.gov and the GSA Business Standards Council. We'll next hear from the Council's two committees, the Technology Committee and the Committee on Cross-Agency Collaboration and Innovation. We're excited to have the two co-chairs of both committees join us today this morning to write updates on their work since our last meeting. And as always, as you hear about their exciting work, keep in mind that we're always looking for volunteers. It's a great way to network amongst our colleagues here in the federal FOIA community, but also we have a very strong brain trust in each of those committees, which would, I'm sure, be an advantage to your agency. Over to you, Alina. Thanks. I appreciate it. Also, today we're excited to focus the spotlight on two different agency programs. First, we're going to hear from the FOIA program at the Centers for Disease Control, followed by a joint endeavor between the State Department and the FBI. We have reserve time at the end of today's session for public comments. We will open the telephone lines at the end of our meeting for any oral questions or comments from the public. Please limit your public comments to three minutes. Once your three minutes expire, we will mute your line and move on to the next commenter or other questions or comments pending in the chat. During the course of the meeting, we will pause and check in to see if there are any questions from our agency FOIA colleagues that come in via chat for each set of speakers, and we'll share them as appropriate. An important reminder also, please be sure to chat all panelists or those of you who are on WebEx to ensure your comments are read and seen by our moderators. For those of you watching on the NARA YouTube channel, the chat is not on, but we do want to hear from you. If you have questions and comments related to the agenda of today's meeting, please send them to cfo-council at nara.gov. Or if you have questions on another topic for the National Archives, you may direct them to public.affairs at nara.gov. We have received and posted several written comments in advance of today's meeting. We do review public comments and post them as soon as we are able, and if they comply with our public comments posting policy. So with that, Bob, I'm going to turn it back over to you. And Michelle, I believe you can go to the next slide. Thank you, Alina. I'm happy to start off our meeting here with some updates on OIP. So next slide. So first and foremost, congratulations everybody on closing out fiscal year 22. I know the end of the fiscal year is always a significant push for agencies. And of course, after that, we begin our reporting season. And so I wanted to highlight some upcoming reporting deadlines. First is our agency NO4 reports that are due to OIP by November 14th. So that's coming up rather quickly now. Of course, you have the DOJ Handbook for agency NO4 reports that are on our reports page of our website, which provides you a comprehensive resource of how to submit the NO4 report as well as the content of the report and definitions of each of the metrics. We want to receive those from you, your draft reports by November 14th, so that we can work on finalizing them and evaluating them for a posting by March 1st. Next, we have our chief FOIA officer report, which will be for those who are required to provide a chief FOIA officer report. It will be due by January 17th. Agencies that received more than 50 requests in FY21 are required to submit a report by January 17th. Agencies that receive 50 or less requests on FY21 may report if they wish, if they should report by February 10th, 2023, if they would like to. The posting deadline for the final reports will be March 13, 2023, after, of course, our review and clearance. And of course, it was a reminder that we continue to have quarterly reports that provide each quarter your numbers of requests received, processed in the what's in your backlog and the status of your channel list requests. And those are each due by the last Friday of the month following the end of the quarter. We do have a reports FOIA reporting obligations at a glance resource on our page that has all the requirements and deadlines of the various reports for easy snapshot. Next slide. So I did want to go take a minute and cover the guidelines for 2023's chief FOIA officer reports. We did have the most significant change, I think, of the guidelines as most of you know, since 2010, the guidelines were framed based off of the key areas identified in the 2009 DOJ FOIA guidelines. Of course, Attorney General Garland issued new FOIA guidelines. In 2022. So we've structured the new chief FOIA officer reports requirements based off of the Attorney General's new guidelines. Which key areas that it covers are the presumption of openness, proactive disclosures, removing barriers to access and reducing backlogs and ensuring a fair and effective FOIA administration. And so you'll see that the new structure of the chief FOIA officer report reflects those areas. And some of the questions that we've included in the report. We've also incorporated recommendations from the FOIA advisory committee and recent engagements with the government accountability office. So I have here listed some of the new questions. I just highlighted a few of them, but won't go over all of them. One of the first questions we have in the presumption of openness and leadership for FOIA is how your agency is incorporating FOIA into its core mission. Of course, the Attorney General in his FOIA guidelines asked agencies to in their administrative response letters confirm and two requesters that when applying exemptions they have applied the foreseeable harm standard. So we're asking you about that and interoperably with FOIA.gov as well as impact of FOIA litigation on your agency's FOIA administration. If you have any questions about any of the reporting guidelines, annual CFO please reach out to OIP's compliance team. Next slide. So just touch on a couple of articles of guidance that we recently issued. Of course, after each year reviewing your CFO reports, one of my favorite parts of my job of seeing all the great things that agencies are doing across the government in FOIA and conducting our assessment, we issue guidance based off of that review for things that agencies should continue to focus on. This past year's guidance focused on proactive disclosures, specifically the timing of proactive disclosures, especially those that are subject to Section A2 of the FOIA and the format of proactive disclosures. Finding alternative means of access for commonly requested records that may provide access more effectively or efficiently. And reminders about the quarterly FOIA reporting requirements. I encourage agencies to review their assessments and to find the areas to focus on in the upcoming year and also to try to hit the milestones this next year. We strive to get all greens. Next slide. We also recently issued guidance on the interface between FOIA and the Privacy Act. This is an area we found, particularly for agencies that don't deal with it frequently, but frequently enough, that could be an area that is a bit confusing. And so we hope that the guidance will be very helpful. It covers and compares each statute's purpose, the different definitions of records under each statute and the different access rights under each statute. And then explains how you should process or request under the Privacy Act or how you should process Privacy Act requests, whether they're first-party requests or third-party requests. And also addresses how that impacts the annual FOIA report requirements. Of course, any requests that touches on FOIA should be in your FOIA annual FOIA report, but a pure Privacy Act request should not be. If you have any questions about the guidance or any questions about this topic, of course, please reach out to us. If you have questions specific to the Privacy Act and not the interface between FOIA and the Privacy Act, those should be directed to your senior agency official for Privacy or OMB. Next slide. And then finally, very excited to announce the new project that we are undertaking. It's a continuation of something we've been pursuing for a little bit now, but we recently kicked off our project to develop an interactive FOIA wizard on FOIA.gov. The wizard would assist users in identifying already public available information and also where information is not publicly available help them find the best agency to submit their request. We're thinking it will likely, this project will likely include a logic-based and machine learning language processing tool that will facilitate an interactive experience to help users locate information or the best place to ask for information. So currently we kicked it off and are in a robust discovery phase, but we'll want agency and public impact in the coming weeks and months. So stay tuned. And if you're interested, please let us know. We'd love to include you in our discovery phase. But the overall goal here will be that we'll provide a much more cohesive user-friendly experience to the public on the front end of FOIA.gov, helping them find information that's already out there so they don't have to make a request or help them make more targeted requests and also reduce misdirected requests by helping them get to the right agency. So really excited to get this project started this year. And with that, next slide. And I will hand it over to Alina. Thanks, Bobby. Really exciting updates. I'm excited about the FOIA wizard in particular. That sounds really great. Thanks. Michelle, next slide, please. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk with all of you today, particularly given the challenges that FOIA programs all across the federal government continue to experience during the pandemic, which is still ongoing. Among the thousands of requests for assistance that we at OGIS receive each year, an increased number are related to delays. So I wanted to touch on that again. I feel like a little bit of a broken record. I've talked about it in the past. I want to keep talking about it because it's a big part of our portfolio right now that we see at OGIS. We are certainly sympathetic with agency FOIA professionals who are trying to keep up in these difficult times, and we very much appreciate your commitment and dedication to continuing to meet the challenges and requirements of the FOIA law. Although it may be tempting to avoid difficult conversations with requesters who are unhappy with delays, we have found that communication can build trust that can lead to productive conversations. This communication often begins when a requester requests an estimated date of completion or EDC, which is their right under FOIA. Next slide, please. So providing EDCs, of course, is a legal requirement under FOIA, which stipulates that agencies establish a means of tracking cases and communicating with requesters, including providing an estimated date on which the agency will complete its action. But beyond the legal requirement, providing an EDC is also an opportunity to open a conversation with requesters. Presented with an honest assessment of the time it would take to complete a FOIA request, requesters may be more willing to narrow the scope of their request or prioritize a request to allow for rolling releases. This has the potential of a win-win as it may result in less work for the agency, quicker responses for requesters, and a decreased risk of litigation. When OGIS receives an inquiry regarding the status of the case, we first urge requesters to reach out to the agency's FOIA public liaison, FPL, as the most efficient way to obtain information. We urge components processing cases to provide your contact information as part of your initial communication with requesters. OGIS has found that the greatest opportunity for dispute resolution rests with the people who understand the request and the responsive records. Next slide, please. So, we understand there's difficulty in determining an estimated date of completion, particularly for components and agencies with large backlogs, or where the FOIA processor wears numerous hats and has competing responsibilities. But the most important thing to understand is that an estimated date of completion is just that, an estimate. And OGIS has resources available to you. I've listed three of those here on this slide in 2020. OGIS issued an assessment report, an advisory opinion, and a FOIA ombuds observer on this very topic. In June of this year, OGIS hosted a great panel discussion at its annual open meeting on the issue of EDCs with three agency representatives who have established successful procedures for providing EDCs for their agencies. Next slide, please. OGIS receives over 4,000 requests for assistance each fiscal year. The majority of those seeking our assistance are simply confused about the FOIA process. As we have discussed, there are many opportunities to start a conversation on narrowing the scope of a request, but that conversation will never happen if the requester cannot contact the right person at the correct agency. So this is our plea to take a careful look at your agency letters again. If you are contacting a requester, asking them to narrow the scope, provide a name, number, and email address they can contact to start that conversation. If a requester needs to provide a privacy waiver, proof of death, or obituary for a third party subject, tell them how to do that. This will help the FOIA process run more smoothly. And of course, OGIS, and I'm sure OIP, I'm going to volunteer Bobby, are always happy to look at agencies' letters and happy to give you feedback. Next slide, please. So I want to switch gears to talk about the Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee, FOIA Advisory Committee. I always include this picture as a reminder of how things used to be pre-pandemic. We were sitting huddled together on the stage of the National Archives McAllen Theatre in Washington, D.C., and frankly now it seems like an ever-growing distant memory. We have now completed four full terms of the committee, 2014, 2016, 2016, 2018, 2018, 2020, and 2020 to 2022. And since March 2020, the committee has been meeting and working in a 100% virtual working environment. While that has presented some disadvantages, including lack of opportunity to meet in person and form personal connections, the advantages have been numerous, including more efficiency in meeting as a full committee and as subcommittees, and enabling committee members to participate regardless of where they are located or working in the continental United States. That efficiency no doubt contributed to the 2020 to 2022 term, a committee term, who made a total of 21 recommendations. Next slide, please. The most recent full term of the committee ended in June of this year. This fourth term experienced a few firsts since the committee began eight years ago. I thought I'd mention some of them. This was the first time the committee chose to break down into four subcommittees, classification, legislation, process, and technology, and it was a little exhausting. As I'll go over in a minute, we've chosen not to go that route again in this term. The second first was that the committee did not wait until the end of its term and instead voted and passed a recommendation halfway through its term. That recommendation came out of the legislation subcommittee, and that recommendation is for the archivist of the United States to ask Congress to expand public access to federal records and congressional support offices by creating disclosure procedures modeled after FOIA. OGIS delivered that recommendation to the archivist after the committee's vote at its June 10, 2021 meeting. And earlier this year, OGIS transmitted the recommendation to Congress via two different vehicles. First, our annual report, and second, in May 15, 2022, letters to the chairpersons and ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Another first for this past committee's term was the first time that four recommendations were deferred and one recommendation was specifically rejected by the acting archivist. The committee advanced a total of six recommendations under the rubric of reimagining OGIS. Throughout the term, a working group studied and produced an extensive white paper available on our website under the May 5, 2022 meeting, OGIS 2.0, reimagining FOIA oversight dated May 4, 2022. The acting archivist accepted one specific recommendation that the archivist should commission a feasibility study incorporating input from requesters and agencies to more deeply explore the costs and benefits of the rest of the recommendations of reimagining OGIS. And refined proposals to aid Congress in drafting legislation. The acting archivist deferred or paused for other recommendations related to OGIS. One was to give OGIS authority to make binding decisions. Next, to give OGIS the authority to review records in camera. Third, to create a direct line item of appropriation for OGIS. And fourth, to increase OGIS's budget. Finally, the acting archivist rejected one recommendation to return OGIS as a direct report. Based on the rationale for moving OGIS under the umbrella of agency services as part of the 2010 archivist task force on transformation, OGIS will currently remain where it is under agency services. Next slide, please. So a couple of years ago, I just created a terrific recommendations dashboard in order to keep track of the great work the committee has done since its inception in 2014. And I have also included a link on this slide. We continue to update the dashboard periodically as we make progress on the recommendations. Very recently, we completed updating the dashboard to reflect the additional 21 recommendations I just went over. And the updates also reflect progress on recommendations we are making from prior terms. Here's a quick snapshot of four terms of the committee's work. A total of five reports have been published on the OGIS website. 22 recommendations have been completed. 13 recommendations are in progress. And as I just discussed, four recommendations were deferred and one recommendation was rejected. Those are the black. Not a great color, but that's what we went with. Next slide, please. The fifth term, the current term of the FOIA advisor committee is off and running. I am excited and look forward to another very busy and productive term of the committee. The acting archivist of the United States has appointed a very talented and knowledgeable group of members. We have four returning members from the requester community and four returning government members. I'm also including in that count, OIP director Bobby Tullivian and myself. I am confident that the returning eight members will provide continuity and the 12 new members will bring fresh and innovative ideas. And that the committee as a whole will build on the work of the prior four terms. The first two meetings of the fifth term took place in September. If you missed them, tune in to the NARA YouTube channel and you can catch up on the two meetings. At its September 14th meeting, the committee organized itself into three new subcommittees. Thank God, not four, each of which is co-chaired by one government member and one non-government member. The first committee is the implementation subcommittee co-chaired by David Cooleyer, the University of Arizona and Katrina Pavlikinen of DHS. And that committee will, a subcommittee rather, will focus on the work of the committee in its first four terms and whether additional work needs to be done on any of the recommendations. The modernization subcommittee co-chaired by Jason Arbaren of the University of Maryland and Gorka Garcia-Milane of the Department of Health and Human Services will be looking at a range of technology and process issues and finding new opportunities for addressing those issues. Finally, the resources subcommittee co-chaired by Ginger McCall of Demand Progress and Paul Chalmers of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation is expected to study human technology and budget resources for FOIA programs as well as FOIA fees. The next meeting of the FOIA Advisory Committee is Thursday, December 1. Please mark your calendars and remember to register an event right. I believe our event right is now open starting today. At our next meeting on December 1, I am excited to report that we have invited representatives from the Requestor Community to serve on a panel that will focus on complex FOIA requests and litigation. The committee welcomes and encourages your ideas and suggestions at any time. Please send an email to foia-advisory-committee at narra.gov and let us know your ideas for improving the FOIA process. We definitely want to hear from you, the hard-working FOIA professionals who are facing FOIA realities on a regular basis. Please keep up all the great work that you're doing and we really appreciate it. Next slide, please. I would be remiss if I didn't take a minute to recognize my extraordinary OJAS staff. They work extremely hard behind the scenes to make public events like today's events go as smoothly as possible. I am extremely grateful to my terrific OJAS team, whose work facilitating greater access and transparency to federal records and assisting anyone with the FOIA process has continued to further two of NARA's important strategic goals, making access happen and connecting with customers. Next slide, please. I hope you take advantage of the many resources available on our website and that you tune into our past public meetings available on our NARA YouTube channel. OJAS often solicits input from the FOIA community and we want to hear from you, both requesters and you, agency FOIA professionals. We invite all of you to subscribe to our blog, the FOIA ombudsman, and Twitter feed, and to participate whenever we put a call out for input. Ultimately, our goal is to help improve the FOIA process for both requesters and agency FOIA professionals. FOIA programs are only as good as our FOIA professionals, so again, thank you for all that you do to fulfill the requirements of the FOIA and your agency. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Lindsay Roberts from OIP. Lindsay, over to you. Hi, good morning, everyone. Next slide, please. Thank you. And actually, current name is Lindsay Steele. So I think Roberts is sticking over from my previous days. Yes, I'm so sorry about that, Lindsay. No problem at all. Just to leave you any confusion there, but I'm really excited to be here this morning to share some updates about the upcoming development of shared FOIA business standards, as well as to provide some updates on our new CFO Council website. Next slide, please, Michelle. To start, I'd like to share that we at OIP in collaboration with OGIS, are working with the Office of Shared Services and Performance Improvement at GSA, who helps to administer the Business Standards Council to develop shared FOIA business standards. You may be asking, what are FOIA business standards and what is the Business Standards Council? The BSC is a cross-government team that works to design integrated common standards that can be used government-wide based on policy and statute in various areas of government administration. And so there have been shared standards developed in areas such as grants management, travel, and e-records management. We're very excited for this opportunity to develop some shared standards for FOIA. Next slide, please. As many of you know, a lot of agencies have common needs for FOIA technology and there are opportunities for shared services as many of you have experienced with the different products that you've used over the years. There has been, for many years, interest in developing some shared standards and services for FOIA technology. It's often a topic of discussion here at the CFO Council, along with the Council's committees, along with the FOIA Advisory Committee. It often comes up, you know, why aren't there more shared services for FOIA or is there a common standard that we could use? So we really see this opportunity to develop standards that could help ensure agencies' compliance with FOIA's procedural requirements and processing requests. It would also facilitate easier compliance with reporting obligations, along with improved data quality. It can also help agencies keep up with increasing requests and reducing backlogs, overall facilitating better customer service for the public. For instance, when your agency needs to go acquire a new case management solution, for example, you could just take these standards that are developed and use that as a basis for your market research and ultimately helping to define the exact requirements for your agency. So we can hopefully get some time savings and efficiency out of that. Shared business standards, in addition to helping with actual acquisition of technology, they can also be used outside of the procurement context. These shared standards could be used as an assessment tool to help you look at your FOIA programs with a critical eye. And on the whole, the shared standards will help define key requirements for agencies' FOIA technology. Next slide, please. So we're just at the early stages of embarking on this process of developing the business standards. And our initial focus is going to be on agency case management systems. We think this is a type of technology that is the most wide-ranging in terms of different agencies needing some type of case management tool. And it also gives us like a manageable defined chunk of work to start with. This focus will allow us to define data requirements that support FOIA compliance and reporting, as well as defining workflows and perhaps some other functionality and baked-in logic that can help facilitate efficiency. Over time, the standards may expand to additional advanced technologies that are used for FOIA, such as e-discovery, record search, and processing tools. We're very excited to thankfully be able to hopefully leverage the work of the FOIA reference model working group, which you may hear a little more about during the Technology Committee updates. But the FOIA reference model working group has been working closely with MITRE on their development of what they call a FOIA reference model, which essentially aims to map out the entire FOIA process in really quite extraordinary detail. And so we're hoping that in taking some of the work that has already been done to map out the FOIA process, that will hopefully give us a good starting point in developing these standards. Next slide, please. So when we kick this off, we are going to convene an interagency working group via the Chief FOIA Officers' Council to develop the business standards and use that as a way to receive feedback from agency stakeholders. We'll also work together with OGIS to seek input from public stakeholders as well. If you are an agency FOIA professional who's interested in serving on this working group, please feel free to reach out to me at our DOJ OIP FOIA inbox. We will be really getting this project underway in the coming months. And we're really excited to provide something that will be abuse to many agencies, hopefully, and also continue to build on it as there is the demand and need for it. Great. Next slide. The second thing I'd like to talk about briefly is our new CFO Council website. We're very excited to announce that the CFO Council has a new home on FOIA.gov just launched last week. You will now see, when you go to FOIA.gov, a menu item at the top for the CFO Council. You can click on that and go directly to a page that talks about our meetings as well as individual pages for the two committees. So please bookmark the FOIA.gov slash Chief FOIA Officers Council page. Our existing, as you may know, we've been maintaining parallel sites on the OIP and OGIS website. And so for efficiency's sake, we're going to be archiving those. And the CFO Council page on FOIA.gov will be the place where we put everything related to the CFO Council. Next slide, please. You can find information about upcoming and past meetings on the main page along with information about public comments that have been submitted and instructions for how to submit a public comment. Next slide. You will also be able to find information and deliverables from each of the committees and the working groups. As the committees have been active now for multiple years at this point, the working groups may cycle through as well. So we have separated it, separated out working groups that are currently active and then separately you'll be able to find inactive or past working groups. But we'll have all of the deliverables that each of the working groups have worked on their charters and any other updates related to the work of those committees. Next page. Next slide, please. So that's it for my updates. I'm pleased to now be able to turn it over to our Technology Committee co-chairs. The Technology Committee has been incredibly active over the past couple of years and they're getting off the ground this cycle with some new working groups. So Michael and Eric, over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lindsay. I appreciate that. I'm really excited to be here to share some information on the Chief Boy Officer's Technology Committee. I'm also very pleased to be joined by Gorka Garcia Malone this morning to talk about two of our working groups. You'll have the pleasure of hearing from our Tech Committee co-chair, Mr. Eric Stein, a bit later in the meeting. So I know we have a diverse audience here who may or may not know much about the Tech Committee. So we thought it best just to break it down a little bit and share with you all just who we are and give you a snapshot of what we're attempting to accomplish in the FOIA space. Where we've had some success and invite your active participation into these areas and efforts. So first off, who? First, we're a group of FOIA professionals established in 2018 from across the federal family. We have 40-plus members representing over 25 agencies at multiple levels of leadership. And for me, really, that's a key ingredient in the successes that we've had over the years. We have folks that are leading major programs and folks that are key contributors of various agencies. And that mix, that diversity really helps us to be as inclusive as possible when looking at the challenges and the potential solutions to common FOIA issues. So how do we do this? How do we go about identifying those common challenges in the FOIA community? Well, we've broken our work down into what are truly member-driven teams. So I'm going to give you some of the high points on a few of those teams. And Gorka will give us a deeper dive on some of the key work that's going on in two of those. So one of the first working groups I want to highlight is the Search AI group. This group has presented webinars on things like artificial intelligence 101 and looks to help to ensure that we meet our mission in this area, leveraging the tools that we need in a complex and changing FOIA landscape. We have a data working group. We also have a five-way compliance group, which is an area that's always interesting, ensuring that our efforts at transparency are fully transparent for all of our stakeholders and that we're mindful of equity across our community as we deliver on the transparency mission. We have a FOIA and classified working group. And I asked for a readout from this team, but it was redacted under B1. So we'll have to see what comes from those guys. But really, this is one of those groups that have worked incredibly hard, especially in a remote work environment that many of us have endured in the COVID post-COVID world. So they've done a tremendous job in coming together and sharing best practices. We have a technology best practices team, which I'm really excited for Gorka to give a readout on in just a few minutes. We have a wonderful FOIA reference model working group that Lindsay just mentioned. This group is working, as she mentioned, with stakeholders to develop advanced tools to assist in predictive coding efforts. And we're hopeful that they can kind of bridge the gap between the robotic process automation that we have today and help deliver on robust technology assisted review, which is the promise of tomorrow's technology. And really, as Lindsay mentioned, really groundbreaking work and to be able to work with those folks to break down the FOIA process and provide FOIA practitioners with the tools that they need is really has the promise to be transformative. We have a FOIA IT platforms group that Gorka again is going to talk about in just a minute. But for me, this is one of the real values that we've been able to provide the FOIA community over the last couple of years. So while many agencies use COTS products, it's really helpful to understand the capabilities and use cases for the different products. And one of the landmark achievements in this area was the FOIA NextGen Showcase of last year. The purpose of your call at the event, and this was the first of its kind, was to identify FOIA solutions for federal agencies in response to existing FOIA case processing challenges raised through the research that we've done in the community of collaboration that we created. We had 22 vendors participate over two days with open dialogue and briefs. The event that we held was intended to help federal agencies better understand the promise of things like AI and advanced and emerging technology for case processing. And we're going to continue to work in this area and on these efforts. It's kind of a 30,000-foot view of the member-driven teams that we have working on critical issues in the FOIA tech space. But to kind of drill down a little bit more about two of these groups, Gorka Garcia Milan will give a readout on the best practices and the IT platforms working groups. So Gorka, over to you, sir. Do we lose Gorka? I don't know. Yeah, it looks like Gorka is not on at this moment. Okay. Well, I promise you you're missing something fantastic. So sorry about that, guys, for Gorka. I know that there's been people in our agency with some technology issues, but that's okay. I'll give you just a little bit more on the best practices. Basically, all of these groups have charters, leads, and each of the groups are producing thought leadership pieces on these topics. They do things like conduct critical surveys and present webinars to folks across the federal family. So that's a bit about those groups. And as Lindsay mentioned, this information and their charters will be on the FOIA.gov website. So we encourage you to do that, to take a look there. So in addition to the working groups, as I mentioned, through the leadership of Bobby and Alina and their respective teams, we've had a number of opportunities to talk with and consult with folks across the globe. And in areas of government we wouldn't normally have access to, and this improves our situational awareness of trends and thought leadership that we're able to bring back into our own program. So those are areas where we'll gain information and insight from folks that are leading programs or key contributors programs across the federal family, and they're able to come back in and we're able to bring those lessons home to our home agencies. So in short, the tech committee is a great forum for folks to come together and share common concerns, seek common solutions, and really engage in the camaraderie that is frankly tough to come by in a largely virtual world. So I'd encourage you all to visit us on the new FOIA.gov website that Lindsay mentioned and consider joining our great team. So with that, we'll send it back to you, Alina. Okay, I've reached out to Gorka. Hopefully he'll join us again, and we can give him another opportunity to find in and tell us about the great work that his group has been doing. We're running a little bit early, so maybe he went off for a little bit to actually do some important FOIA work. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Yeah, Erin, go ahead. I could give a couple more of these. Hi, Mike. It's unfortunate to have some technical issues during our technical committee presentation here. Just to point out a couple other additions, I think Gorka would have touched on and just some of the other work over the different working groups here today. So with that, good morning, everyone, Eric Stein. And just to build on the points that Mike was previously made, we really reviewed our charters carefully to adapt to the current changes and situations we're facing as a result of the hybrid workplace, increased demand from agencies and FOIA requests, and it's not going to be more people alone to solve these problems, but technology is really going to be an integral part to success moving forward. I also point out that as our different working groups have really become empowered and looked at these issues, so the new charters very seriously, will be issuing new surveys to agencies asking questions about data, best practices, and search and AI capabilities. And while this is an element of survey fatigue out there without good accurate information or data, we really can't make meaningful change. So in the coming weeks and months, you'll be hearing from at least those of you at the different federal agencies here today from our committee asking for feedback. And I know some of you have just provided feedback recently to our sibling committee here. Our questions are very much focused on technology and based on feedback we've received in the spirit of feedback, we very much welcome feedback not just from agencies but from the public as well about what you'd like to see us do better. And while our body looks at how do we improve administration within agencies, we don't want to become too myopic or a tunnel vision just focused on agencies but keeping our customers in mind and how do we make FOIA better moving forward. I'm very happy to see that Gorka appears to have joined the participants list. So with that, I'd like to see Gorka, are you available to give your update from your working group and committee here? Gorka, be sure to unmute your line of device. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can, Gorka, and over to you. Exactly. Apologies for arriving late on my computer. I lost kind of covering, but it's good to be here and thank you for the opportunity to just discuss what the two working groups that I'm going to all put are doing. And the first one I want to touch on is what we call the Best Practices Working Group. This one's led by Wendy Schumacher. She's with the Department of the Interior. And really the genesis of the working group is, you know, the Technology Committee here follows the FOIA Advisory Committee closely. And about in the last month of the last term. This doesn't, it seems like a long time ago. This doesn't, in the last term of the advisory committee, they recommended that the Technology Committee, the Technology Committee, create a working group to explore best practices for the release of records in native format, right? So within a month of that recommendation being approved, the Technology Committee can be in the working group. As I said, it's led by Wendy Schumacher. They're evil. She's wonderful to work with and maybe we'll be able to get to see her in this venue. And so what we're doing is we're trying to take a sort of a, sort of step-by-step approach to figuring out how the various stakeholders across the government are dealing with this issue, right? So the first question that we're posing ourselves in the work group is how do organizations deal with Excel sheets? Because as best as we can tell, there aren't really very many review platforms for FOIA that allow you to navigate Excel sheets, right? Typically what you have to do when you take these Excel sheets into these review platforms is you PDF them. So you might get an Excel sheet that maybe has 50 rows and 20 columns and it ends up being something like 700 pages of difficult-to-read data on PDF. So we know that this is a problem. I think it's a perfect problem to approach this question with. And so the plan is to reach out to our fellow stakeholders across the federal government, figure out how a representative sample of these agencies are dealing with Excel sheets, and then speak with technology experts to determine the risks associated with releasing Excel in native format and how to navigate those risks, right? Because if all goes well, you know, if we can redact these documents in native format and release them in native format, it's going to be ultimately much easier for the request, right? So that's what we're working on. And the idea instead of sending out a survey, right now the idea is to actually communicate with these agencies directly, you know, via phone call and just get a sense of not just of how they're doing things, but why, right? What their concerns are, what their efficiency, their security, et cetera. And so that's the best practices working group. I hope that gives you a sense that, you know, we do have our finger on the pulse of the FOIA advisory committee. And remember, the FOIA advisory committee is composed of members of the FOIA community and the government, but also half of it is composed of members of the public who are very interested in FOIA, well-seasoned in the process, and have legitimate questions to ask about, you know, how to best process records. So my sense is that the work that we're doing does benefit from the input of the public because this is a matter that was brought before us by members of the public. The other working group that I'm involved with is the FOIA IT platform working group. And this one I co-chaired with Virginia Burk, she's in the Peace Corps and also fantastic to work with. What we're doing there, I think everybody by now is probably aware that FOIA online is on setting soon, you know. And what NARA attempted to do last year, and I think successfully, is to present alternatives to FOIA online that the FOIA community can choose from. Right, so I think I've mentioned it before here. We participated in NARA's Nexigen event last year. If you go to the NARA website, you'll see all that they did. They took information from vendors, from various FOIA platform vendors, right, posted it on their website. They also invited them to give a brief presentation to the FOIA community at large so they could explain the benefits of their platforms. And what we have on their website is a lot of these videos, a lot of these supporting materials from the vendors. And so what this work group is looking to do is to go through that data because it is a lot of data and it's not necessarily easy to collate, if you will. Right, so what we're hoping to do in this working group is to review all of that information, reach out to the vendors who are appropriate to fill any potential gaps in the data, and present to the FOIA community and to the public a fairly, fairly easy to navigate matrix where you can, if you're an agency that's looking to transition away, say, for instance, from FOIA online, where you can go through and figure out what your needs are, right? Do you need video redaction, for example? That might be a category in our matrix. But go through and figure out what your needs are and which of these vendors might best serve your needs. And so those are the missions and the work that these working groups are involved in. Worker, thanks very much for all of that. I just also want to point out, I know a couple of people have said the next gen FOIA tech showcase was last year, but I think because we're in the government, we think of fiscal year, right? So it was in fiscal year 22, but it was actually calendar year, February of 2022. It seems like a distant memory. But thanks again for highlighting that. And I really look forward to the outcome of your analysis of all the vendors that participated. So thank you for all of that. I really appreciate it. Michael, back to you. Anything else you wanted to add about technology? Just thanks to everyone who's contributed to the FOIA technology committee. As Lindsay mentioned, members rotate in and out. And it's really been, has been and continues to be a real pleasure to work with so many diverse folks from across the federal family. And of course, to be able to work Alina with you and your staff and Bobby and his staff. You know, all these critical issues in that form that we have together is really valuable for the community. So really grateful for your continued leadership and Bobby's continued leadership on this. So thanks so much for that. And thanks for the people that are watching. Thanks. So sign up. If you want to participate, feel free to reach out to us and let us know we're always looking for volunteers. So thank you very much. So with that, I'd like to turn things over to our other committee, the Kokaki. They've decided not to change their name. They're going to keep it Kokaki, the committee on cross agency collaboration and innovation. And I'm going to turn it over to Avi Mosheim and Michael Bell, our two co-chairs. Thank you, Alina. I am Mike Bell. I'm going to get us started real quick just with some updates on what the Kokaki committee has been up to. I was hoping the slide would be up there because I always forget what Kokaki stands for if it's not in front of me. There we go. So it always helps to have that. So we are so used to calling it Kokaki now. It's taken on a life of its own. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to give us a little update on what we've done since the last CFOC meeting back in April. Just a little background on committee for those who may not remember. We've been in existence for about a year and a half now. We've got people from all over the government just like the technology committee. And we're still in the information gathering stages for our three subcommittees. The three subcommittees are we've got our resources committee, which is trying to get solutions like technology or best practices to all the FOIA offices in the government to make sure they have access to those. Some of the big agencies like transportation, you know, we have the resources and we can pretty much, you know, find all those solutions if we need it. But there's a lot of one person FOIA shops, the smaller ones that maybe don't even have a full-time FOIA person. They're the ones who really need the collaboration from the other government agencies to see what's out there to help them out. We also have a GIS career field agency, government information specialist. That's basically so that we can find out the best ways to recruit, develop, and retain FOIA professionals. I think everyone knows that there's just a shortage of, you know, of people out there in all walks of life, not just government but private sector. And to find a really good FOIA professional is, you know, it's hard work. You really have to dig sometimes and that's one of the reasons that we were trying to gather some of this information. And the final subcommittee is the pandemic slash virtual FOIA office subcommittee. That came out of the pandemic, obviously, not to really look back on what went on during the pandemic, but to see what lessons we could take from having to go all virtual and then convert it into our hybrid FOIA offices that people are running now. So it's really, you know, how can we learn, take what we learned and improve our FOIA processing right now. Now, one of the things that we've been doing over the last 18 months, information gathering. And one of the things that we've been working on at our meetings was going to be a survey for FOIA professionals around the government. Because we have our three subcommittees and we think we have a good target on what we want to work on. But we wanted to hear from the people before we went too far and to make sure that we're working on the right subjects. And one of the things that we did was we took full advantage of the American Society for Access Professionals National Training Conference, which was in July this past summer. And it's the first one that was held in person since the pandemic. So you had, I think it was about 300, 400 FOIA professionals and requesters as well, all in one place in Arlington. So we wanted to make sure that we could get ideas from that conference. So we actually showed up the night before and we dropped off our surveys that we had created. We had paper copies with links that we dropped off at registration and ASAP made sure that all government employees received a copy. And they also sent out a link to our survey online and promoted it so that all members of ASAP would have the opportunity to take that survey. So they really helped us out there. We give them a lot of credit for the way the survey went. And also we held a, during the conference, we had a joint plenary session with our friends in the Technology Committee. While they were there talking about all the great things that they had accomplished and some of the solutions that you've heard today, we were more in the information gathering stage then. So we not only told about our committee, but we took questions from the audience. Again, it was a full ballroom, full of people. And we heard a lot from the crowd about they really want to do their jobs better, but some of them just don't have the means or the support. And that really came out in the survey that we did. The survey that we left it out maybe a week or so after the conference, we get other people as well. But we were able to receive over 200 responses from federal government employees. We did have the limit to those for privacy concerns. Don't worry, we did watch all that. But 200 federal employees is a pretty good mix there because we had a wide variety of agencies and experience of the people who responded to it. I'm not going to go through all the results of the survey, but there were some key things I think might be interesting to mention here. So this is going to influence our future actions, which Abhi is going to talk about in just a minute. We did realize that half the respondents were hard directly into a FOIA position. That may seem like a lot, but then on the other hand, half the people also came into FOIA another way, sort of like through the back door, do things like records management, IT, things like that. So we have to realize how agencies can get those up to speed and how we want to recruit people into the FOIA career field. Let's see, some of the other things that we learned, some of the things that FOIA professionals thought were the most beneficial into doing their jobs well. A couple of them were pretty obvious. Document collection and communication were right at the top. Those are important. But one of the other important things was simply agency support. And that starts at the top with chief FOIA officers, FOIA officers like me. So the FOIA professionals out there, the ones who are really doing the work, they want and need that support to do a good job. That's something that we can focus on with our committee. Some of the things that the respondents said instituted or consisted of agency support were things like training and resources and even mentors. Sometimes it's tough to have a mentor, especially if you're in a one-person FOIA shop. Luckily, my first FOIA job was in the Department of Defense, Office of the Secretary. And I had any number of FOIA mentors that I could take advantage of there. And that really helped me get started in my FOIA career. And not everyone has that opportunity. And that's one of the things that we can look at. Let's see. Another interesting finding is 35% of FOIA professionals that responded had applied for another job during the past year. I don't know. There's no data line going from previous years. But it's interesting over a third of people were actually looking. But those are both in and out of the FOIA career field. I think about half of those want to stay in FOIA. What about half of those looking for other jobs wanted to get out of FOIA? And that's something our GIS subcommittee can definitely take a look at. Because one of our questions was what would keep you in FOIA? And the answers were things like more resources. Yeah, we all need help. And we also had a career lab. They want a career ladder. Because sometimes in FOIA, you want to reach your full potential. But sometimes the positions aren't there. So they want a career ladder. And then they want training and flexibility. And I think flexibility is one of the key things that came out of this pandemic and the way we do business now. So these are things that agencies are going to have to institute. And the final point that I'll make from the survey is that we learned a lot about pandemic preparedness. We learned, you know, which agencies were prepared, which people were sort of left out on their own and how we can prepare for that in the future. And then finally, we learned that some people are still supplying their own telework supplies, even after two years. They still don't have all the resources from their agency to do their job. And that's one thing that you think we would have gotten down pat by now. So these are all things that we can look at. And I see Abby is already talking to you about future plans for our committee. So thank you all. Thanks, Mike. And thank you all for being here and supporting the Chief FOIA Officers Council. I'm Abby Mosheim, Mike's co-chair on co-cacky. And I'm going to tell you about our subcommittees plans for the future. Three subcommittees are really digging into the survey data that Mike just mentioned to understand federal FOIA professionals needs and how best they can assist them. So for the government information specialist subcommittee, they will continue to implement a phased approach for developing proposed deliverables, including a development of a white paper that examines the job series for GIS and makes recommendations for professionalizing that job series. On the pandemic virtual subcommittee, they expect to create a list of best practices for transitioning from an office environment into a virtual environment. These practices can also be useful in maintaining a virtual environment for offices that are now full-time remote. And on our resources subcommittee, after examining the survey data, their initial takeaways showed that respondents had a strong interest in increasing personnel, specifically civilian employees, in solutions offered by technology and in streamlining and improving processes. The resources subcommittee will conduct a best practices workshop in the near future based on the survey information. And they want to look for innovative methods for using and sharing resources across the FOIA professional community. And that ends our future plans for co-cacky. But one thing that we would like in the future is for more people to join us. If you have an interest in collaborating across agencies to come up with solutions to common problems, please feel free to reach out to me and to Mike. And we would be happy to have you join. Thank you very much. Happy. Thanks so much, Michael. Thanks to you as well. I was very interesting to hear some of the survey results. So I look forward to hearing more about that in the coming months. I'm just going to pause for one second to ask Ojas' deputy director, Martha Murphy, who's been monitoring the WebEx chat. Are there any questions we have from our FOIA professional colleagues that need to be raised at this juncture? No, they're not. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you. All right. So I know we're running a little ahead of schedule. That means that our next segment, our presenters can actually take longer if they want to and fill up a little bit of space, or we can end early. It's our discretion. We noted that on the agenda. We can adjust times as needed. But next up we have Roger Anto and Bruno Miano from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And I'm really pleased to introduce them and they're going to talk a little bit more about their program. Michelle, actually, please next slide. And I just want to give a plug for our office for Ojas. We actually helped Roger and Bruno Miano facilitate a set of webinars. We had two of them both in May of 2020 and May of 2021. I believe I got that right. If not, I might be off by a year. I apologize. Maybe Roger and Bruno will correct my dates. And we were able to provide a platform for their FOIA program to talk about some of their concerns and needs and their opportunities to work with requesters to make their FOIA program more successful. And I want to just make that invitation to anyone else out there from our FOIA professional colleagues, any other agency that needs that kind of support from Ojas. We're happy to provide it. So please send us an email and we'll be happy to help you out. So without much further ado, I've already given a lot of ado, I'm going to turn things over to Roger and Bruno. And thank you both of you gentlemen. Good morning and thank you for joining us. And I welcome you and over to you. Good morning. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bruno, you want to take the lead since I'm having audio issues? Sure. Yeah, no problem. So thank you, Olina. Like Olina said, I'm Bruno Vianna, the deputy FOIA officer here at CDC. Roger Andow here who's joined us as well as the FOIA director, the FOIA officer. And we're going to talk about our challenges, successes and outreach as a whole, but, you know, during, particularly during COVID. Next slide, please. So this is how is the FOIA office structured? So we have a centralized FOIA office and our positions are listed out here. Every position listed there that has an asterisk next to it means that we have vacancies at that position. But we have an intake position that is, you know, that receives all the requests, even requests that come in through our public access link or PAL. Some things need to be done before it's assigned to an analyst. We have 10 initial processing analysts with several vacancies there, two appeals and litigation staff and a couple of vacancies there. One communications lead and then two IT staff, one of which is a contractor. So our process goes a little bit like this. We receive the request, we assign it to an analyst after, you know, making any sort of fee waiver or expedited determination, expedited processing determination. We'll assign it to an analyst and that analyst will take it from that point until that request closes. At the end of the process when the records have been reviewed, the records do undergo a second line review by CDC FOIA office members. CDC FOIA office management prior to the closing of that request. Next slide please. So emerging challenges. So particular during COVID we had an enormous increase in the volume of the work coming into the FOIA office. So prior to COVID, a big year for the FOIA, the CDC FOIA office would be about 12, 1250 requests. And we averaged about 2500. So we've got a 100% increase there. We saw 200 to 400% increase in FOIA appeals over the last three years and a 400 to 500% increase in FOIA litigation over the last three years. One of the big challenge that we faced at the onset of the COVID-19 response was just so many staff across the agency were deployed into the Emergency Operations Center to assist with the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which made it hard in a lot of instances for us to reach out and get records when the custodian needed to pull those records manually. Part of our response to that was to, you know, a pretty significant increase in what we call enterprise searches, where the FOIA office has IT staff who can go in, pull emails, pull instant messages, that sort of thing. We had a huge and just an enormous increase in the use of that technology, as well as the de-duping and some of the other filtering and massaging of the documents that we get back. So that was one of the big things that we did in response to that. A challenge that every FOIA office, I'm sure, faces is that we were under resourced at the time and before. So what Roger and I were able to do is we successfully lobbied the powers that be at CDC to give us some more money and some more positions to fill out our staff, and we're still in the process of doing that, but that's going to be a huge boost in our ability, our horsepower to process these records and get them out the door to the requesters. Another challenge that we faced is just the closeout process was lengthened by consultations with other federal agencies in the White House. You know, there's a lot of cross, you know, we're all working together to tackle this enormous tragedy and event that happened to the world. So just we all had to work together to, you know, when we found each other's equities on our records, and that adds a pretty significant time to the end of the processing of many of our requests. And then another big challenge that we're seeing more and more these days is we're getting, you know, increasingly we're seeing part of the requests that are coming in asking for text messages. Right now we do not have an agency-wide system to go in and pull those text messages yet. So that is, you know, has to be tasked out to that individual who will then, you know, search their phone and send us any results that they are able to locate there. Next slide, please. Okay, so successful strategies that we implemented. So we're really stressed with our folks engaging with our requestor community on the phone for requests, but another strategy that we've used is doing webinars like Alina was mentioning. And I highly recommend that you, you know, I don't want to create work for anyone, but I highly recommend that you all use OGIS as a resource. They've been fantastic in all sorts of aspects for putting these events on these webinars to kind of inform the requestor community. So definitely reach out to them for that. So we did two, I'm a little hazy on the dates as well, Alina. So, you know, everything is, every day is a Monday to me. And, you know, I can't remember the exact dates that we had these events, but we did have two and both were kind of centered around one was the state of FOIA, which we'll share an excerpt on the next slide once we get there from one of the slides that we presented there, just kind of telling what we were going through as at the height of COVID and all that kind of good stuff. And then the other webinar that we did was electronic searches at CDC. So just tips for kind of streamlining and making it easier for us as a FOIA office to conduct the search for what you're looking for, be able to go through those records and then get that record out to you. So just kind of some, you know, help us help you kind of tips that we gave in that webinar there. Another big thing that we did, which was a huge boost or like I said, we had to very heavily rely on our ability to pull records electronically in the FOIA office. So we were able to secure a contract for an e-discovery IT specialist in the FOIA office to enhance our ability to conduct those searches and that refinement of the records after the search is conducted. So a program is only as good as the search terms and the things that you put into it that, you know, the custodians that you enter, the date ranges, that kind of stuff. So it gives you exactly what you put into it. And sometimes it's, you know, doing an electronic search can be a little bit challenging to hit it just right depending on how that request is written. But that e-discovery specialist that we were able to obtain has been a really big boost to our ability to conduct those searches. Next slide, please. So this is one of the slides that we shared and one of the webinars that we did. So it was just kind of, what can you do to help us get you the records that you seek? So just a couple tips. Keep the request brief. You know, at any time, if you can use bullet points, I'm looking for this record. I'm looking for this record. You know, give us the dates, that sort of thing. Bullet points, keep it concise and to the point, you know, sometimes we get requests that are many, many, many pages and you have to kind of hunt through there to find what the request is looking for. So keeping it brief, keeping it concise, bullets help a lot just to keep it clear as to what you're looking for. Give us enough information up front so we can quickly process your request. So obviously it slows things down when we have to reach out. We have to send you a letter. We have to get, you know, play phone tag to see what it was exactly that you're looking for. So that helps a lot. Ask for what you want and nothing more. You know, some people take the approach of giving me every piece of paper that's ever been used at the CDC and I'll find what I want in it. Obviously, you know, we're a staff of under staff, like I said, and trying to build up that staff and get up to full staff. So if you just ask for exactly what you want and nothing more, obviously we can pull it quicker and respond quicker. And then, you know, be realistic about response times. I know the CDC FOIA office staff work very, very hard and, you know, they are asked to do a lot. Roger and I have pitched in in different areas of the office and as far as getting the process from receipt to getting it out to the requester. So we're both wearing, you know, several hats as far as the processing of FOIA documents. So we're doing as much as we can. And like Alina had said at the beginning, we do offer, we do provide those estimated dates of completion. And we do try to stay on top of those. So if that we are to, you know, we do anticipate that we'll go past that date. We do encourage and direct our staff to reach back out and update that date if we're not going to be able to make it by the time that we said that we would. So just a little excerpt of the webinar that we did. Next slide. Okay. So to speak a little bit more about successful strategies that we implemented at the time. So we reworked the office workflow to enhance our processing efficiency. Like I said, Roger and I, we shuffled the way the process went. We took on some other tasks that were other people were doing. You know, we kind of just had to reshuffle things to get the people that are doing the processing of those FOIA requests. Allow them to do, you know, as much as possible. Obviously there's, it's never perfect, but allow the people doing that work to as much as humanly possible. Just do that work, not be pulled to the side over here or over here to do this other thing. If, you know, for that side of the house, we really wanted to just focus as much as we could for them doing that specifically that work. We encourage electronic submission of FOIA requests to our public access link or PAL system. So that is a system that is hooked directly into our FOIA tracking database. So if you put in a request through the public access link system, it is automatically entered into our system. With any attachments that you put in there, it enters your contact information. It enters the records that you're looking for. So that eliminates the need for someone at the initial part of the request to do those keystrokes, do that work to do that data processing and get that request into the system. Again, that's just another way, it doesn't cost anything. So it's just another way that a requester, if you just come in through that portal, you can also track your request. You can see the status of your request that you've entered through that system. It gives you, you know, a portal that you can look at all your requests that you've submitted. It does a little bit of the work for us. So it allows us to go ahead and get started on the process of doing the work, looking at your request and trying to get those records out to you. So it just helps us a little bit. Every request that comes into that system helps us a little bit. So it's really helpful. And then also enhance the use of our software to assist in the searching for deduplicating and refining responsive records. So like I said, electronic search of records is only as good as what you put into it. So once that search is completed, we do take those records and we put it through our deduplicating process. What's called containment. So if you have an email thread with 10 responses and they're all captured in that thread, it will give you the one with the 10 responses and kind of remove the need to have 10 copies of that same thread. And then, you know, we can just refine things. We'll reach out to requesters and say, hey, there's a lot of newsletters or we're seeing, you know, someone subscribed to some news outlet that's sending a daily email or that sort of thing. Do you agree to, you know, that we're assuming that's not what you're looking for. Do you agree to exclude that kind of stuff? And the software that we use will more easily allow us to kind of kick that stuff out of there because, you know, to get to the stuff that you're actually wanting to read that you put in the request for. Next slide, please. Oh, okay. Well, I guess that is the end of our slide. So I don't know if Alina, if you have any questions or if you've received any questions about anything that was, we've discussed today or Roger, if you had anything to add. No, no, no, I think you've covered it at all. So if there are any questions for us, we are happy to entertain any questions. Martha, just for to you about about the I'm sorry. Go ahead, please. Oh, that's all right. We can ask I thought I looked in the chat and I didn't see any questions. But I was going to encourage any questions. So if anyone has any questions for Roger and Bruno, please do put it in the chat. And we can circle back if Robert Roger Bruno might don't mind sticking around after our next presentation. I really wanted to say thank you for joining us and sharing your experience. The challenges and the successful strategies that you've implemented. I think this is something we'd like to do more regularly in our meetings, and it's really helpful, I think for us to in the federal FOIA community to compare notes. And so thanks again for joining us. And for your presentation. Well, thank you for inviting us. Yeah, thank you so much. Of course, absolutely. So next up, we have Eric Stein from the Department of State and Michael Seidel from our FBI, who are here to talk about a really exciting exchange program that they just recently started and worked on. Of course, Michael and Eric are familiar faces in the FOIA community and great leaders in FOIA. And so really happy to have them as part of our agenda and excited for their presentation. So with that, we can hand it over to Mike and Eric. Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Bobby, thank you for that kind introduction and good morning, Alina, as well. I'm Mike Seidel. I'm the FOIA program chief for the FBI. And joining me for this presentation today and I'll introduce him again is Eric Stein, my counterparts at the Department of State. Next slide, please. I'm going to begin by giving an overview of this program that the Department of State and the FBI's FOIA program completed in FY22. First, let's start with the objectives. And you can see the four bullet points there. The first three bullet points capture the idea of starting a more collaboration between agency programs and developing a strategic partnership. But let me give you a little more to those points in terms of vision. When we embarked on this idea to set up a program and to find a partner to begin this process. The vision was to provide a means to engage in some healthy program self-assessment and also to serve as a catalyst for innovation. So what we learned through this program is those things occurred. We met those objectives. As you learned from other agencies and you actually get out of your silo, if you will, obviously we all have our own program challenges in FOIA. And we're in our silos and we're doing that hard work every day to serve the public in these requests. So it's easy by default to stay in those silos. So this program and engaging with the other agency got us out of that silo and that exchange of information caused us to assess our own program and became a catalyst for innovation as we saw the different business processes of the other agency. As we saw the different technology approaches of the other agency, as we saw the culture of the other agency. So very positives from the objective agency partnership perspective. Moving to that final point of the objectives, this was also designed to provide professional development opportunity. We have a responsibility to develop the future leaders of FOIA programs and frankly to ensure continuity of this important government function. It's important that we provide our personnel with concrete opportunities to learn and grow both personally and professionally in the FOIA space. And this program was designed to do exactly that. So with those initial points, I'll turn it over to Eric to talk about structure. Thanks Mike. Well good morning again and thank you to OGIS NOIP for the opportunity to present here today on this partnership between the FBI and the State Department and the exchange program. So I'll be talking about the structure of the program and what we did over this exchange. So you see here on the screen the bullet of the first one says each agency selected an experienced employee for the program exchange. So maybe it's easier to say what we didn't do. We didn't take someone from the State Department. We didn't take someone from the FBI and just have them go to each other's agencies and work in their FOIA program. That was not the objective. It wasn't to plus up our resources by one. We're actually offset one each other by one. But rather we set up about a month long program where each of our agencies sent one FOIA professional to the other agency to observe, to interact, to engage and to provide feedback about what they saw. Both in real time and then take some time afterwards to analyze and think about what they saw. Everything from the intake process to case processing, to appeals, to litigation, to other components of FOIA processing including records management and sharing and collaborating on challenges and records and electronic records. And you've heard some of the other presenters today talk about issues and challenges with text messages, electronic messages, just different formats of information. And it was very, it was interesting because the exchange was it's almost more like a shadowing program where someone goes over one agency into the other and it wasn't without its own challenges. We're all emerging or still coping with the COVID-19 pandemic and our actual exchange was disrupted temporarily by the pandemic but we pushed forward. We waited until everyone was healthy and continued. So each agency selected an employee and there were some administrative and logistic matters that had to go into that. This wasn't those a detail or a joint duty assignment. It was just rather an exchange program. And given that we were also working with classified information, clearances had to be exchanged. There are other factors to consider for those agencies here that don't work with classified information, a program like this is still be done and exchanges can still occur. But it just so happened that both of our agencies are in that same arena of national security information. So for one month the participant was fully immersed in person and these exchange was in person. It was not hybrid. We had someone go out to the FBI and someone come here to the State Department and they were fully immersed in the program. And we put together schedules where the different exchange members were able to go through and shadow and spend quality time with folks doing searches and redactions. And within a lot of those interactions that I think the biggest lessons were learned, most innovation occurred because we were able to see, well, our agency would do it this way. Oh, it's interesting you do it that way. We never considered that before. And while a lot of the program was structured in such a way that the agency, the person who was coming over to visit the agency could see how things were working at that agency. They did provide feedback and it was really, really useful to get that outside perspective. I think as Mike said, you kind of get easy to say, well, this is how we're doing things and that's how it's going to get done. That just doesn't work. I mean, for a whole host of reasons, especially given, I know I can say here at the State Department we saw over a 30% increase in our request last year from the previous year, 3,000 more requests than usual. So increased demand, increased volume of records and, you know, finite resources, we need to figure out better ways to work and meet the needs of requesters and our community. So the other point here is upon conclusion, the participant shared and applied, acquired knowledge and participated in a joint program to debrief both agencies. So I'll give you an example when our FBI exchange colleague came over here. We had a session with all of our FOIA professionals were invited to listen with a briefing about how does the FBI process FOIA requests. And that actually generated a lot of really good discussion about how are we doing things here at the State Department. Should we consider new ways and new models of measuring success, how we organize things, how cases get tasked, reviewed and so forth. And the point of the bullet here is at the very end of the program. What Mike and I had set up was an opportunity for the State Department, the FBI, FOIA offices and professionals to come in here from the two exchange participants, what they learned, what they observed. And from there we hope there are additional insights and opportunities for collaboration brainstorming and new ways not only to, for each agency to consider how they do FOIA, but how we also work together. And I think that was a really big takeaway too and I don't want to get too far ahead because I think that's next. So why don't we go to the next slide please. So the program benefits, I gently touched on some of these and I'm going to drill down a little bit more now on improved coordination. And so one of the takeaways from this program was our participants, but also not just the exchange participants who went to each agency, but the actual FOIA professionals were able to gain a better understanding of the challenges of the host agency perspective. And it's the whole concept of walk a mile on someone else's shoes. Why don't they respond faster? Why doesn't this happen? And there was some good feedback from everything from response times or things to consider or how to really make sure we're getting the information on cases that need to go from state to the FBI or the other way around to the right people in a timely manner to comply with FOIA itself, court deadlines or so forth. So really good collaboration of understanding the challenges and the challenges could be process-based technology and so forth. And then more importantly, looking for improvements moving forward. And after the exchange, Mike and I have spoken at least a couple of times on different areas where we can either collaborate and work better moving forward that have come out of this opportunity. In terms of improved coordination, while state and FBI were the first, the two agencies involved here, the benefits gained would very likely help many FOIA programs look who receive a large volume of requests or have to work with key partners regularly. And there are all types of different agencies collaborating and needing to work together on consultations and so forth. So if anyone's ever interested in hearing or your agency how this works, I know be happy to talk about our perspective. And I'm sure Mike would be willing as well from what they got out of the program and how we're going to do this moving forward. In terms of shared best practices, again, it wasn't just here's a presentation on how we do case processing at the State Department. Here's how they do it at the FBI. There were a lot of different opportunities for collaboration among dozens of FOIA professionals to interact with the FBI exchange participant who came here and then the other way around. And getting that outside feedback and perspective is useful. But then what do you do after you have that information? How do you actually implement something different? And I can tell that our FOIA office has taken the feedback seriously we've received and started thinking about how can we make some changes to better keep up with the demand and pace of requests and volume of information that we're seeing. And then the enhanced relationships. Before this, it would be very clear we had a very good relationship with the FBI via our FOIA program already. But I think there's this deep in that relationship and not just between me and Mike working together, but our employees, our office is making sure you reach out, empowering employees to meet one another, work together, collaborate, and understand how your processing request may be a little bit different than how another agency is doing so. And that's okay, but to give feedback, to collaborate, to come up with ideas, to innovate and to find out the best possible way moving forward, especially in this hybrid environment, where some people are in the office, some are at home, some are a mix of both, and how do we keep things moving forward? And that's going to be through, I believe, career enhancing opportunities like this one where we went out and asked who's interested in participating, who wants to do this, who wants to be part of an exchange, and then maybe looking in the future, not just in-person exchanges, but virtual ones, a mix, and adding other agencies and so forth. So there's a whole lot of potential for what we've done here, and I highly encourage agencies to consider looking at similar programs, and you've heard a little bit today about career development for FOIA professionals, retention, how do we recruit additional employees, not just new folks to do FOIA, but also how do we make meaningful careers for FOIA professionals who want to stay and work in records management, transparency, FOIA, and the different areas that we are committed to here. And so with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Mike here for enriched development opportunities. Thank you, Eric. So on the developmental opportunity points, I can't really underestimate the value that each participant gained from this experience, especially in terms of the depth of the experience that one month of immersion that Eric referred to, the breadth of that immersion, and really unique opportunities to develop contacts and deep and professional relationships that occurred. So in terms of depth, what was really unique about the program is that participants, and this happened on both ends with both agencies, that participant really in terms of hierarchy interacted from the rank and file, all the way up to executive management of both agencies and everyone in between. So a lot of depth of hearing about FOIA programs from different perspectives and from different levels of work and management. Eric touched on the breadth a little bit. So here at FBI, the Department of State participant did a round robin, shadowing of all their functional areas to include initial processing, FOIA processing, our national security unit, which does classification, et cetera. And what was unique about that round robin shadowing exchange, it really wasn't a series of briefings. An exchange actually did take place where it might have started as a briefing, but then the participant from the other agency would begin asking questions. And it became an exchange of information. And I got some really positive feedback here from the folks here at the FBI that, well, jeez, we were asked some really tough questions, questions that we didn't expect. And to my point earlier, well, that caused us to do some healthy agencies, self-reflection on, is this the right practice for us? Or maybe we should continue doing it other way. So it truly was a breath of the exchange in terms of the functional areas. And finally, the program really created some unique opportunities for one-in-one engagement for those participants. Those are opportunities that would not have otherwise happened. So the very fact that those participants were immersed at those other agencies and present naturally created opportunities to make those contacts and have those unique one-in-one interactions that really underpinned the success of the program. So I think that's about it. Unless you have anything else, Eric, I think that wraps up our overview. I do. I mean, I just wanted to say again, thank you to Mike, the FBI, and also, you know, very publicly here. It's everyone in our FOIA office who helped us make this such a great experience. And I know everyone was juggling a lot and take on an additional shadowing program that was a new thing. It was something that hadn't been done before, at least in recent years. And that could be coming out of the pandemic to be doing this and figure out, but it's actually a great opportunity to really evaluate what are we doing, what can be done better. And as you heard from both the Tech Committee and CoCACI, we're really looking at how do we make FOIA work moving forward. And partnerships are really a part of this in terms of understanding who to reach out to or how to collaborate. And this was something new and I think a first step and hopefully it was going to be a longer journey of opportunities for our career enhancement and just in general, raise awareness of the larger FOIA community among agencies. And so with that, I don't know, Bobby and Alina, if there are any questions. But again, thank you again for the opportunity to present on this specific program today. Actually, Martha tells me there is one question from one of our federal colleagues. Martha, do you want to go ahead? Sure. Our federal colleague wanted to know why was the exchange program limited to just the two agencies, taking into consideration the fact that other agencies process records having equities from them. Are there opportunities for other agencies to participate in the future? Mike, you want to go first? Sure, Eric. Well, the short answer is you have to start somewhere. So this turned out as a bilateral collaborative endeavor that just, you know, just happened between Eric and I for our normal business coordination. And so we kind of talked about this idea and we're able to act upon it. So the short answer to the question, we have to begin somewhere. But as Eric referred to earlier, you know, building on the success that we experienced this program, you know, I see expansion in the future. I can't really talk to any details about that. But I'm seeing this as just the beginning and not an ending point. Eric, over to you. Yeah, absolutely. And just to build on the points that Mike raised and to see the question here too. Mike and I saw an opportunity. We went with it. And I think we've actually, if any agency is interested in setting up a similar type of exchange just between two agencies, please contact us. There were some growing pains, things we had to work through with any type of initial rollout of a program or an opportunity so you can learn from what went well and maybe some things we would do a little bit differently. And in terms of other agencies, both Mike and I have discussed this as maybe the start of something bigger in the future. We did want to get it to scale. We wanted to see how it worked the first time, but definitely open to ideas. So again, encourage you to reach out to OIP OGIS or contact us directly, however feedback comes in. And other agencies have contacted me or in the series of work that I do with other agencies have expressed interest in a similar type of exchange. And it really does become a resource issue. As you heard today in the previous presentation from CDC about we're down resources. We're down people. I think sometimes it becomes we really want to send people in these opportunities but we also have to balance out the demands of the program. So timing becomes a challenge as well. But we pushed on, we pushed forward and we'd love to see additional collaboration. I know for our FOIA office here, but also probably collaborating with our partners to make sure that we could build the best possible programs for the needs of where we are right now at this moment in time and onward. Okay, great. Thank you. Thanks for all of that, Eric and Mike. Martha, anything else? Not about the specific topic. No. Okay, great. Well, thank you again. Both of you, we really appreciate your presentation. You were to be admired. Actually, I'm in awe that you've started this program. I think it's great. I feel a little responsible for introducing the two of you. I'm just going to take a little responsibility. You know, I am a matchmaker in my spare time. So I feel like this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship that will grow and prosper. So thank you. All right. Bobby, over to you. Great. Thank you. And I want to thank Eric and Michael as well. It's such a great example of collaboration. And I think this is, you know, this is a great opportunity here at the CFL council meetings to compare notes. And this is something that other agencies with similar as Eric and Mike said, and they can be a resource that other agencies with similar relationships could replicate. But with that, I think since we have no other questions from our front within our council, we've reached the end of our planned agenda. We can open it up for public comments. We did promise to leave some time for that. We have a lot of time for public comments. We look forward to hearing from any members of the public who have any comments or would like to share any thoughts on the work that we're doing. Your feedback is really important to us. I also want to remind everyone that you may also submit written comments. Please email them to CFO-Councilatnara.gov. Any oral comments will be captured in the transcript of the meeting, which will be posted as soon as it is available. Elena? Thanks, Bobby. So we're going to open up our telephone lines to get us started. I also know we have some comments that my colleague Martha Murphy will be reading out loud, but let's start with telephone lines. So Michelle, our band producer, could you please give instructions to our listeners for how to ask a question via telephone? Absolutely. So ladies and gentlemen, as we enter the public comment session, please limit your comments to three minutes. Once your three minutes expires, we will mute your line and move on to the next commenter. Each individual will be limited to three minutes each. As a reminder to ask a question via WebEx Audio, please click the raise hand icon, which is above your chat window to the right. And if you are connected to today's webinar via phone audio, please dial pound two on your telephone keypad to join the comment queue. Michelle, thank you for all of that. Anyone raising their hand or anyone waiting to be called? Yes. Okay, I'll let you take over, Michelle. We'll go ahead. Call it. Your line is unmuted. You may go ahead with your comment. Your line is unmuted. Make sure you unmute your device. You may go ahead with your comment. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to make this public comment and possibly if I can be answered, that would be great. I'm Glen Ellen, Virginia, and we deal a lot with public agency, which is school, public education and health department for rehabilitation. So anytime when we make a request which our families are entitled to as an equity, as they would be provided information as part of their program, the agencies place barriers by forwarding a request that should be normally available to all students or all people receiving services and the forward it to FOIA and then the demand money. And they also do a toll on time, which are often sensitive to the matter and decision making. And I feel that is abuse of the system and the FOIA. So people may have different kind of experiences, but our experiences that the FOIA is always told is a way of tolling the request which are available. So we would like to know, I would like to know how we can report those. And the second issue is when agencies, public agencies are dealing or when they're interacting with the laws and regulations and their rights as a safeguard, I feel it would be appropriate for every FOIA information update to be provided to the parent how they can, what are the things that they can FOIA, what are the things they should not FOIA because that's available without processing FOIA. And it does not make sense for FOIA to be FOIA. So that is our challenges and FOIA where it should be a blessing, where it should be a wheel to work things for more deeper information on government agencies. And then the process, it's often used to place it as a barrier. And I feel that's unfortunate. Thank you. Caller, can I please ask for you to identify your name and what organization you're associated with? Absolutely. I'm an advocate parent, advocate for a special education. My name is Zara Lakani. I'm in Glen Island, Virginia, 804-869-7536. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. I do think it sounded like a lot of the issues that you're dealing with dealt with the state and local FOIA access laws. And this federal council is focused on the federal FOIA. So we wouldn't have as much familiarity with that. But some of the issues that you did identify are things that we do try to make sure that the federal and applying the federal FOIA that are addressed, such as not having bureaucratic hurdles and having clear messages of what can be requested and how you can get records. But I want to thank you for your comments. All right. We are moving to the next comment to include. Alexander Howard, you may go ahead. Thank you so much for the opportunity to comment. I was just thinking back that I was present at the first meeting at the council in 2016 when FOIA officers had lots of questions about what was coming down the pike. Specifically back then about the release to one release to all policy that was being piloted at the time at the president's direction by the Department of Justice. I'm curious, is the office of management and budgets deputy director of management present today at the council? Okay. I would like to hear about that. I would ask why OMB ended its cross agency priority goal on FOIA when that happened? And if the director would consider restoring it, why or why not? I'd ask why OMB hasn't issued guidance on open data as mandated by the Open Government Data Act 2018 and provided support to agencies implementation including all the FOIA units, which I presume would love to get more assistance technically with disclosing databases in open machine-readable formats as mandated by that law. And I'd also like to hear more about how OMB is supporting OIP on improving FOIA.gov and what the status of agency interoperability with FOIA.gov is pursuant to memorandum of 2019. I'd very much like to hear, of course, about the status of the release to one release to all policy at OIP, which I've been asking Bobby or his predecessor about since 2016. Why hasn't DOJ promulgated a policy since then? Particularly given AG Garland's memo on proactive disclosure. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to ask questions. I wish we had more of an opportunity for back and forth in person and in public. I would certainly have stood up and asked for why there wasn't more information on the council subcommittee's websites for collaboration innovation or technology, particularly since I'm on the advisory committee at NARA and we do not want to duplicate your work, but we have very little insight into it, nor does the request or community or general members of the public because your new website only has charters. So thank you for the opportunity to talk and I look forward to your answers. All right, thanks, Alex. Bobby, do you want to take this one? Yeah, I can address a few of the things. As far as the CFO council website, we're endeavoring to have as transparent as possible and put a lot as much of us work very similar to the FACA. And so if there's not a charter up already, it's because we're still working on it and the teams are finalizing it. And there are things on the website beyond the charters because as we've done any kind of work product, such as draft white papers or so forth, those have been put on, of course, the vendor day, all the material from that. So we've endeavored to be very, very transparent and want to share those materials. And of course, Alina and I, and even serve on both the council and the committee. And so we're aware of and try to make sure that there is no duplicate efforts. And we also have another member, Borca, who's on both as well. But in the past, the committees has met with the council. So I think there's been a great working relationship between the two. And also that the council has been very transparent in its work. OMB has been very supportive of our work on 40.gov. As far as the status of interoperability, I don't have the numbers right now in front of me, but the majority of agencies are interoperable. But we have included this as a specific question in the chief FOIA officer report, which we're going to assess agencies. So we'll have specifically which agencies are fully compliant and which ones are not as part of the CFO reporting. And then my response to the release to one release all is the status is the same. Thanks, Papi. Michelle, any other callers? Yes, we do have a couple of callers on the audio line. So Kola, your line is being unmuted. You may go ahead with your three-minute comment. Yes, this is Bob Hammond. Thank you, great stuff. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Okay. Well, I'll keep calling back after my three minutes are up. My first topic is the foreseeable harm standard. See my two public comment briefings, which I sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland. The FOIA statute DOJ policy and case law require defendants to clearly articulate what the harm is for any withholding or redaction. And it cannot be speculative. This is extremely important because DOJ, OIP's website states that DOJ will not defend cases where no foreseeable harm is articulated. And Attorney General Merrick Garland via this. My ongoing case, Hammond DOD 16-421-CV in the District Court of Columbia is a perfect example. DOJ, United States Associate Attorney General Benita Gupta must review this. DOJ must recuse from future litigation filings, but not mediation. DOJ combined eight disparate 2014 FOIA requests in one appellate denial, where DOJ did not articulate any basis for withholding the six of the eight requests, let alone any foreseeable harm. Then DOJ withheld under exemption five, deliberative process, anti-season records of Walter Reed National Military Medical Centers, FY 2013 annual FOIA report submission and raw data to Navy ViewMed. That's ViewMed, B-U-M-E-D, without articulating any foreseeable harm nor could they. Then during litigation, DOD through DOJ added B-6 privacy and withholding a 17-page Walter Reed FY 2013 FOIA law. After withdrawing withholding an entirety under B-5, DOD through DOJ released a 16-page log with the FOIA author admits to offering during litigation that does not comport with the 17-page log cited in the Vaughan Index. That's Vaughan V-A-U-G-H-N. In addition to B-6 with DOD through DOJ, falsely states only pertains for seeking their own medical records. The materially altered law contains redactions under B-4, B-5, and B-7, never cited in any Vaughan Index or defended in litigation, let alone not having articulated any foreseeable harm. Apart from no foreseeable harm, DOJ can no longer participate in this conduct that includes admitted operation of records during litigation, admitted destruction of records after being advised multiple times to preserve them for judicial review, admitted unknown materially false FOIA author decorations, statement that DOD's agency counsel provided records in an email to my former counsel when the exhibit of that email documents that is false. And DOD through DOJ continue to submit the same FOIA author decorations and false statements as to agency counsel's email multiple times despite knowing them to be false. DOJ cannot continue to defend and must recuse in future litigation files. Thank you for your three-minute comment. Your time half expired. Thank you very much for your comment. We are moving to the next comment to NQ on the audio line. Caller, please go ahead. Your line is unmuted. You may make your three-minute comment. Yes, this is Bob Hammond again continuing. Then Department of Navy Bumet initially lied in stating that Walter Reed had not submitted any FY2000 FOIA reports or raw data, which Bumet walked back outside of litigation in response to a narrow unauthorized disposition inquiry where DOD states Bumet received Walter Reed's FY 2013 report submission subject to my April 1, 2014 FOIA request, but did not retain it. I believe that most FOIA professionals just want to do a good job without interference from management or agency lawyers. I do not believe that Bumet's FOIA author, Della Garcia, is responsible for the apparent false official statement that Bumet did not receive Walter Reed's FY 2013 FOIA report submission, nor for DOD's claim to NARA that Bumet destroyed it. I believe those records still exist and that Della did not destroy them. You may not know that lawyers defending their clients are exempt from false official statement statutes. They're allowed to lie. But that is not the case for a FOIA officer who gets hung out to dry, improvably proven materially false decorations that may have been drafted or edited by others. I'm not a lawyer, but attorney protections may not pertain to subordination of knowingly material false decorations, entering awful records into evidence, and materially false statements where the attorney is the subject of the statement, e.g. agency counsel's false email claim. My second topic is disestablishment of FOIA online preservation of records and agency replacement plans. See my public comments, Preserve FOIA online records plus D-SERVIFOIA.gov. It addresses Preserve FOIA online unique case processing records, D-SERVIFOIA.gov application and its data, audit NARA FOIA processing and reporting, and post FOIA contemporaneous processing logs. The FOIA advisory committee has recommended this twice. It's been approved, priced, yet OGIS and DOJ continue to misrepresent that and have taken no action to implement it. There have not been any public discussions of FOIA online going away, particularly preservation of the more than 200 data elements in FOIA online that comprise unique FOIA case processing records, not duplicated elsewhere. In utter folly, NARA does not know what a federal record is that is subject to FOIA and claims they don't have to produce or preserve FOIA online records. From NARA's own website, a federal record as defined in 44 U.S.C. 3301 includes all books, records, papers, maps, photographs, machine readable materials, or other documenting materials regardless of physical form or characteristics made or received by an agency of the United States government. And if you read further on NARA's website, they refer to USC 36, which is NARA's own CFR. Thank you. All right. Thank you. That was Mr. Hammond again. He managed to circumvent our three-minute rule per commenter, Mr. Hammond. We would appreciate if you would refrain from doing that in the future for trying to make sure we give equal opportunity. Bobby, anything you want to respond to? And I believe we had a request from Alex Howard to confirm or deny if there was an OMB official present today. Alex, there is no OMB official attending this meeting today that I'm aware of. Michelle, do we have any other callers? I do not see any additional callers on the line. Okay. Bobby, any other comments or responses to anything that's been said so far? No, I don't think so. I have just a reminder that this isn't the forum to talk about specific cases or specific requests, which is why I'm not responding. Thank you. I'm going to turn to Martha now. Martha, are there any questions that you would like to read out loud from the WebEx chat? Yes, Lena. We've got a few questions. I'm going to start with another one that came from Alex Howard. And this deals with FOIA online. Has every agency transitioning from FOIAonline.gov informed all of their requesters? When and how? And does every agency transitioning from FOIAonline.gov have a notice posted for requesters? So what I can say is that actually both Lena and I have been in many different ways trying to help the agencies transitioning off FOIAonline do so seamlessly. Of course, we had the vendor day, but agencies should and usually do notify when they're transitioning their request or community, both on the... They would do it on the FOIAonline platform and also on their own platform so that everyone has a proper notice on how to make a request and what to expect. I just want to add that we're hopeful that there'll be more information about the FOIAonline sunsetting process early in 2023. So we hope that we can actually discuss that at our next Chief FOIAofficer Council meeting. Great. Another comment from Mr. Hammond. He wanted to say that he promotes line items for FOIA in every agency budget, detailing how that funding would be used, for example, to decrease backlogs, acquire information technology, potentially increase grade structure, professional training and certification and career path enrichment. Not sure if we want to comment on that one. I appreciate Mr. Hammond's comments and obviously this is actually a subject that both the FOIA Council and the FACA are looking into as far as resources. Great. From Frank Fan, when will interagency consultations and referral requests be available via OneDrive? I thought this might be something that someone on the Technology Committee may want to discuss or address. We're happy to take that. And, Frank, we can take that as a topic of discussion for the Technology Committee to look into a practical issue and maybe there's some best practices out there. I think the core issue being raised here is how do we find a better way to collaborate and work with one another instead of just emailing records to one another but rather via collaborative platforms and so forth. It is something we've discussed in passing but haven't devoted much time to. It's not to say we can't and we have a meeting coming up this month and we'll raise it there, so thank you. Thanks so much, Eric. Alexander Howard followed up a little on the question regarding FOIA online. He wants to know how many agencies transitioning have posted this on their FOIA web pages and how many have emailed their requesters. I'm not sure we have any answer to that question. We do not at this time, but, again, we're hopeful we'll be able to supply more information in the coming months. Another question from Mr. Hannon. Will DOJ require agencies to certify that their data is true and accurate and complete to the best of their knowledge or in the alternative that they know it is not accurate? If not, why not? So, in the actually the first section of the ANO4 report handbook, there's a subsection specifically on data quality and the importance of that and that agencies are ultimately responsible to ensure that their data is accurate and complete once they're in the ANO4 report and so that is the agency responsibility clearly laid out in the requirements but we also, of course, go through a rigorous progress with a process with the agencies that over the years we've been able to automate somewhat to compare the data against itself and against other years reports to help with the validation and so through the agency's commitment and submitting a complete report on work together, we work to provide the most accurate ANO4 report that we can at that time. Sounds great. Mr. Hammond asked how he could participate in working groups as a private citizen given as well that he is a former Fed. Can he participate in the groups? So, unfortunately, the working groups for the Technology Committee and the subcommittees of the Kokaki are limited to FOIA professionals in the federal government currently. However, we have certainly advertised and will continue to advertise many opportunities for members of the public such as Mr. Hammond to participate by providing comments, sending them to the emails that we provide it previously and we're happy to receive any comments and we have certainly posted numerous comments from Mr. Hammond on Yorja's website. Bobby, anything you want to add to that? No, that's exactly right. Well, that's a good spot on. So, there's a lot to go through and I'm trying to sort of weed through the ones that we can address here today. That's, those are the sort of the big topics that we've come up with so far. I think that's all we've got for now. Okay. All right. Thanks, Martha. So, Bobby, I think we're going to give folks back the gift of time. It's always nice to be able to do that, right, as we try to wrap up. I just want to put a plug in again for volunteers from our FOIA colleagues for the FOIA Business Standards Working Group. And again, please get in touch with Lindsay Steele. I'm sorry that I got that wrong, Lindsay. You can reach out to doj.oip.foia at usdoj.gov. We're definitely looking for volunteers for that working group. We're not going to form a separate committee, but we are going to host a working group as part of the council. And we definitely appreciate volunteers for that. And again, I'm just going to make a plug. Bobby made it earlier. And so did our committee co-chairs. If anyone is interested in volunteering either for the technology committee or the co-cackey, they're always welcoming new members. And it is a great opportunity to network with your fellow FOIA professionals. So we definitely want to encourage that. Bobby, any other closing remarks? Thanks, Alina. And thanks to everyone who joined us today, both agencies and members of the public for a great meeting. Special thanks to our presenters. We had really great presentations from the two committees, as well as our agency colleagues at CDC, State and FBI. I think it was really helpful and really enjoyed their presentations. And then just to echo Alina and please reach out to us as many different volunteer options came up during the meeting. Please reach out to us if you're interested in any of those. And also we would love to continue to do agency spotlight. So if there's something that you would like to present and showcase of your agencies for the benefit of your agency colleagues or some or innovation or successful strategy you have, we would love to showcase you at the next G-4 officer council meeting. Hopefully this coming spring. Well, we don't have a date for that next council meeting. We will definitely start advertising as soon as we've nailed down a date. So we definitely hope you'll be joining us again in the spring. In the meantime, I hope everyone in their families remain safe, healthy and resilient. And again, I want to also voice my appreciation to the presenters today. It was a great program and we hope that there will be a lot of notice coming up. Take care everyone. Thank you everyone. Take care. That concludes our conference. Thank you for using event services. You may now disconnect.