 Your line is now unmuted. Welcome, and thank you for joining today's chief FOIA officer, Comple Meeting. Before we begin, please ensure you've opened the WebEx participant and chat panel using the associated icons located at the bottom of your screen. If you require technical assistance, please send a text to the event producer. Please note that all audio connections are muted at this time. You all have a welcome to submit written questions throughout today's presentation. To submit a written question, click all panelists from the drop-down menu in the chat panel and to your question in the message box provided and send. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. With that, I'm going to turn things over to Alina Simo, Director of Office of Government Information Services. Please go ahead. Thanks, Teagan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our second virtual chief FOIA officer's Council Meeting, and perhaps not our last. I hope everyone has been staying healthy, safe, and well. I am Alina Simo, Director of the Office of Government Information Services and Co-Chair of the Council. Let me introduce my Co-Chair, Bobby Toledian, Director of the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice. Bobby. Thank you so much, Alina, and thank you all for joining us. We're looking forward to a great agenda and meeting today. We do have a full agenda today. In a minute, you will hear welcoming remarks from Archivists of the United States, David Ferriero. Bobby and I will provide an overview of the Chief FOIA Officer's Landscape for new CFOs that are joining us for the first time today. That will be followed by some updates from both OIP and SIS. You will next hear from the Council's two committees of the Technology Committee and the Committee on Cross-Agency Collaboration and Innovation. You will want to stay tuned in for a presentation from the Chair and Vice-Chair of the Chief Data Officers Council. We are excited to have them join us later this morning. 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. We are also simultaneously live-streaming today's meeting on the NARA YouTube channel, and we will be monitoring the chat functions both on WebEx and YouTube, so please chat any questions you may have. We have reserved time at the end of today's session for public comments. We will be opening the telephone lines at the end of our meeting for the last 15 minutes for any oral questions or comments from the public. We are monitoring the chat on WebEx and the NARA YouTube channel. We will read out loud any substantive questions or comments we receive from the public. At this time, I would like to introduce Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero. Thank you, Alina. Welcome to, from 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, where we would ordinarily be meeting, and I very much look forward to the day when we will actually welcome you back to this building. The National Archives is a shrine to American democracy and plays an important role in the Freedom of Information Act landscape. The National Archives is home to both the Federal FOIA Ombudsman Office, OGIS, and to the Office of the Chief Records Officer of the United States Government. As senior officials tasked with ensuring agency FOIA compliance, you know firsthand the crucial link between an excellent records management program and an efficient responsive FOIA program. April 13th marked the 106th birthday of the late U.S. Representative John Moss of California, who worked for six congressional sessions, 12 years, to get the original FOIA through Congress. In urging his House colleagues to vote for the measure in 1966, Representative Moss said, we must remove every barrier to information about an understanding of government activities consistent with our security if the American public is to be adequately equipped to fulfill the ever more demanding role of responsible citizenship. 65 years later, FOIA continues to play a role in helping Americans fulfill what Representative Moss called the demanding role of responsible citizenship, though it is important to note that one need not be a citizen to file a FOIA request. In fiscal year 2020, requesters submitted more than 790,000 FOIA requests to federal departments and agencies. Fulfilling these requests becomes more and more challenging as the amount of government information and data swells. Last summer, one of the four federal advisory committees here at the National Archives, the FOIA advisory committee delivered to me 22 recommendations for improving FOIA administration. Two of those recommendations are directed at the Chief FOIA Officers Council. I'm pleased that the council has already established a committee on cross-agency collaboration and innovation, and I look forward to learning more about its agenda in the coming year, as well as the work of the technology committee. Many of you have not been back in your offices since early March 2020. The last year has challenged all of us, but has also created opportunities to look at new ways of doing things. And I hope today's meeting sparks thought about opportunities for finding innovative ways to administer FOIA. As we enter our second year of basically distancing ourselves from one another, please continue to take care and stay safe. And I now turn the meeting back to Alina. David, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Tegan, next slide, please. At this time, Bobby and I would like to spend a few minutes providing an overview of the CFO landscape and CFO council. Bobby, over to you. Oh. Bobby, I think you're muted. Please limit yourself. I was just saying, can we go to the next slide, please? Thank you. Good morning again. And so Alina and I, we thought since we have so many new CFOs joining us, we're looking forward to, I'm looking forward to meeting our new CFOs and also thanking our veteran CFOs for joining us for today's meeting, that we would take this opportunity to just briefly review the role, the important roles of the Chief FOIA officer and the Chief FOIA officer council. The role of the CFO actually was first established by an executive order, but then later codified in the FOIA by the Open Government Act of 2007. And the FOIA specifically requires that each agency designate a Chief FOIA officer who should be at the senior official, it should be a senior official at the assistant secretary or equivalent level. Over the years, we have certainly seen the importance of this role and how critical it is in agency success and administering all aspects of the FOIA from proactive disclosures to responding to requests. And in 2019, the Department of Justice issued a memo asking agencies to review their Chief FOIA officer position to ensure that it is at the appropriate level. And so we then followed that up by asking agencies to regularly review that position in their Chief FOIA officer reports. Next slide. The FOIA has specific responsibilities that it provides for the Chief FOIA officers. But overall, the Chief FOIA officer role is meant to be a senior official responsible for ensuring the overall effectiveness and efficiency of your FOIA programs. The responsibilities listed here on this slide are directly from the statute. But as you can see, essentially the CFO should be in a position where they are regularly able to monitor all aspects of the agency's FOIA administration and then provide either make changes or provide recommendations to the head of the agency to make adjustments in practices, policies, personnel and funding that may be necessary to ensure that you are continuing to improve your FOIA administration and also making sure that your agency is efficient and it's efficient and appropriately applying the law. Of course, we also look forward to working with the new Chief FOIA officers and continue to work with our veterans Chief FOIA officers here at the department. And each year agencies report to the Department of Justice. They're through their Chief FOIA officer report on five key areas of FOIA administration, implementing a presumption of openness, having effective systems for responding to requests, utilizing technology, continuing to increase proactive disclosures and improving efficiency and timeliness. So the next two slides I'm going to cover continue the many responsibilities of the Chief FOIA officers and by now I'm sure everyone is really exhausted. There's a lot to do. We are definitely aware that CFOs not only have a large number of responsibilities under the FOIA, but that CFOs also wear several other hats at your respective agencies. So we know there's a lot going on and you have a lot to juggle. But I wanted to highlight three bullets on this page. Training all agency staff, not only the FOIA personnel at your agency and reminding that FOIA is everyone's responsibility remains critical even today. And we do hope you will serve as our primary agency liaison with my office and Bobby's. But again, we understand you may need to delegate that so long as we know who that is. But please check in with us and we're here to help you. And we thank you for designating FOIA public liaisons. Requestors tell us having a good FOIA public liaison makes a world of difference. Next slide, please. So on this next slide, continuation of the CFO's responsibilities, most agencies FOIA regulations are up-to-date by now, but it is important to keep up with any changes that require updates to regulation and proactive disclosures is a topic that the CFO council has discussed in the past and that continues to be very important. And you'll be hearing about that at various points from us today. And of course, near and dear to my heart, dispute resolution services with OGIS or the FOIA public liaison, it remains very critical and a very important part of what OGIS does. Next slide, please. Of course, as members of the, as Chief FOIA officers, you are a member of the Chief FOIA officer council in our council meeting today. The council is formally structured to have Alina and I, the directors of OIT at the Department of Justice and the director of OGIS at National Archives, to be the co-chairs and comprises of the deputy director of management at OMB, as well as each agency chief FOIA officer that's joining us today. The FOIA also allows as co-chairs to design other employees or officials. While this is the formal construct of the Chief FOIA officer council, we could not have the success we've had with this council and across all of the initiative that we have without all the hard work of the FOIA officials that have joined us in these public meetings and have served in the committees and all the work that we're going to discuss today. Next slide. We have a few more specific responsibilities for the Chief FOIA officer council, and these are directly from the statute to develop recommendations for increasing compliance and efficiency, sharing best practices and innovative approaches to FOIA, identifying and developing initiatives to increase transparency and promoting common performance measures. All in all, these responsibilities just underscore the opportunity that we have here with the council and how leveraging, all of our experiences across 118 agencies across the government that are implementing the law to share best practices, learn from each other, cross collaborate and find new ways to both make sure that we are all meeting the core purpose of the FOIA and improving our administration of the FOIA for the large volumes of requests agencies are getting from year to year. So we look forward to talking a little bit about what we've done for these responsibilities and also building on this. Next slide. So this may be a little repetitive of what Bobby has already said, but the council is, again, a great opportunity for us to share updates from both OIP and OGIS and share best practices with each other and learn from each other. And also for the council committees, I'm very excited that we now have two committees to provide updates on their work. And as we will see later this morning, it's a great opportunity for us to collaborate with other federal councils. Today you will hear from the Chief Data Officers Council and we hope that in the future we'll have other councils come and join us as well and present about their work. Next slide, please. So I am excited to report that council now has stood up two committees for a couple of years, only one committee existed. They started out as the Technology Subcommittee and then we promoted them to a full committee. The committee on cross-agency collaboration and innovation is our newcomer and we are going to hear from them later today. You will hear from both sets of co-chairs actually today and we are very grateful for the work the co-chairs have already put in and we'll be putting in in the future. And please consider volunteering for one of the committees. You will be joining other FOIA colleagues who are passionate about improving the FOIA landscape overall. So you'll see contact information for the committee co-chairs later and don't be shy. Line up. Next slide, please. Bobby, over to you. Thank you. And then lastly, both OIP and OGIS serve as an important resource to agencies and so we wanted to highlight for our new CFOs some points about our office and the resources and how we can help with your agency. So OIP is responsible for encouraging the agency compliance with the FOIA in the department's FOIA guidelines as well as overseeing agency FOIA administration and we carry this mission out in a number of ways by issuing policy guidance on all aspects of FOIA administration holding workshops and sharing best practices providing training. Lina mentioned the chief FOIA officer is responsible for ensuring that agencies have sufficient training both for FOIA professionals and program personnel that are responsible for helping their agency implement the law. Here at the department of justice we provide established training for both FOIA and non-FOIA professionals but we also are available to come to you these days virtually and provide tailored training specific to your agency and your agency's needs. We also manage your agency's FOIA reporting obligations and provide legal advice on FOIA matters through our FOIA counselor service line. Next slide. A number of resources available on our website to you and all of our agency FOIA colleagues here on our website we have all of our FOIA policy guidance the department of justice guide to the FOIA which is a comprehensive legal trees on all aspects of the law from procedural requirements proactive disclosures to exemption applicability we regularly provide summaries of new court decisions so that agencies are up to date on the latest status of the law and all of this is on our FOIA website. You can also follow us on our FOIA blog post and for any new events training or any new events regarding FOIA we also have FOIA training resources on our website that you can use at your agency as well as a self-assessment toolkit for objectively looking at your agency's FOIA programs. Also we've managed which I'll get to a little bit later FOIA.gov which is the government central website for FOIA. Next slide back to you. Thanks Bobby. So this is the world of FOIA all in one slide while the concept of dispute resolution as a way to improve customer service and the FOIA process has been around for a number of years Congress embraced dispute resolution in the Open Government Act of 2007 and created OGIS with the passage of the Open Government Act of 2007 and at the time of the passage and since Congress has referred to us as the FOIA ombudsman we formally opened our doors in September 2009 and the statute gives us two very clear missions. First we are responsible for reviewing agencies FOIA policies and procedures and compliance with the FOIA statute and identifying procedures and methods for improving FOIA compliance. We do so in a variety of ways including targeted agency assessments, more general issue assessments through our work on the FOIA advisory committee which I chair and which I will discuss a bit later this morning and our work on this council the chief way after. I invite you to visit the compliance section of our website. There you will find the 14 agency specific assessments we have conducted so far as well as 8 issue assessments. Second, we are charged with providing mediation services to help resolve disputes between requesters and federal agencies as a non-exclusive alternative to litigation. Last year we received over 4,000 requests for assistance. The first thing to know about our dispute resolution program is that we do not dictate solutions or tell agencies they have to turn over records. Our mediation services are completely voluntary and we have had both agencies and requesters participate or decline to participate. Most often we act as a facilitator to help agencies and requesters better understand the issues and the other parties position. The statute specifically says our mediation services are a non-exclusive alternative to litigation. We try to prevent litigation by explaining the FOIA process, how the search was conducted or an explanation of records withheld under each of the exemptions. But there is nothing in the statute that prevents a requester from filing a suit after going through our process. Generally once a case is in litigation we are no longer involved. But a lot of times the explanations we provide help requesters get a better understanding of the agency's response. We also look to the agency to help us provide more detailed explanations. A number of requesters have told us that after they have worked with us they understand why the information was withheld or why the agency searched to not locate any records. So in short we believe OJIS does work. Other activities include outreach, regular meetings with our stakeholders, participating in a range of training and teaching activities. And I want to pause and just note that up until the pandemic we have been providing in-person training to help agency FOIA professionals prevent and resolve disputes without the need to involve OJIS. Our training program on dispute resolution skills for agency FOIA professionals was extremely well regarded and in high demand. However, the pandemic has caused us to retool and refocus our training and we are working to move our online virtual experience platform. We look forward to being able to roll that out in the not too distant future. Next slide, please. Please follow us through our regular blog post and our Twitter feed and visit our website which is listed here on the slide for more information. Next slide, please. So we're going to pause for a minute, Bobby, just to check in with Martha to see if we have any questions on the chat so far. No questions so far other than things that I have addressed in the chat. Terrific, thank you. So it sounds like everything is crystal clear. All right, Bobby, back over to you. Thank you, Elina. So we'll move on to the next item on our agenda if we go to the next slide. And so we wanted to provide, I wanted to provide some updates and some reminders of some recent work and upcoming initiatives. Next slide. First, as many of you know, we in last month agencies published all of their ANO4 report data as well as their two 4 Oscar reports. As you can see here, all of the data has been uploaded to the 4A.gov and as you can see here, just as far as number requests receiving projects government-wide, agencies are still receiving over 700,000 requests received in process. We did have a little bit of a dip there, but as illustrated in a lot of the chief 4 Oscar reports can be a lot of factors contributing to that including the pandemic. Next slide. So some upcoming reminders of 4A reporting first. I wanted to thank all the agencies and agency officials who have been working on their ANO4 report for this past year and their chief 4 Oscar report. Especially the ANO4 report I know is a large undertaking for a lot of agencies to validate and clear that data. And so we thank all the agencies who worked on their data last year and were able to timely provide their reports to the public so that we could load them on 4A.gov. We look forward to, as in prior years, issuing a summary of government-wide ANO4 report data very soon. This summer we will be issuing our annual summary and assessment of agencies 2021 chief 4 Oscar reports and issuing any guidance based off the results of those reports. So please stay tuned for that. Also, this summer we will provide agencies with new reporting guidelines for the 2022 chief 4 Oscar reports. All of this will be published on our FOIA blog post and on our website. So please follow our FOIA post for notices about these events. Next slide. Of course, we continue to work on FOIA.gov the central website for the public for the federal government's FOIA administration just to brief recap, 2011 we launched FOIA.gov as an open government initiative to serve as a dashboard for your agency's ANO4 report data so that the public and agencies could easily review the ANO4 report data in open formats and in ways that they could compare your data over time in the cost agencies. We quickly built on that to make sure that FOIA.gov serves as more than just a dashboard but a central resource for the public to not only learn about your agency's FOIA operations through your ANO4 report data but also more important to learn about the FOIA process have a place where they could search for records that have been posted that might help either meet their records request needs or find the right agency to make the request and also to have well in 2018 then we launched the national FOIA portal on FOIA.gov which added the functionality allowing requesters to not only have access to significant information and resources about each agency's FOIA administration but have the ability to be able to make a request to any agency through this one single site. In 2019 in order to achieve that goal DOJ and OMB issued guidance for achieving interoperability with the national FOIA portal and that directive requires that agencies unless provided an exception by the end of this fiscal year become fully interoperable with the FOIA. Next slide. So we have been working directly with your agencies to ensure that you're on the path to be able to become interoperable but as a reminder there's two forms of interoperability with the national FOIA portal if your agency has an automated case management system you're required to work to implement the FOIA.gov API so that the requests that are made through FOIA.gov to your agency are directly ingested into your case management system. Agencies with non-automated solutions primarily those agencies with very small numbers of requests are required to achieve full interoperability by being able to accept from FOIA.gov a structured email that provides the request. As I mentioned the directive requires that agencies become interoperable with either of these approaches by the end of this fiscal year and we'll continue to work with and communicating with agencies to make sure you can meet this requirement. I encourage you to pre-reach out to us if you have any questions or any issues arise as you're working to achieve interoperability. Next slide. We've also been working on enhancing and building on our work on the site on different pages of the site. Specifically earlier this year we launched a new redesigned an update to the interoperable using direct user feedback. Now it's much more streamlined and combines all the functionality in a much more intuitive way where you can make basic reports on your agency's data but also more advanced reports as well comparing multiple agencies against each other or filtering the data that you want per agency. Next slide. We highlighted this at the last Chief Four Officer Council meeting but we're also very excited to continue our work with GSA 10x team in working to find us a solution that helps improve the searchability of the records posted in your agencies for libraries. So essentially allowing requesters to be able to search across all agencies for libraries for information that is already posted online to help meet their, proactively meet their records request needs to potentially be able to help identify the correct agency where they may want to make up the request or also to help them maybe make a more targeted request based off the information that's already proactively disclosed. We're excited to just have launched now into our Phase Two of this project with the 10x team which will be a much more robust discovery phase and will include a lot of opportunity for us to engage with both the public, requesters and agencies in giving direct user feedback on what this could look like and what would be the most helpful and efficient effective way for us to develop this solution. Next slide. We're also looking forward to now soon as the next project updating the quarterly report data page similar to the four report data page to make it more streamlined and also to make it easier for agencies to provide the data directly through their 4a.gov account. Now that we're coming to a phase where agencies are becoming interoperable with 4a.gov we're also taking a fresh look at a discovery of additional functionality that would make this site more robust and more efficient and more effective for both requesters and agencies. Both for the 10x and our additional discovery we're looking forward to meeting with you hearing your needs and discussing potential solutions and impacts on your 4a.gov as well as meeting with requesters and the public. We'll be reaching out but if you have a specific interest in working on these projects with us this is a great opportunity for us to be able to hear from you directly what could be helpful and implement into our process your agency specific needs. So please reach out to us at OIP if you are interested in being a part of any of these projects on 4a.gov. Next slide. We're also still working and planning on updating our 4a.gov toolkit new modules to come on proactive disclosures in the administrative appeal process and technology into each of the modules as well as providing a new format so that it's even easier for you to use the assessment where you can have where there will be a fillable version where it auto-populates information and it's much easier for agencies to use the toolkit. Next slide. And of course lastly I wanted to highlight recently just this past March had a new Supreme Court decision on exemption 5 and as you all know exemption 5 incorporates into the FOIA the civil discovery privileges and it has two requirements, a threshold requirement that information be intra-interagency as well as for there to be a civil discovery privilege that applies. Here the court focused on the deliver process privilege and whether which applies when information is pre-decisional and deliberative the court's decision focus is on the pre-decisional element and not to get too much into it with the time that we have today but we are going to issue guidance on the impact of this, the court's decision and that will be coming up soon so stay tuned for that as well. Next slide. With that I'll just pause to see if there are any questions. There's no questions on the chat yet. We obviously have a very quiet audience today Bobby. That's all right. We'll have the time at the end too for any questions so if anyone has any questions on anything we've kind of gone through please feel free to chime in at any time. With that I will hand it over to Alina. Thank you. Next slide please. Okay. So my turn to give some updates to everyone listening with joining us today. Some OJIS updates. Next slide please. So one of several ways that OJIS tries to improve the administration of FOIA is through our work on the FOIA advisory committee which I chair. The OIP director, Bobby most recently has been a continuous member of that committee. The committee brings together members of the FOIA community from inside and outside of government to collaboratively identify the greatest challenges in the administration of FOIA and develop recommendations for the archivist of the United States. There have been three complete terms of the committee thus far 2014 to 2016, 2016 to 2018, 2018 to 2020. We get the idea every two years. The current committee term 2020 through 2022 is in full swing and four subcommittees have been working hard legislation, process, classification classification and technology. They're all actively engaged and meeting on a regular basis. We have created a terrific recommendations dashboard in order to keep track of the great work the committee has done since its inception in 2014. I have included the link here. My thanks to my wonderful staff in OJIS. I'm going to give a shout out to our compliance team in particular. We have the compliance team lead and Crystal Lemelan, compliance team member who has really been working hard on this dashboard and also keeping it up because that's part of the battle here. Next slide, please. As of today, the committee has made a total of 30 recommendations to the archivist and we have advanced over 35 best practices. They cover a broad range of topics in general design to improve the FOIA process and access to government documents. Here, we have groups sent by general category. This is the snapshot from our website. You can view all of this information and more. Next slide, please. As you can see from this graph, we consider six of the recommendations completed, 19 are in progress and five are pending. In other words, about those five that are pending we have ideas about their only so many hours in a day. I want to address five of the 19 recommendations that are already in progress. Here at the National Archives, the pandemic has affected us as dramatically as at other federal agencies but because a number of National Archives employees deal directly with members of the public at research rooms, museums, presidential libraries, they've had to retool during remote only work. Now, our employees have been redeployed to other important projects that can be accomplished remotely and OGIS in particular has been lucky enough to be able to draw the interest of five different NARA employees who are assisting with five of the committee's recommendation. Three assessments and two training projects. I'm just going to list them very quickly. Recommendation number 2020-01 through the first recommendation of the 2018-2020 term assessment and information agencies publish on their FOIA websites to help professors with the FOIA filing process. This project will build on results of NARA's records management self-assessment that we conducted in early 2020 by assessing compliance against guidance from OIP and this project will inform further guidance on how agencies can improve online descriptions of the FOIA process that will be forthcoming from OIP at a later date. The second assessment is an annual performance plan view for 15 cabinet level departments and 103, I understand now maybe there's 104 independent agencies to see if these annual performance plans mentioned the FOIA. This project seeks a review of all of these annual performance plans and follow-up to be expected with a handful of agencies that do include FOIAs in their performance plan to assist OGIS in possible recommendations to the legislative and executive branches. This is recommendation number 7 from the last term. The third assessment is to help identify ways from federal agencies used to allow access to common categories of first-party records without requiring a request under the FOIA and privacy app. I will also mention that the current committee term is also looking at this as well and is hard at work. But we're getting started and building on the results of the 2021 Chief Boy Officer reports that you mentioned earlier, which asked agencies to provide description of the types of first-party requests that they receive and whether agency officials have explored establishing alternate means of access to those records outside the FOIA process. So we will be looking to those results. This is recommendation number 14. And there are two training models that we're going to be working on in collaboration with our Chief Records Officers Training Office, and we're very thankful for their help. And also in close collaboration with OIP. The first one is the development of briefings for senior leaders during transition to administration, or any change in senior leadership that happens from time to time to provide an understanding of FOIA resources, obligations, and expectations, as well as records management. Opportunities exist for at a glance resources for new Chief Boy Officers, as well as senior agency officials for records management, S-A-R-O-M, as we like to fondly refer to them, as well as political appointees. This is recommendation number 6. The second training module is a development of targeted training in federal records management for FOIA officers and FOIA professionals, as well as a FOIA module which already exists in part in federal records management training that the National Archives already has available. We'll be adding to that for all federal employees in accordance with both FOIA and the Federal Records Act. The training will focus on adequate documentation, agency file plans and record schedules, electronic record keeping, NARA's capstone policy for email record keeping, and best practices for conducting electronic record searches. Work on all sides of these recommendations is underway, and we are excited to see the end product, which we will share with everyone when they're ready for prime time. Next slide, please. Next three upcoming opportunities for both FOIA professionals and members of the public to learn more about what is happening in the FOIA realm. On May 6, our colleagues at the CDC will be discussing how they perform enterprise-wide FOIA searches in response to request and responding to questions and comments. On May 12, OGIS is holding its annual open meeting where we will be discussing our annual report, which we hope to have finalized and published on our website by that date. And on June 10, the FOIA advisory committee will hold its next public meeting with the report outs from all four sub-committees that I described earlier. So please tune in for all those events. Information is already up for the registration link is already up for the CDC event and registration information will be forthcoming, so please follow us on our event pages on the OGIS website. Next slide, please. So I'm going to pause for a second now to see if there are any questions on any of this before we move forward. Martha, I need that question. Yes. We did have a question that goes back to Bobby's presentation. What advice do you have for benchmarking? I understand there are deadlines and best practices. Is there a way to compare performance on various metrics with comparable agencies or components across the government? The averages and totals are less informative for comparison purposes. Yes. Thank you for that question. That's a great question. So a couple of resources I mentioned for that specifically. One is I would encourage agencies of similar size and nature they can compare their data with similar colleague agencies on FOIA.gov so you can see large decentralized agencies versus mediums, small agency how your colleagues are doing but specifically as far as benchmarking we do emphasize certain milestones in the chief FOIA officer report that OIP then subsequently assesses in a particular things like your average processing time for simple requests. We want that to be as close to 20 days as possible until we score agencies based off of that the number of requests you process compared to prior years your backlog not just in terms of reducing backlog but what proportion of your requests are backlog as well as your progress on closing your oldest requests your 10 oldest requests your 10 oldest administrative appeals and your 10 oldest consultations. So our summary in assessment of prior years chief FOIA officer reports are on our reports web page also the new guidelines for 2021 are on our page as well as milestones that we're going to be assessing from year to year. So I would look to those as metrics and milestones to work towards every year as a benchmark. Okay. That's all for now. Thank you so much. All right. So I think we're running about five minutes early, Bobby. That's the first for us. So hopefully we've got on deck Eric Stein and Michael Sarris who are co-cares of the technology committee and on the agenda next they are going to be giving us some updates. So I'm going to turn it over to them without much further ado and ask our vent producer to please go to the next slide. Eric and Michael, you're on. Thanks. Thank you Alina. Thank you Bobby. Good morning everyone. My name is Eric Stein and I'm joined by my colleague Mike Sarris who are the co-chairs of the chief FOIA officer council technology committee. We want to thank you for your time this morning. We put together a presentation to cover what this committee has been doing since the last briefing of this group and keeping in mind that some of you have not ever attended this meeting before and those of you who are joining us again will pick up where we left off last time. We want to thank you for your leadership and support in your respective agencies for the various FOIA programs particularly with an eye on technology and we'll be covering a variety of topics including what we've accomplished and what's coming up next. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Mike Sarris and if we can go to the next slide please. Good morning and thanks Eric. The technology committee is a creation of the FOIA advisor committee that Alina was just discussing. That body recommended to the archivist that FOIA leaders study the utilization and deployment of technology in FOIA programs across agencies and identify the best practices and make some recommendations that can be implemented government-wide and that's just what we're doing. We have over 40 members from at least 25 different departments and agencies and we're always going to look out for new members and fresh ideas. So now I'd like to run through our organization and kind of give you an idea of our focus areas for the committee on the next slide. Our privilege to be able to share the work of our members. Our group is an action-oriented body dedicated to providing tools to FOIA professionals and the contributions from these working groups are already paying dividends in the FOIA family. So initially the technology committee put together a global look at the intersection between FOIA and technology and we published that report last February. With that global perspective established we pivoted to focus on seven key areas that I'll kind of walk through now. The first one is FOIA searches. So how technology can assist with the adequacy of search, documenting searches, and how technology is considered, you know, when you're thinking about how to and where to search. The next two I'll take together the FOIA Express and FOIA Online. These groups exist to identify recommendations to improve these COPS products to better support FOIA processing throughout federal agencies using these tools because we have a body of folks using the same tool. We can kind of bring those folks together and solve common problems and look for solutions to common challenges. The next one is artificial intelligence. We provide tools to educate FOIA professionals about artificial intelligence, answer questions raised by various FOIA professionals and their agencies about the most appropriate AI tools and as Eric will share in the accomplishments we've already had some very successful presentations on AI in the FOIA space how it can be used for your agency and so on. The next piece is 508 compliance and collaborative tools. This is a really interesting action-oriented group that focus on two areas of attention in the FOIA space. The first is kind of the explosion in IT tools and the implications in record production and improving processes. The hurdles that 508 compliance can be for some agencies are addressed as much information to the public in our transparency mission as possible. The next one is FOIA and classified information. Those are FOIA issues involving how technology is used for classified, classifiable, and then of course declassified information in the IT tools. And finally, video redactions. We're reviewing current practices, challenges and advances in the review redaction and release of video footage. We have an explosion of that record type being requested across the federal family and parent in the production of those record requests. Each of these groups has a charter that guides its work and now Eric will guide us through some of the accomplishments of our group. Next slide. Thank you, Mike. We have accomplished quite a bit despite the challenges of the pandemic. Technology has been that much more important to all of us in so many different ways whether it be at work or in our own personal lives. As we look through here we picked up in November, 2020 with our first presentation that month on artificial intelligence and our chair for our AI working group led a presentation of virtual workshop on AI 101 session, if you will, to get our employees throughout the government familiar with concepts of artificial intelligence. People jump to very specific interpretations of what they think AI is. We worked to debunk certain myths and say here's what AI can do in a federal record landscape and here's how it could potentially be helpful in FOIA. In recent discussions we've come across a lot of interest in not just using AI, machine learning and different concepts to help find and locate records but also in how to apply redactions on records. While there's still a lot of work to be done with the tools available with federal agencies there's definitely an appetite and interest leveraging technology more with the work of our employees of course to execute FOIA requests. So this session was excellent because it really provided a primer and opportunity a primer about AI and an opportunity for FOIA professionals to come together and ask questions about anything on their mind and kind of put guards down and say okay what do we know about AI and what don't we know and how can it really be used in FOIA and is it being used at all at agencies right now for FOIA? Fast forwarding a little bit to January and in between the November and January timeframe we continue to work on our charters for the various working groups. As we brief this body before each of our working groups has a charter and they're publicly available on the OGIS Technology Committee website but charters were designed so each group has a clear defined scope and a list of deliverables and after we achieve and complete those deliverables we're going to determine whether we keep some of these working groups going or sunset sunset them and then create new ones for emerging topics as they come out from our discussions from meetings like this or just as they emerge as FOIA work progresses. So in January we finalized our working group charters we started the research for those deliverables and a lot of these charters had similar research deliverables where our members of our committee and just a quick shout out to those of you joining us today I see several of you on the participants list here thank you for joining us. None of this works without our wonderful members who take time out of their days to come work with us and collaborate on these issues. So our charters almost all of them had a research component where we looked at past chief FOIA officer reports the most recent ones, other publicly available information liaising and talking with other federal agencies many of you here today and just sometimes just getting feedback from the public and other groups about different concepts and ideas and taking that back and discussing it. So that's what we were doing in January and then February we ultimately published the charters online. So again here's a link to it if you're interested in reading about those charters and what we're doing in those groups you can read about them using that link. Next slide please. So in March we were very fortunate we were able to participate in two of the OIP best practices workshops. The first one in the intelligence community and another one with the broader FOIA community that doesn't work on national security information. It was a very great discussion for FOIA practitioners to discuss some of the challenges at the start of the pandemic, what we've been doing in the years since and what we're going to be doing moving forward and the technology committee was able to listen to feedback from the different agencies and the different experiences from the panelists and then take that back to our respective working groups and incorporate into our research and deliverables. With that Michael I'm going to turn over to you because April 2021 this is really something that you've been leading so why don't you talk about the draft video redaction paper and where we are with that. Great thanks Eric. So as we mentioned each of the charters have deliverables and one of the ones that we've just recently wrapped up the draft of is the video redaction paper discussion and just to give you a 30,000 foot view of some of the issues that the video redaction group has worked with is record retention schedules. Some record retention schedules for closed circuit television might be 30 days whereas others might be 75 years past incident in a law enforcement context. So dealing with just that scope of what is available for a legitimate FOIA request or a perfected FOIA request to ask for those records and whether you have to produce them or not is all going to depend on the record control schedule. The different technologies that are available to FOIA practitioners to handle these types of requests. Do you have a Ferrari type thing with all kinds of bells and whistles that you can make the next iteration of the Mandalorian on or do you need something that's a little bit more stripped down that can functionally get you from point A to point B without having all of those additional bells and whistles. It's an important topic that implicates both budgets, training and the ability to have the folks in your FOIA teams or on your FOIA shop that can actually do this work in their current roles and with their current skill sets. So there's a number of issues at the VA action draft paper as addressed and we're looking forward to getting that out to the wider FOIA community and what that really does I think highlight, as Eric and I often talk about the action oriented nature of this committee in terms of getting tools out into the hands of people into the hands of the FOIA practitioners across the federal family and I'm really excited to share that the other working committees, the other working groups are making just as fast progress and their deliverables that are in the charters are on their way toward being met in the coming quarters. So with that we'll talk about some of our kind of key findings to date and we'll talk to Eric to talk about the misconceptions in searches. On the next slide. So here, building off of what Mike just said this is kind of where the rubber meets the road in addition to having some of our draft papers and deliverables now being circulated and prepared for public release according to the charter deadlines which we're striving to accomplish and you should check on that website to see those when we post those respective papers. We've been doing a lot of engagement with other agencies and having done this now I think we started in late 2018 we started the technology committee and having worked through a year without the pandemic the pandemic and here we are now we're learning a lot and we're seeing more and more buy-in engagement from our colleagues and many of you here with us today. So the first point here is probably the biggest one of the biggest findings we've had since our last meeting and that is there are major major misconceptions about the ability of federal agencies to conduct searches of their electronic records for FOIA cases and we say this to share for your awareness these misconceptions can really skew opinions and thoughts and understandings and need to frustration even among requesters when they think that they contact an agency and we just hit a button and we can search in a federated way all the different databases and archives in your custody and those of us in FOIA know that's not the case the overwhelming majority of the time and we bring this up because we have a searches working group that's been discussing this and will have the deliverable themselves but understanding this from a dialogue especially with the public we just can't hit search on the terms you give us in one place we may have to search many many places we have lots of different records coming in then we have challenges of deduplication of large volumes of electronic records electronic data different data sets that may not be compatible and all types of formatting and other challenges this was eye-opening for us because going back to our AI 101 primer we may want to do something related to electronic search capabilities to kind of lay out here's what our capabilities are and we do want to respond to requests that come in but there are limits on what we are and are not able to do and I think also people will see that there's technology and really sophisticated advanced technology out in the private sector in different places and they may assume that we have the same capabilities in different federal agencies that's not the case some of you here today may, in addition to being your chief FOIA officer or just your FOIA officer for your agency serving the privacy office or you have another role in the IT department or you may be wearing many hats and so this may just be one of your many responsibilities and some of the other agencies here you are the chief FOIA officer role and you have to work with your chief data officers information officers in some cases you are the chief information officers so the federal landscape is a little bit different in each agency so this was a pretty big eye-opening discovery we had from discussions with public and other agencies and we're going to continue to build on providing clear understanding of what we're able to do and working with our federal agency partners to execute the best possible searches given the technology available Michael, over to you and really what we've seen in many ways is the ability of events as we all know in the FOIA space events in the news drive and can drive FOIA requests so certainly agencies like the Center for Disease Control and others and may it's a better self-administration we've seen a tremendous uptake in requests related to COVID likewise with a number of events that have happened in the community over the last year you've seen an uptake in requests for video whenever you see things on the news large gatherings folks almost invariably there's a federal presence there taking video of that event either for evidentiary purposes or for whatever purpose legitimate governmental purpose there is to engage in that activity so what we've seen again is an explosion in the interest of how do I process this request because it is a federal record created in the course of business operations and we're hanging on to this and we're using this in our operations now we have an affirmative obligation upon request to produce this information oftentimes we have a desire to proactively disclose this information and we want to make sure that we're protecting the relevant privacy interests of the folks in hand and so this has really been a huge issue for us which is one of the reasons that I mentioned previously why I'm so excited about the work of the video reaction committee and getting this paper out into the hands of the practitioners and Eric you touched on search already with this name the importance of it we'd like to talk about classification getting that information out as well as we move forward sure we did touch on search a little bit already so I won't go into too much detail there but just to say from our discussions of the search working group one of the things we're finding is we really want to highlight best practices and what works in agencies beyond just like we use these terms we use Boolean logic what tools or capabilities exist what we found is it's an easier and a little bit more productive in discussions to highlight challenges we were facing especially in this remote hybrid onsite telework environment and so we're really starting to go down on what are the search capabilities the agencies can perform remotely and which ones require onsite work and that ties nicely into classification unclassified information of course we can't go into classified information for a whole bunch of reasons here but we can talk about there are challenges at agencies that deal with classified information or the declassification of information for public release through FOIA and what we've been looking at just very much staying in the lane of classification in FOIA because there are a lot of bodies of classification and declassification matters but with regard to FOIA when you have classified information how different agencies are able to work with one another with the technology they have, move records comment, liaise provide feedback on referrals and consultations some of the challenges and limits of technology given that some agencies have more people onsite than others what can be done right now what can be done when we are in a better place in the pandemic and more people are on site and will process this information and I think one of the biggest and most interesting things coming out of this group is again if and how we can leverage technology like AI or technology assisted review in the future to help identify records that may be responsive so for example if you're looking up a specific topic and you do a search of an archive or a database and you use three terms using technology to find maybe records that don't use those three terms but are very much related to that topic and on classified systems which has its own challenges and probably as much as we can say about that right now but really good discussion really nice group of employees working throughout the federal landscape on the classification and declassification environment and finally actually I'll say one more thing we are looking to make sure we're leveraging work already being done by agencies declassification programs which do review millions of pages annually for their 25 year review requirements for executive order 13526 and otherwise so a whole lot of interesting stuff being done in this area but still very much constrained by the pandemic and finally finally for me at least before we turn it back over to Mike this slide AI artificial intelligence and going back to this we're seeing more and more in articles and coverage with AI and what AI is doing what we found pretty much is that AI is being leveraged at agency in some agency the small number mainly more in records areas not so much FOIA yet but it's coming we can see that there are certain tools and applications for case processing where AI is going to be available it's not available already and deployed more in the future and this is going to be important because we search these large volumes of electronic archives and get thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands millions of potentially responsive records the amount of time it takes to manually go through that large volume makes FOIA almost impossible in certain instances and we need to figure out a way to work through the challenges of large volumes of data you know a steady stream of incoming requests that Bobby showed in that chart earlier despite the pandemic we still received over 700,000 requests in the age of the government this year and how to leverage technology in an ethical, responsible and careful way that helps get to the intent of the FOIA law in transparency but also making sure that we protect the information that needs to be protected appropriately privacy and other sensitivities so what we're going to do next for our artificial intelligence group we're looking at a couple of things one is to have some sort of AI for federal employees part two training if you will building off of this initial primer if here's what AI is and then also looking at and this is a nice tea up for Mike to take over here what's out there in the private sector and for the public what tools are out there, what technology and what capabilities because the equally important the needs of different agencies vary so much that there are probably a lot of great solutions we've already seen out there but then figuring out how do they become customizable and tailored to the needs of a specific agency in their IT environment in their own ecosystems and interoperability all the challenges there are a lot of great tools but they don't necessarily fit within agencies IT infrastructure and landscape so understanding better what's out there how to leverage GSA schedules that already provide access to certain tools and with that Mike I'm going to kick it back over to you for the final item on the slide because I think we're now ready for vendor day discussion great thanks Eric I appreciate that as Eric mentioned you know artificial intelligence is kind of for some folks anyway it's this mystical almost magic type of a topic and when we see a hundred plus agencies and multiples of that number of so-fied organizations running FOIA programs faced with the same challenges that everyone else faces with different levels of resources and different levels of bandwidth to be able to kind of attack this issue and this challenge is kind of this mandated requirement that we have to do we have to produce these records in 20 days and get these things out to be as transparent as possible we see a huge diversity and ability and so one of the things that we believe in as a core is equity and kind of leveling the playing field providing an opportunity for FOIA practitioners across the entire federal family to be on the same page with everyone else in terms of knowing all of the best practices having access to the tools that they need to tackle their mission and so a piece of that is preparing a virtual vendor slash technology event where we can present all of these tools to the FOIA community you know the best of the best there to do that now we all know that's fraught with challenges and making sure that all the T's are cross and eyes are dotted and especially more complicated in the pandemic world to make sure that everyone that needs to be consulted is consulted that everything is done in accordance with multiple sets of regulations so we're very fortunate and blessed to have Bobby and Alina to work with on this and the goal here is coming up here in fall to have a virtual vendor technology event so folks who may be in a small shop or maybe in a big shop can have access to and see the diversity of tools you may be in a shop where you're locked into one tool for example I'm at the Veterans Health Administration we have an Office of Information Technology and they selected the tool so when I came to work that's what I have but if I would like to advocate for a different tool or for other tools then it's critical that I know about them and that I'm able to connect with other people in the federal family who have used that tool perhaps or who have some experience in that area and so having this kind of community day this day of where folks can kind of come together ask questions get the best the best information that you know kind of candid advice from someone who may be using product A or product B and learn you work out the details on how all that would comply with all the appropriate rules and regulations governing these events but we think that this can be potentially transformative because again the diversity of programs is so great 100 plus programs tons of multiples of that folks working as a lead FOIA officer in a program in a stove pipe might be in a different component of an agency running a large volume FOIA office but you don't have the opportunity to connect and liaise with different folks and learn about these different products so I think that's a really important piece that we're going to be able to do and we're excited to bring that thanks for the great work of the folks on our committee we're excited to be able to bring that to the FOIA community and as Eric mentioned earlier we have some of our great committee members you know as participants watching this this work couldn't be done without their great work without the hard work of each member one of those numbers 40 plus numbers on the committee so we're really appreciative of that and so we'll move to the next slide and talk about the things that we're going to be doing in the future in our next steps sure Mike before we go I just want to go back to your point on the vendor day whether you're a large agency or a small agency one of the things we've really worked hard to do is make connections we get contacted by smaller agencies where it's a one person shop doing all these things so what we do is try to put you in touch with other small agencies or share what we've learned from these discussions and a lot of it is the agencies will share with us here's how we handle this solution sometimes it's helpful sometimes it's not but we tend to find more times than not it's helpful to collaborate and just know that you can come to this group and we will we're such a large group in terms of our the 40 some odd members and different agencies the FOIA community grant scheme of things is so small we're able to put different offices in touch because we do get contacts about like we get questions about like I don't have resources to do this or it might just point out my CIO shop or my IT shop put this together and here's what I have for those of you here today if you are the chief FOIA officer and you haven't done any outreach to your IT shop or your chief data officer or those different components that may be relevant to your FOIA program we really really encourage you to do so don't underestimate the value and importance of that leadership role that you're in and what we hear from our members of our committee and even just FOIA practitioners is having that support from leadership on high really makes a big difference for at least identifying solutions or teaming up issues for potential solutions and even morale in general and even just with those two sometimes we'll resolve problems so Mike definitely would be the first here please sure thanks and just to give you guys a real quick thumbnail best use case study for this recently we have four different agencies that have one that has successfully implemented the tool and three that were considering the implementation of this tool they already bought it and they're working on kind of their go live schedule to talk about the best practices in implementing that tool so hey what worked for you what didn't work for you what did you find useful what drove metrics you know when you implemented this portion of that tool what really was the biggest bang for your buck when you did that and to be able to have that kind of candid conversation among FOIA professionals you know to have that FOIA professionals to come together and candidly share you know the falls and the highs that they were able to achieve these products has been really important so it's just a quick best use case of the power of this committee to be able to bring people together so talking about our next steps as we mentioned we have deliverables in the charters and they're posted on our website that we had in the link earlier as we begin to put those out so for example the video reaction paper should be out very shortly we're going to post those there and we'll do everything we can to make sure folks understand what these are out and about so please be looking for those and these are volunteers that have come together to improve the FOIA community all of these volunteers that we have on this committee are fantastic Eric and I are the two guys that are fortunate and lucky enough to be able to share their good work but really the work that's gone on by these guys has been fantastic so that's what we're going to be doing with the draft deliverables and then Eric you can talk us through some of the workshops that we're planning so building on the AI session we already mentioned we'll have a follow up for AI for FOIA professionals and again one of the things our committee is focused on is building up connections among the FOIA practitioners with an eye on technology and the tools so we'll have this AI event scheduled and we're looking at potential other events based on the various working groups we have first things I think for most of our charters and our deliverables we want to get the initial papers out and then see what type of response if any we get and whether that leads to what happens often is when after we do our research we draft the papers and start drafting and we see there might be an appetite for a discussion on searching of electronic archives or how to work with classified information which is hard remotely but or AI in general and where exactly we start because if we just jump in saying alright here's how to use AI for FOIA and you're an agency that doesn't even have any input just in the case processing system I still use Excel to track my cases we can really miss the mark there so we're looking at right now the next upcoming event will be for the AI one but the other ones could be for the different search areas but we also want input from all of you whether it be from you specifically as the chief FOIA officers or your proxies or your employees and that'll steer the ship as to what we do next and then going back to the vendor date to you Mike there's one thing the point you made before about building off of the vendor day and the connections even looking at shared solutions across the government where if one agency has a technical capability that may have cost a good amount of money to purchase before we have another agency go out and purchase a tool for something they may use once or twice or three times a year if ever instead of wasting money in building and purchasing a tool you'll use once or twice maybe leveraging agreements across agencies and this might be something for our colleagues and our other committee here the reports to this body to look at how can we leverage those agreements for technical solutions so we can leverage lean budgets as much as possible so Mike back over to you yeah and what we're here in part is to solicit feedback and input from this great by all these chief FOIA officers the product that you think that we should be going after on vendor day and saying hey we use this product it's really been beneficial to us in driving performance we've been able to hit metrics A, B, and C because of this product we've been able to either transform operations or this has been a consistent workforce for years that we've used and we think that other agencies could probably benefit from this because ultimately at the end of the day we're all working towards making Bobby's presentations even better and better watching that and also between the request received and process making sure that that process is over received and backlogs are going down and so on so if you've got a tool or you've got an idea we want to hear from you we want to hear from you have your give voice to your voice we want to amplify your voice we want to make sure that we really are sharing the best of the best so if there's something that you know about and you have an idea and say hey this would really be beneficial for the larger family to know about please send it along and likewise as we identify new areas and working groups for 2022 as the working groups that we have that focus right now in those seven key areas as their work wraps up these are very energetic folks and we've got a lot of people that are working to continue the iterative process of improving the FOIA programs and FOIA processes across the federal family if there's an area in your program you know it would be really great to have a systemic look at this you know on a governmental level about issue A or B something that you may have worked on your entire career or something that may have just popped up then please you know send that to us because we're we're a body with open ears and active arms we're working all the words in the water growing to get to where we need to go and I can't get there without active input so that's kind of why we're here so we'll talk to you Eric to talk more about you know kind of soliciting feedback from the fact FOIA advisory committee and others sure well just our point here is we are interested in feedback from all of you today I understand there may be at least one or two questions in the chat so we will open up for questions in a moment but we're soliciting feedback from the FOIA advisory committee previously mentioned by Alina is the separate body that is a public and private partnership that all of you at this chief FOIA officer all of the chief FOIA officers here federal agencies and the public so if you do think of anything just to reiterate Mike's point please do share with us in our contact information is on I think one of the final slides speaking of which we did add in an appendix slide here that we're not covering today in the slide deck it just shows what we briefed this body on previously on what we accomplished in between the last meeting the previous meeting and for the some of you may already be familiar with it but if you're new we do encourage you to take a look at what we put up to and kind of a long timeline of what we've been able to get done over the past year so let me go to the next slide please alright so here's the contact information I just mentioned and at this point I think we're going to open it up for questions as I understand at least one in the chat and anything else any other questions that have come in so hi this is Martha let's get one question in the chat which I think you addressed a little bit but I'm going to read it out regarding misconceptions has the committee addressed differences that small agencies face with technology challenges you mentioned the vast differences across the government regarding searching various databases etc the small agencies have even fewer resources available and this also applies to vendor technology access $10 million so they can't really afford a lot of solutions again I think you touched on this a little bit but perhaps rounded up I think just a couple a few thoughts some would say $10 million which is a huge budget compared to some of the agencies we deal with because I'm sorry to kill again because I've used this joke before or this comment before but someone said we were talking about interoperable technology I just got a new fax machine or a new photocopier that's really helpful and a copier machine to help print out requests or digitize them so in terms of these issues and challenges you have very small shops and operations, those challenges are just as real those of us who are larger agencies that have millions of dollars are processing thousands, tens of thousands of requests annually I would encourage you to reach out to us with specific questions or concerns we'll drill down as to what exactly do you want would you like us to assist with what we could help you but stretching lean budgets is something we talk about time and time again before we go into money it's kind of a trap people talk about money and resources and people we try to really put our fingers on what the problem is and if it's technology, we keep it in our lane and if not, we then say Bobby and Alina, we have this challenge it's kind of out of scope for us can OJIS or OIP help them and they can take those issues those are kind of my initial reactions to Eric's great point there that a double-sided scanner just something as simple as a double-sided scanner has the power to double the productivity of an individual performing that fast and that's a very simple several hundred dollars or less now piece of equipment, they can be put on someone's desktop there are very low cost high productivity drivers that we seek to identify and encourage agencies to use that aren't using them and what is great is the opportunity to talk to other folks who have had that light bulb moment already because we're limited in how many light bulb moments we have in a day so if someone else has had that light bulb moment and they can share it and help address a challenge that you might have I think all of us sometimes find ourselves so in the weeds of a problem a different agency's perspective fresh set of eyes can really help point you in the direction of a solution that can make your life a lot easier because as Eric mentioned you get into money, you get into FCEs you get into resources everyone is stretched thin and everyone is working at maximum capacity especially these days in the Covid era so the simple solution this low-hanging fruit is out there for all of us and having friends in the community in the FOIA community to be able to help point you to some of these has been really impactful for so many folks I would say there's definitely ways to do it and please use our contact information communicate with us email Eric or myself and we'll share this information with our larger community the big throbbing brain of the tech committee and so often great solutions come from those folks that we're so fortunate to work with and I just I was out there too couple points just over the past year really impressed by agencies that have figured out how to digitize mail it's not highly complex to scan but to have people willing to come in especially at the start of the pandemic before there was vaccine available we had challenges how do I work on cases remotely and agencies figured out how to scan mail to make sure it was digitized including faxes I know at least one or two have put in place the ability of faxes to come in now they're scanned and worked directly sent via email to agencies to start processing otherwise these cases were just queuing up fax machines were just loading people were coming in but there was no action because no one was in the office especially early March 2020 there have been some practical examples of how technology has been used and some agencies have said we don't even know where to start we're going to talk to about a scanning mechanism so they've reached out to us we put them in touch with other agencies here's what's worked here's what you need practically because I think that's where we actually get the best bang for our block people want to know how do I do what they're doing and then they figure out what their issues with resources and otherwise no problem at all the question that came in is what are the top 10 productivity drivers for small agencies I expect you all to have the exact answer for this right now but I feel like we're on one of the shows the top 10 reasons are I don't know if we have the top 10 but I can rattle off a few off the top of my head Mike and then see what you think for small agencies it's tough because some small agencies get a lot of FOIA requests and some large agencies get fewer FOIA requests but I think it comes down to the record types being reviewed and sought and so for a small agency if there's it's tough because agency size is not necessarily a great indicator of what type of FOIA requests and processing I think if we go to the record types an agency that pretty much gets requests for the same form or the same standardized type of information having tools that allow you especially for technology to do some sort of auto redact feature or in this form we're going to redact boxes 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 that could be a big productivity driver because and a good return on investment because you want to do as much manual review and there's less room for margin of error of someone actually going through and just missing a box like that for the agencies that do more reports and narrative driven products that are heavy on what's in the content of their records very significantly I don't know if we have just from a technology perspective one great recommendation here but I think you have to look at the record types and we can definitely take this back to our group to look at but I don't think we've specifically looked at either top 5 or the top 10 for small agencies in general but we have had small agencies mainly identify challenges and try to help them with that Mike, what do you think? So I put in the chat our report from February 14th last year and the top just in a minute and a thumbnail senior level support for report programs is really important and that goes into what I call the Align Assets Act model for running the report program and so first thing is that your agency is aligned and people understand the importance of this mandated program that you have to perform and produce these records. That kind of alignment is important from leadership down and then the second piece for productivity is to assess your operations the DOJ toolkit is fantastic we've used that at VHA and you can really go step by step by step and the new tools that Bobby is going to release to the larger point community I would highly encourage you to use those because then you'll get a look at a small agency where areas that you might not be aware of will come into focus will come into sharp focus because you'll see how you stack up against a really solid benchmark. Not every one of those areas may be 100% applicable to you but you'll be able to quickly get through those and then once you've done that assessment if you want to really drive productivity act on that so Align Assets and then act and then pretty much any agency or any program can find the success that we've been fortunate to have at VHA and many other agencies have been fortunate enough to have but taking a look at that leadership support making sure everyone's aligned in the same mission doing an honest look an honest assessment of where you're at and where you have to go and then take action to get there set those benchmarks and move forward there and the tool is very simple and easy to use doesn't take a ton of bandwidth and I think you'll be really really happy with your return on investment for the time that you put in for that kind of honest high ball assessment of your program and if we didn't answer your question fully I encourage you to follow up with us afterward are there any other questions today? nothing else in the chat okay well we want to thank you all for your time and with that we have an appendix slide here and we can skip the next slide and the next slide after this and we're going to hand it over to the committee on cross-agency collaboration innovation thank you again everyone be safe and be well take care good morning everyone my name is Mike Bell I'm the FOIA Officer of the Department of Transportation and I'm one of the co-chairs of the co-cackee committee an acronym that has grown on us over the last few months and my co-chair is here as well hey good morning everyone my name is Abhi Mosheim I'm with the consumer product safety commission and Mike and I are here today to share with you news about the two FOIA officers council's committee we like to call it co-cackee for short because it is a mouthful we're a very new committee growing, vibrant committee and so let's get started and let you know how we're doing next slide please so last year if you recall the last meeting OGIS and DOJ announced the creation of the new committee and it came from recommendation 16 of the FOIA advisory committee's final report the 2018-2020 FOIA advisory committee's final report next slide please so recommendation 16 recommended that the chief FOIA officers council create this committee to look at research and propose a cross agency grant program and other revenue sources for FOIA program to review and promote initiatives for clear career trajectories for FOIA professionals building on the GIS job series coordination with existing agency efforts and to explore and recommend models to align agency resources with a commitment to agency transparency next slide please so our committee met in March it was on March 9th, 2021 our very first meeting and we had the author of recommendation 16 join us to go over the intent and objectives and from that on the creation of three subcommittees we didn't want to limit ourselves to just the recommendation points the three categories in the recommendation but the subcommittees that we have created do flow from there and also from the situation that we're all in now which is the pandemic and how we've gone from being in-person and I know at least in our office we had a mix of electronic production and paper production and now that it's all electronic just the challenges that we're facing across the federal government in our FOIA offices and how we can remedy some of the challenges that we're facing find solutions so the three subcommittees that we created include pandemic virtual FOIA offices government information specialist job series and standardizing technology and Mike is going to tell you more about those three subcommittees yeah next slide please the committees that we have formed are pretty much in the new stages where we just started forming them and we're going to start setting up timelines over the summer and come up with charters but we have gone ahead and come up with some goals for them and that's really what I want to go into at this point our first one because there's a big elephant in the room the pandemic virtual offices subcommittee I think all of us know by now keeping our heads up we've been working from home max telework for over a year now all I know is I don't know what day of the week it is sometimes and I had to google how to tie a tie today but I do know that my first day of teleworking was March 16, 2020 that was a Monday and it really wasn't much lead time because we were just thinking okay do we have enough work to keep everyone busy for two to four weeks when we're away from the office and that's what everyone was thinking at the time and so there wasn't a whole lot of pre-planning that went into the telework because it came on us so suddenly however offices not just boy offices but everyone across the government specifically and came up with a lot of really good ideas and many of those have been talked about in some of DOJ best practices forms that they've held to keep people informed of what's going on but what we want to do with this committee is to actually take a deep dive into those ideas and see how we can really implement them across the government and also how we can maybe transform them from when we go back to the offices in whatever form that is because we all know it's not going to be business as normal when we go back more likely it's going to be some kind of hybrid for your office instead of going in five days a week people may only go in for two days a week which is different than everyone teleworking at home so we really want to look at ideas and how we can transform them to work once we get back into this new the new normal which everyone's been talking about for the last year next slide please the second subcommittee is about the GIS job series the GIS job series has been around for about a decade now I worked on it implementing it way back when I was with DOD we changed the job series we tried to make it independent from just being admin workers but there hasn't been a whole lot really done since then so we're trying to see how agencies actually benefit from having this independent job series and you can see some of those things we're going to focus on recruiting for positions there are plenty of good boy people out there but it's tough to try to get them to apply to your agency so we want to see how we can help along with that career advertising very few children want to grow up to be FOIA officers when they get older except maybe Bobby he's probably an exception to the rule but most of us we got into because we saw maybe a job offer out there or something on USA job so we had to find the job for the career what we want to do is try to find a way to get those good people from the government and into FOIA because we can't depend on just these good people that are out there just accidentally finding FOIA we want to go out there and get them finally uniformity and grade we know every every agency is different that's pretty obvious but we want to make sure that certain functions align with certain grade levels we just want to make sure that agencies are on the same level with that so when you hire other people you know you're getting a person with the right qualifications and experience finally the final two items there are cross-agency details and cross-training these are kind of ambitious goals that we want to take a look at but really we think that these might benefit small agencies is what we've been talking about I work as a partner transportation we have a lot of FOIA analysts across many different offices different operating administrations so we actually have a good detail program that we try to take advantage of good people, different experiences so they can just learn a little better but if you're a one person FOIA agency that's tough to do and while we know there's going to be funding issues we just want to take a look at how we can pull something off that a FOIA person from a small agency can maybe spend maybe even a week or two somewhere else and get a different perspective on their job that's one of the things we're going to take a look at on that committee next slide please our final subcommittee is just about standardizing technology you know there's plenty of ways to say use program X FOIA express or FOIA log but if you don't know the right way to use it or if the agency doesn't have the proper resources it's not going to do you any good and the technology committee that we just heard from they're kicking butt right now with all the solutions that they're coming up with but what we want to do is just to complement what they're doing and to just make sure that agencies have the right infrastructure and processes in place to take advantage of these solutions technology really doesn't do anyone any good if you're not using it the right way I just always think back to a phrase that I heard it's a poor musician who blames his instrument and you know it's easy to blame technology if we're not using it right so we want to make sure that all agencies are on the same page that phrase again just how they use technology and make sure that they're using it in the right way the agency resources are aligned to take advantage of the technology that's out there because it's changing very fast and there's no way we're going back to a paper world so all four offices have to be ready to take advantage of it and as people said the smaller offices it's tough for them because of budget that we can find a way to put a process in place that they can use this technology that would definitely be a success for our committee next slide that's the end of the committee part but I know Alina said earlier talking about recruiting members our committee is brand new we're a little under half the size of the technology committee so we really want some good people who want to work hard as Abhi said we're not limiting ideas if another subcommittee comes up from an idea that we received with it so email either one of us if anyone's interested and I guess we'll see if there are any questions there are no questions in the chat at this time we'll definitely email Alina if you have any additional ideas for subcommittee topics or if you want to join our committee we would welcome you with open arms so we look forward to working with everyone and thanks for having us today thank you all thanks very much Abhi and Michael thanks again take care guys I know we're running a few minutes behind schedule but I will now ask the event producer to please flip over to our other slide deck and I am very excited to introduce the CDO council chair, Ted Kalk and vice chair Dan Morgan Abhi and I had the good fortune of being able to present at a CDO council meeting earlier this year so we are returning the favor although they're doing us a favor by being here so we really appreciate it Ted serves as the chief data officer at the United States Department of Agriculture in this role he is responsible for developing strategies that enable USDA to fully leverage its data as a strategic asset improving organizational decision making and outcomes for citizens he was selected as the first chair for the CDO council due to his expertise in leadership and data analytics that's at least what your bio says Ted so I know you're living up to the hype Dan is the chief data officer of the United States Department of Transportation he has overall responsibility for the departmental data program and data compliance across the department he is responsible for establishing a clear vision of the data managed in DOT and the application of DOT data for decision making he serves as data strategist and advisor steward for improving data quality liaison for data sharing and developer of new data products wow Dan that's a lot okay so without further ado I'm going to turn it over to you thanks well thanks Alina hopefully you can hear me and it's great to be with everybody today thanks Dan so really excited to just engage with this community and with the public and talk a little bit about the work of the CDO council maybe we can go to the next slide but just to put in context some of the background around the CDO council I think just even thinking about the recent administration focus on data really on how the major challenges we're trying to adjust whether that's COVID-19 or economic recovery or climate change inequity really how those executive orders signal the importance of broader data working government and a need for re-examining how we collect, use, share and disseminate data so many of those executive orders are unified for better data management practices, skills and infrastructure thinking about the executive order on advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities they've established the data working group that's going to study and provide recommendations on inadequacies and federal data collection activities and policies and infrastructure there's a call for a data-driven response to COVID-19 and looking at our data collection and sharing and publication practices as well as the need for privacy protections there is an emphasis on talent and data skills that are needed to support these activities and really just holistically when you look at those executive orders the work that we've been engaged in in the CDO council really helps to reinforce the importance of that work and the challenges. In terms of the CDO council itself the foundations for evidence-based policymaking act of 2018 required that all agencies in government for the first time establish chief data officers and it also established the chief data officers council so our council now includes approximately 80 members from both CFO and non-CFO act agencies across the government and we're responsible for implementing the federal data strategies individual actions that are agencies and for creating data-driven organizations in partnership and I think that's where the collaboration is going to come into the discussion today with our other evidence act officials including chief boy officers and evaluation officers and statistical officials as well as others our vision is to lead transformational change that improves the nation's ability to leverage its data as strategic asset and some of the conversations we've had recently after about a year of working to stand up the council and to understand our work better is really our ability to have a vibrant learning community to ensure that CDOs and that professional advance but also how we're collaborating with other councils across government so let's go to the next slide we have some statutory responsibilities and so in terms of supporting those and also supporting the current administration priorities we're really engaging in these kinds of things in four ways, gathering input from the public, engaging in understanding the uses for and priorities around improved data collection and dissemination working with our community to understand the good work that's been going on for many years but how we can leverage those best practices for CDOs and our partners in the wider data community to improve agency data collection, data governance, data sharing data skills, data inventorying, and then also building capacity across government so that we are building our practices in a way that they're informed by a data ethics framework that advances equity, are reducing bias in our data, looking at our data science practices. We have a number of priority projects that we're engaging into prototype and look at solutions and then this broader opportunity to collaborate with with other evidence act councils and other data focused councils like the FOIA council is one of our major kind of priorities to support these statutory goals. So going into the next slide just also talk about our work to support implementation of the federal data strategy. As many of you may know the first federal data strategy was kicked off in 2020. The action plan outlines some pretty aggressive actions and milestones that are foundational work. Each agency has been implementing individual actions identifying the data needed to answer priority questions, standing up data governance boards, assessing our data and related infrastructure maturity, doing data skills assessments at our agencies and really looking ahead to updating our agency open data plans and publishing and updating our data inventory. So we've been supporting the work of that federal data strategy through the community building and through our development of best practices as well as our working groups and we've set up a structure to help us to implement that. So we'll go on to the next slide and just take a quick look at our overall structure. We have an executive committee so both Dan and I serve as chair and vice chair on the executive committee. We have a membership from the office of the federal CIO as well as from OIRA at the office of management and budget. We have obviously in our larger council we have our agency CDOs and I think really critically our ex-officio members from councils like the FOIA council and then we have a number of working groups that both align with the administration priorities but also are like on COVID-19 where we're working to support common decision-making tools and sharing information across agencies and giving broader access to public health data that's needed by our individual agencies to support safety of our workforce and ongoing operations. We've also established other working groups that are really designed to over the short, medium and long term improve our ability to share to improve data sharing practices data inventory and data skills and so that's where the collaboration and our teaming with the great not only the knowledge that the individual CDOs have but also their broader organizations and our ex-officio members and the councils that are working together with us and so I think Dan will be talking a little bit about some of our planned activities for 2021 this year and also about some of the collaboration sort of structures we started to put in place with the other councils so I'm going to turn it over to Dan to talk about the second half of the presentation. Thank you. Let's go ahead and jump to the next slide. So obviously as a council we have to meet like you as a FOIA Officers Council we're quite large. Every agency has a CDO not every agency has other evidence act officials every agency has a statistical official and not every agency has an evaluation officer so at CDOs we're in interesting places where all of our membership isn't equally engaged across evidence activities because of the nature of the statute but we set up a variety of discussion sessions on things like federal data strategies action plans and how agencies are addressing some of those actions as Ted mentioned we've got our ongoing working groups like you some of our working groups are newer than others the COVID-19 working group was one of our first ones I think it's important to remember the CDO Council was only established January of last year and so we've you know we've been forming, storming and norming in the middle of the public health emergency and COVID-19 was top of mind as we started to form our work we have a website now at CDO.gov and of course we've got we are still working on how we're going to work on public engagement and doing things like you do with public meetings so we have an opportunity to learn from you as a Chief Boy Officer Council about how to make this virtual meeting format work well of course we use internal collaboration tools across government many of you who are inside government are familiar with OMB Max our OMB Max site is open for everybody so if you search for Chief Data Officers Council you'll find our materials and no need to request access I really want to double down on the strategic linkages piece and the cross-agency council work that we've been doing so one of the things that we recognize early on is that data is really a team sport and to that point we have identified a number of other councils that exist where we can collaborate on projects together where we can share ideas across councils where we can attend each other's working groups to be able to share information across boundaries so we've actually set up a number of ex-oficial relationships with the Chief Evaluation Officers Council with the Chief Information Officers Council with the Privacy Council the Interagency Council on Statistical Policy I'm proud to say that we have a relationship with Abbi and Alina as the Chief Boy Officer Council ex-officios we've also established one for the Federal Records Management Council with Lawrence Burr the Chief Records Officer of the United States serving as the ex-officio and we have others like the Federal Geospatial Data Committee I do know that one of the things that came out of the FOIA Advisory Committee is a recommendation for more collaboration across the FOIA and Records Council to the CDO Council and we're going to continue working with Abbi, Alina and Lawrence to figure out how best to make that work to meet the spirit and intent of that recommendation and how we can work together to make sure that CDOs understand how data is currently managed under the Federal Records Act and the FOIA but also how we can work how we can leverage some of the things that you are doing with your technology committee to understand how advanced technologies can help us both be successful What are the things that we have the advantage of working on through the CDO Council process that OMB operates a funding process called the CDO funding process the projects that we have underway are data skills workforce development very soon we will be releasing a data skills playbook for folks to see we have also been working on sharing dashboards across agencies with an emphasis on human resources and diversity Ted has been leading a project on natural language processing for public comment and the Department of Interior is leading a project on interagency collaboration on wildfire fuels as we see the new administration coming online we expect an update to the federal data strategy action plan and we work closely with the Office of Management and Budget to provide meaningful input from the CDO Council perspective on what the action plan says so that we can help CDOs effectively implement the action plan Those are our key activities here in FY21 and probably heading into FY22 as well and we'll have some new projects that will be coming online but that's our focus area right now I think we have time for maybe one or two questions if there are questions in the chat There's only one question in the chat someone wanting to know if political appointees are part of the Council's membership No So every CDO is required to be a career official That's all I think the only clarification I would make there is that's true with regard to CDOs We do have representation from the Office of Management and Budget so it certainly is possible that we could have membership but not at the current time Good point, thanks Ted Okay, well thanks very much Ted and Dan we're really happy to join us today apologies that we're running a little behind schedule so thanks for hanging in there with us and we hope to have you back and we'll continue this collaboration this has been just great and we've had a couple people ask us for your PowerPoint presentation we'll make sure that we post that on our website and give access to everyone to that so thanks again I want to express my appreciation as well thank you so much Ted and Dan Thanks Bobby and everyone all the slides are already on our site look at the chat and I've posted it a couple times in there Great, thanks Martha really appreciate it and Martha is Martha Murphy the OGIS Deputy Director she has chosen not to be on camera today but I'm sure she is always camera ready and Martha thank you again for monitoring the chat and helping us with all of that so Tegan if we could go back to our slide deck the next slide please alright so we have now reached the public comment section of our meeting we did promise to leave time for that we look forward to hearing from many members of the public who have ideas or comments they would like to share we would like to open up our telephone lines now Tegan if you could please provide instructions for our listeners for how to ask the question or make a comment if you have a telephone that would be great alright at this time if you'd like to ask a question and make a comment please dial pound 2 on your telephone D-pad you'll hear a notification when your line is unmuted which point please mistake your name and question once again dialing pound 2 when to gate that you wish to ask a question or make a comment okay I also want to remind everyone you may also submit written comments please email them to OGIS Open Meeting all one word at narah.gov we will post any written comments we receive on our website any oral comments will be captured in the transcript of the meeting which we will post as soon as it is available so Martha can I turn to you first any questions or comments from the public via the chat function that have come in during the course of the meeting we only had one question that came in through the YouTube chat someone had a question about classification and FOIA and maybe we can just clarify the overlap the question was why do some FOIA officers refuse to be classified by records and claim that FOIA is not for declassification whereas other FOIA officers do declass by historical records do they need B1 to B9 with actions so I can speak to that just generally of course when applying exemption 1 agencies are responsible to make sure that the information is properly and continues to be properly classified but if information is withheld at exemption 1 there is a process to be able to challenge that classification and have that freshly reviewed to determine if it should continue to be declassified and so that process is there and of course classification only relates to exemption 1 but obviously there could be overlapping exemptions so hopefully that responds to the question but more generally there is a process for if you believe that information should be declassified to challenge the actual classification thanks Bobby Martha anything else on chat nothing else at this time all right Keegan do we have anyone on the telephone line who would like to chime in I'm not showing any questions or comments on the phone at this time once again if you would like to make one please dial pound 2 on your telephone keypad okay we're going to give folks a couple more seconds to think of their comments but please know that the chief officers council is happy to receive comments at any time we'd like to hear your thoughts, comments, feedback things that you would like to see in the future and that also of course includes all of our FOIA colleagues who are here with us today if there are any particular agenda items you would like for us to include in our next chief officers council meeting Bobby and I are very open to that right Bobby? Absolutely okay all right well I am pausing for a second there are no other chat questions or phone questions I think we can actually wrap up our meeting on time yay nothing here nothing here either okay great thanks very much Martha and Keegan so Bobby and I both very much hope to have another CFO council meeting later this fall please stay tuned for further announcements on an exact date and time as well as registration information I predict that it's probably going to be virtual again although everything is a little bit up in the air so bear with us thanks Keegan for advancing the slide thanks again to all of you for joining us today I hope everyone and their families remain safe healthy and resilient Bobby over to you thank you thanks Elena and thanks for me for everyone for joining a really great meeting today but a special thanks to our presenters particularly the two co-chairs of the committees and especially for all the people who are on those committees for all the great work just one more last plug please please reach out if you want to participate in any of those committees as Elena said we are very open to your thoughts on what the next meeting should look like okay Keegan next slide this was my terrorist contributions I just wanted to make sure we got it in there thanks again for joining us today have a great day and stay safe out there it's supposed to be a very windy take care