 Welcome and thank you for joining today's meeting of the Chief FOIA Officers Council. Please note this conference is being recorded and all audio connections are muted at this time. If you require technical assistance, please open chat with the associated icon at the bottom of your screen and send a message to the event producer. With that, I'll turn the conference over to Alina Simo, Director of the Office of Government Information Services and Council Co-Chair. Thank you Candice and good morning everyone and welcome as the Director of the Office of Government Information Services or OGIS and Co-Chair of the Chief FOIA Officers Council. It is my pleasure to welcome all of you to our spring 2024 public meeting of the Chief FOIA Officers Council. We last met on November 9th, 2023. I would like to introduce my Co-Chair, Bobby Tulebian, Director of the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice. Bobby, over to you. Virtually, and we look forward to another great back agenda. Okay, thanks Bobby. We are very pleased that so many people are able to join us today. We are simultaneously live streaming this meeting on the NARA, the National Archives or NARA YouTube channel. Anyone who misses this meeting or wishes to go back and listen to any portion of it may do so at any time. Thank you and today Alina and I will each provide updates on the work that each of our offices have been doing since we last met in November. We're also very happy and very excited to welcome Daniel York from the Open Government Secretariat at GSA who will be discussing the role he and his staff play in the open government landscape. And you'll also hear from the Council's two committees, the Technology Committee and the Committee on Cross Agency Collaboration and Innovation on all the great work that they've been doing since we last met. I hope that the work they've been doing have been great resources, both committees to all agencies and we hope today will further inspire more agencies to volunteer because the strength of the committees and the Council rests on your participation. This is a great opportunity, Bobby, for us to make a plug again for anyone from our federal family that would like to volunteer for even one of the committees. We are always welcoming new members. It is a great cadre of folks who get together and are really trying to improve the boy process. So we really hope that you will consider joining either or both committees. So we have reserved time at the end of today's session for public comments. We will open telephone lines at the end of our meeting for any oral questions or comments from those members of the public who have registered to participate via our WebEx platform. We ask that you limit your public comments to three minutes. Once your three minutes expire, we will mute your line and move on to the next commenter or other questions or comments that are pending in our chat. During the course of the meeting, we will pause and check in to see if there are any questions from our agency boy colleagues that come in via chat and we'll share them as appropriate. Important reminder, please send a chat to all panelists to ensure that comments are seen by our moderators. For those of you watching on our NARA YouTube channel, we want to hear from you. If you have any questions or comments related to the agenda of today's meeting, please send them to cfo-councilatnara.gov. We will be monitoring that email box for any incoming emails during the meeting. If you have any questions about any other topic regarding the National Archives, you may direct them to public.affairsatnara.gov. Candace, next slide please. Excellent. And so now to kick us off, we're very pleased to welcome Daniel York from GSA today. Daniel joined the federal government at the Department of Justice where he spent nearly 10 years working on IT policy, IT capital planning, and IT government's issues. While at DOJ, he served in leadership positions in a number of multi-agency and government-wide working groups focused on using IT to improve agency mission outcomes. Prior to joining GSA in December 2014, he completed a six-month detail at OMB's Office of the Chief Information Officer where he authored several federal IT policy documents. In April 2018, Daniel became the director of the IT Data Transparency Division within GSA's Office of Government-wide Policy where he led the Folio Federal Shared Service and Federal IT Dashboard Programs. In September 2023, Daniel took over leadership of the newly created Open Government Secretariat where he works with the White House, Department of State, USAID, and Social Society to promote government transparency, accountability, and civil engagement. Daniel holds a master's degree in business administration with an emphasis on IT management from the University of Texas at Dallas. Daniel, thank you so much. We're really looking forward to your presentation and over to you. Great. No, thank you so much for having me and happy to share a little bit about the work we do here at GSA. I guess we'd probably go to the next slide. Great. So in terms of the larger Open Government Initiative, so there's a large international agency called the Open Government Partnership, of which the US government is a founding member. Within that framework, the White House, through the Office of Science and Technology Policy, helps provide the leadership support on the policy leadership around open government in general. GSA handles the domestic implementations of our membership in that organization, and the Department of State and USAID handle the international phasing or aspects. In terms of larger context, OGP, I should say Open Government Partnership has roughly, I think it was 175 members last I checked, member nations that correspond to roughly 2 billion people. So roughly one out of every four people on earth are citizens of a country that are a member of the Open Government Partnership. So very happy to be supporting that in the US's role in implementing it. Moving on to the next slide, a little bit about the team. So that's us. That's all of us. We are small but mighty. I handle the international, inter- and intra-government coordination, as well as the Fifth National Action Plan. Courtney and Laura handle our multi-stakeholder forum and community engagement. Avet and Alexis are working on planning for the sixth National Action Plan. And then Laura and, I'm sorry, Arthur and Avis are working around the idea of the Federal Advisory Committee and then migrating on our website. The next slide. So what we do is really focused on those national action plans, right? The National Action Plan, the Fifth National Action Plan was released in December 2022. So we're in the process of implementing the various commitments. There's 36 commitments across, I'll talk a little bit about those in the next slides, but 36 commitments are broken out into 70 subcommitments. And so tracking progress and how agencies are doing across those, including the several FOIA commitments in there as well. We're also working towards the Sixth National Action Plan and the multi-stakeholder forum and around that to make sure we get a good co-creation process in place. And lastly, it's stakeholder engagement. Not only with our federal stakeholders, agency to agency, but also our public stakeholders by doing events like this and getting the word out about how the public can be involved in open government is, of course, very important. Lastly, we host and maintain the open government website that I just mentioned was migrating to the GSA platform. So a lot of really good activity that we handle here on the domestic aspects. Next slide. In terms of the Fifth National Action Plan, we had a number of updates since August. So in August, the August update was our first time. We weren't actually officially even a team at that point. The order that created us wasn't signed until September. But you can see as a part of the February update, how we were able to get all of the missing updates in from that initial beta version, we'll find all the POCs and actually do a lot of good work in terms of closing those updates as well. And I'll put a link into where the commitment tracker is when I'm not speaking. All those updates said go live in March 2027. We expect the next round of updates to go live in August 2024. Next slide. Great. So in terms of the commitments themselves, I mentioned earlier, there's 36 commitments within the Fifth National Action Plan. We've broken those down into 70 sub commitments. You can sort of see the chart there on the left into how those are broken down by the five themes. We also have a chart here about how those commitments are broken into the commitments that the Open Government Partnership internal review mechanism labeled certain commitments as being particularly high value. And so we have those high value commitments there as well so that the public can see those jumping down. We just Monday released a self assessment of how we believe the US government is doing in implementing our Fifth National Action Plan. It touches also on the code creation process that is now out for 60 days. Well, I guess now 58 days of public comment. I'll be happy to put a link to that in the chat after. But we do hope that the public reads our self assessment and provides feedback so we can incorporate everyone's thoughts and interests into it. 75 countries. I said 100. Good. Thank you, Alex, in the chat. Apologies. So for self assessment, I mentioned it's been published in the Federal Register. It's open for a period of time and we'll be reviewing those comments working with GSA leadership to incorporate them to the final draft and getting that published both on our website but also submitted to the Open Government Partnership. Next slide. So the Six National Action Plan is a tentative schedule where we're looking to head with it. We're just finished up the initial planning and launching phases inside of government as we move into setting up our multi-stakeholder forum and the committee I'll be talking about in a minute. We will be going through the ideation phase and gathering feedback moving into next year, next calendar year, next fiscal year. We'll be doing the drafting, actually writing the document that includes reviews and public feedback and then publication and finally close out. So again, this is another sort of high level what we're looking to get out of the Six National Action Plan. I was just reading for yourself here but the real key here is building trust with civil society. It's the theme for the entire Six National Action Plan and incorporating, ensuring a true co-creation process through the committee I'll be talking about in a slide from now to build something that is both valuable to civil society, to the public that also helps the government grow in our Open Government commitments and priorities. And then near the last year. Great, next slide. So the advisory committee, we're in the process of getting this out. You'll see a public notice will be going out here in the next couple of weeks that officially announces the advisory committee. That notice will include both the initial announcement that it's out there as well as a call for nominations. So folks are interested in being, in nominating yourself or others for the committee please watch the federal register notice and more to come on that. Next slide. We've opened a federal community practice. I hinted on it a little bit earlier. We had our last, well, this slide's a lot of date. I didn't notice that. Our last last meeting was not in January. That was our first meeting was in January. We've also met in March and have another one planned for May where we bring together best practices and lessons learned through a community of Open Government champions across agencies to grow our Open Government paralysis within government and also give us the federal side of the multi-stakeholder forum by which to later draft commitments and receive feedback. So as we build up the public side through the advisory committee, as well as the public events we do, building up the federal side to be the counterpart to that to ensure the best possible plan for NAPSIX. I'll say last but not least a call to action as it were. The next slide is to stay connected. It's really important that we we continue to have sessions like this but also that we hear from members of the public and civil society at large. We've opened a new Open GovSiv listserv and the next slide should give you instructions on how to join. It's like magic. It's just like that. So you send an email to that very long email address. With join Open GovSiv in the subject line it'll then respond to you with it says 48 hours because that's the metric on the SLA but it's usually within a couple of minutes that you have to hit okay like respond to that email saying okay and then you're automatically added. There's no approval process. And with that I believe I'm at the end of my session and I believe we're taking questions at the end of the event but happy to answer any questions in chat that I can and in the meantime I'll turn it back to our hosts. Thank you so much Daniel. We're really excited to continue to partner with you and work with you and stakeholders on the development of Open Government Partnership commitments and I hope that and encourage all the agencies online to join the listserv. We can stay current and participate. Bobby I'm just going to pause for a second and ask Daniel not York but Daniel Lovenson, my colleague and I just have there been any chat comments that have come in from our agency FOIA partners. I don't see anything. I just wanted to triple check before we move on. No there is one comment that there's 75 countries in the Open Government Partnership not 175 for the internal government FOIA partners. Okay got it thank you and Daniel York thank you again for joining us really appreciate it. Thank you again for the opportunity. Yep Bobby back over to you. Yeah thank you I'll go to the next slide and we can go ahead and skip over to the next slide. There we go. So as I said we wanted to provide updates since OIP and OJS efforts and work over since our last meeting and of course this time of year I share my gratitude to all the agencies and thank they thank you for all the work that you put in to compile your annual FOIA reports and chief FOIA reports as we've closed out another year of reporting. Agencies annual FOIA reports and chief FOIA reports are not available online. All of the annual FOIA report data of course is on FOIA.gov and we really greatly appreciate the collaboration with all agencies and ensuring that we're compliant with our reporting obligations. Quick reminder that the quarter two fiscal year annual the quarter two annual report data quarterly report data is due next week if your agency will be delayed in submitting. That data please let us know so that we are make sure that once you do have it up there in FOIA.gov it's published publicly and of course we're always available to advise, answer or help with any questions regarding reporting please reach out to our FOIA compliant staff. Next slide. So now that we have fiscal year 2023 data available I just wanted to highlight some high level data points and some insight on what fiscal year 2023 looked like. Of course we will be also publishing soon in the coming weeks our comprehensive summary of the annual FOIA reports which will break down each of the data elements each of the data points that are in the reports but we can see that this was a historical year for FOIA. In the last fiscal year we hit a milestone of breaking for the first time ever receiving over one million requests and as you can see this is a nearly 30 percent increase from the number of requests that were received in fiscal year 2022. Next slide. Well there are 120 agencies and this is certainly a staggering number of of incoming requests. Five agencies really received overwhelmingly the most requests in the government. DHS, DOJ, VA, NARA and DOD received 82 percent of all of these requests with other agencies receiving the latter 18 percent. Next slide. So in order to meet the demand and matching the demand of the incoming agencies also hit a historical milestone in the number of requests they processed processing over one million requests and slightly more than the number of requests that were received during the fiscal year and this was a 28 percent increase from the number of requests that were processed from the prior fiscal year. Next slide. And similarly and logically the same five agencies that received the most requests processed 82 percent of all the requests that the government received. Next slide. So the result of all of this in fiscal year 2023 was a slight decrease in the number of requests that were backlogged and so we were able to achieve backlog reduction this fiscal year. Again these are just some high-level statistics beyond the lookout for our annual four report summary which will cover all data data points from the processing times, the dispositions of requests, proactive disclosures and the costs for administering the FOIA. Next slide. We also wanted to take a reminder on the requirement that we all share. It's actually a requirement to provide estimated date of completions to requesters upon request. One of the most common inquiries that OIP and I believe OGIS gets from the public is attempts to try to get estimated dates of completion. We do have guidance on providing estimated dates of completion and of course are always available to health agencies that are having trouble formulating a estimated date of completion for requests and will soon, will approve you that will soon be issuing new guidance on this topic with regard to the administrative appeal process. Next slide. So last meeting we were excited to announce that in October, just a month prior to our last meeting, we had released the new DOJ search tool on FOIA.gov that helps the public locate information or the best agency where they should direct their FOIA request. As hopefully you know, the tool contains six predefined user journeys on commonly sought types of records and it also allows users to enter their own search terms where a combination of logic, base and machine learning functionality provides the suggested documents or the agencies for the user. And so now that we've had the system for some time, we've been reviewing the data analytics on how it's being used and like to share some of that today. So just last month, we hit over 50,000 queries of the users of the search tool and we found that most users are independently selecting one of our predefined user journeys, 58 percent in fact and an additional 14 percent are being put into those user journeys based off the search terms they're submitting. And this was good for us because it reinforced what we observed during discovery that a lot of the requesters that are coming to FOIA.gov are looking for commonly common types of records or common themes. The remaining 28 percent who entered search terms received a response from the tool with regard to an agency or document averaging just over one agency per query and three publicly available documents, which we hope indicates that they are getting targeted responses that are helpful. But we will continue to share our observations of how the new tool is being used. Next slide. And of course, as we mentioned, we're using our observations and this data to continue to refine and build on the tool that we built. In October, when we announced the launch, we announced that this is just the initial release and so we do have plans for a search tool 2.0 and we've already begun working on that. We've observed from the data analytics that most users are looking for, for example, law enforcement records. And so that is a now user journey that we're working on as a predefined tab. So this may include records about law enforcement policy, records on individual cases, and records on enforcement in different areas of law, such as environmental law and consumer protection. The user journey, the new user journey will also provide clarifying information to the user about how to find commonly sought information that is not available for FOIA, such as court records and state and local police records. We're also exploring, as far as our build to the 2.0 version, ways for agencies to ensure that the data that's powering the machine learning stays current. So we're planning to have new proactive disclosure guidance to establish more structured and standard ways of posting FOIA logs and posting frequent requested records that are subject to the proactive disclosure requirements of the FOIA. And we hope this will establish not only a better power tool, but also make those records themselves more accessible. And ideally, we can get to the point where agencies can provide this information in nearly real time to update it to so that we could ensure that information that's of high interest posting a post that's been posted appears as part of the search results as soon as possible. As always, we very much appreciate the collaboration with agencies and us all with the public in developing these tools and would very much welcome continued feedback as we work to make them even better. Next slide. We're also very excited to highlight that the FOIA business standards that we have been working with and have worked with the council with for some time now are pending public comment on regulations.gov. We welcome comments on those draft business standards through May 17th. And then we look forward to finalizing these standards to help agencies and the public to streamline the development of FOIA technology to best meet agency and public needs. Next slide. Finally, I wanted to highlight the recent GAO report that examined backlogs across the federal government. The report was just issued this past March and looked at the causes of backlog increases and how agencies have worked to address them. It also assessed existing resources related to backlog reduction and the stride the perspectives of government and non-government stakeholders. In conducting this engagement, GAO looked at agency chief for officer reports and annual for reports on FOIA.gov, met with agencies and non-agency stakeholders and reviewed existing guidance and resources. I'd like to highlight in particular and see reporting data on this engagement, which is something we observe in prior GAO engagements, which reinforces not only the importance of these reports and the work that you put into them for the public, but also for congressional oversight of agency FOIA administration. Next slide. The culmination of the report that GAO issued included four recommendations for OIP that fall into two general buckets. The first two recommendations suggested OIP issued guidance to agencies on creating backlog reduction plans. We were in fact based off of a DOJ, backlog reduction initiative already working on putting together best practices and guidance on the development of effective backlog reduction plans. We look forward to holding a best practices workshop in the upcoming months to share some of that and have agencies invite agencies to share some of their best practices for developing backlog reduction plans and also an issuing guidance to agencies on how best and the most effective ways to produce backlog reduction plans that would be impactful. The other two recommendations focused on the agency's processing times as reported in their annual FOIA reports, specifically for decentralized agencies and calculating their agency overall processing times average average median processing times. And in accordance to our guidance and in the annual FOIA report handbook, agencies that are decentralized should be calculating those based off true averages and mediums and not an average of an average or a median of a median. And so while we do look at that here at OIP, like a spot scan, that's what we've been doing. Going forward, we're going to see how we can also help validate that and examine that more closely in our review process. But of course, the ultimate responsibility of the reporting data is of course with the agencies. Next slide. And with that, if there are no other questions, if there's no questions in the chat, I wasn't following the chat. I'm happy to answer any questions in the chat first, I guess, actually. Bobby, there is one question from our colleague from EPA, Temeb, on guidance for developing backlog reduction plans. Will you invite comment from other federal agencies on the draft guidance before finalizing? Yes, we will invite, definitely invite comments and want to work with agencies. And that's also part of the the idea of having the best practices workshop before the guidance. So stay tuned and we'll be in touch. Okay, great. Thank you so much. So it's my turn, some updates from OGIS, the FOIA ombudsman's office. Next slide, please, Candace. So since we last met, OGIS has continued to be very active. In the last six months, we have posted 16 blog posts on the FOIA ombudsman, which if you have not already joined to follow, please do so today. We have posted over 100 times on X formerly Twitter. We have hosted three FOIA advisory committee meetings, more on that in a moment. We have engaged with agencies on 15 different compliance issues. We have reviewed 31 agency regulations. We have opened 2,636 new requests for assistance and closed 2,835 requests. And we have held virtual training sessions of our popular dispute resolution for FOIA professionals for two different agencies. And we also had a very successful Sunshine Week event on AI, which is available on the NARA YouTube channel, if you missed it. And I do invite everyone to go there and take a listen. It was actually a very successful event and lots of great panelists, including our very own Bobby Tulebian and Eric Stein, who we'll be presenting later on. We are pleased that the efficiencies we're gaining through our new case management system that we have implemented to help track, manage, and process our cases has helped us to keep up with increases in our cases and maintain positive levels of productivity. Next slide, please. It's hard to believe, but we are only two months away from the end of the fifth term of the FOIA advisory committee. The three subcommittees, implementation, modernization, and resources have all been hard at work. In fact, earlier this year and at the end of last year, the committee had already passed two recommendations. 2023-01, the committee recommended that OIP issue guidance stating that whenever an agency withholds information pursuant to Exception 5, the agency should identify corresponding privileges invoked. And the most recommendation sorry that was passed earlier this year, recommendation 2024-01, called for the Office of Information Policy to issue a draft model determination letter written and endorsed by the FOIA advisory committee as a best practice reference for agencies. And this most recent recommendation 2024-01 that I just mentioned was the first time the committee formally solicited and obtained public input and feedback during the shaping of this document. So we were very pleased to see that process. At the April 4th committee meeting, which we held last month, I'm sorry earlier this month, 11 additional recommendations were discussed and passed. If you missed that meeting, it is up on our Naughty YouTube channel and I invite everyone to take a listen. At our next committee meeting on May 9th, we anticipate three additional recommendations to be discussed and passed from the implementation subcommittee. This should be our final set and we'll bring the grant in total to 16 recommendations for this term. The last two meetings of the FOIA advisory committee are Thursday, May 9th and Thursday, June 13th, both beginning at 10 a.m. They will be virtual and live-streamed on our Naughty YouTube channel. Please mark your calendars and remember to visit our website for instructions to register on Eventbrite. As always, the FOIA advisory committee welcomes and encourages your ideas and suggestions at any time. Please let us know your ideas for improving the FOIA process. We definitely want to hear from all of you, those hard-working FOIA professionals out there who are facing FOIA realities on a regular basis and please keep up all the fantastic work that you're already doing. Next slide please. I just want to mention that last month on March 29th, 2024, we published the FOIA Ombuds Observer on the Neither Confirmed Nor Denied or GLOMAR and the link is there on the slide. So please go ahead and visit that link and we hope that you will be reading it. It is geared really primarily for our public stakeholders but we certainly encourage all agencies to take a look as well. I think we've included some very good tips so please check that out. Next slide please. I just want to take a minute to solicit from our fellow government FOIA professionals watching us today. There are a number of you there. We are soliciting a working group that we would like to put together to work on a CFL council charter and bylaws. And Bobby and I would really welcome any and all volunteers for that effort. It's really a long time coming. We've been wanting to do this for a while. It's definitely time so we hope you will consider volunteering. Please drop a chat in today's WebEx chat and we will take note of that or please contact me or Bobby directly and we will be happy to to sign you up to the working group. Next slide please. I hope that all of you take advantage of the many resources available on our website and that you tune in to all of our past public meetings available on the NARA YouTube channel. OGIS often solicits input from FOIA community and we want to hear both from requesters and agency FOIA professionals. Again, we invite all of you to subscribe to our blog the FOIA ombudsman and please follow our X feed. Our goal is to help improve the FOIA process for both requesters and agency FOIA professionals. FOIA programs as we know are only as good as the FOIA professionals so I want to thank all of you for everything that you do to fulfill the requirements of the FOIA in each of your agencies. Next slide please. Bobby over to you. Thank you Alina. Let's now turn to report outs from our two committees. Both of which have been hard at work since we last met. We'll first hear from our co-chairs of the committee on cross-agency collaboration innovation or we like to say co-fackey. Abby Oly and Michael Bell and then we'll hand off the baton to the technology committee co-chair Eric Stein. And before we launch into report outs we want to take this opportunity to announce a sad day. Eric Stein is stepping down from his technology committee co-chair role as he has been asked to step into another position at the State Department. We are grateful for Eric's exceptional dedication and hard work as the founding co-chair of the technology committee. Eric's ability to collaborate communicate and steer the committee towards several important accomplishments has been unwavering. The successes achieved by the technology committee under Eric's guidance is a testament to his outstanding leadership abilities and relentless work ethic. Thank you again Eric for your tireless efforts, dedication and commitment to the successes of the technology committee. And I share those thanks but also very excited and pleased to announce that Gorka Garcia-Milena, boy officer at NIH and a current member of the technology committee has agreed to take over as co-chair. Gorka has already been involved with several different working groups and he and Mike Sarich will be great together. Mike has promised to show him the co-chair ropes. We appreciate Gorka for volunteering and would like to thank him in advance for the anticipated hard work he will be putting in in this co-chair role. Next slide and handing it over to Abbie and Michael. Thanks Bobby. Good morning everyone. Good morning everyone. My name is Michael Bell. I'm the full officer for the Department of Transportation. I think Abbie and I spoke over each other just a moment ago so Abbie if you'd like to introduce yourself again. Sorry about that. I'm Abbie Oewoli and I'm the chief boy officer at the Consumer Product Safety Commission and co-chair with Mike on co-chair. Great thanks. And I don't think we have any formal slides but we can just give the next slide in case there's a placeholder there while we speak. And I did see there was, yeah that was it. So you can go back then. I apologize. Yeah I did see we have a question in the chat so I'll address that in our introduction. I'm gonna get us started just speak about the cross agency collaboration innovation committee. It was a mouthful from the beginning of last three years but I think Koukaki has now taken hold as the name of the committee and I think it's a good testament for all the hard work everyone's done that. If you say Koukaki or you see there's a meeting from Koukaki coming up they know what it is and so I'd like to thank everyone on the committee for doing that. Basically our committee first met just over three years ago and we've been meeting since March of 2021 and regarding the minutes and the postings we actually have had discussions on where we want to house our documents so it's really just a it's a transmission issue on our part. I apologize for that so we'll get stuff posted. We'll at least get it to the OGIS website for now but we are discussing the best place for our products to be placed so that people out in the FOIA community can access them. So again apologies for not updating the website but we will take care of that. I mentioned that we first started meeting back in 2021. The first thing we did was a lot of hard work and organizing which was basically forming three subcommittees and we're going to hear updates on each subcommittee coming up in a moment but the subcommittees are the government information specialist professionalism subcommittee. That was one of the big ones coming out of the 2020 FOIA advisory committee where there's a recommendation to take a look at the job series. The other one since remember we were formed in late 2020 with our charter was the pandemic and virtual FOIA office subcommittee. That was supposed to take the lessons that we learned during the pandemic from going fully virtual and trying to bring them into the new hybrid offices that we all have pretty much transitioned to. And finally the third subcommittee is on resources. That subcommittee takes a look at ways especially for smaller FOIA offices to get access to the resources out there that allow them to do their jobs better. So during 2021 we formed subcommittees. We did a lot of planning. We formed our objectives and set our goals for Kukaki. Then by 2022 then we wanted to have a good solid foundation so we did a lot of data gathering. We conducted a survey of FOIA professionals throughout the government both online and at the ASAP American Society of Access Professionals training conference. Many members did interviews with FOIA leadership from around the government and we had a session at the FOIA training conference for ASAP where it was like town hall session where we heard directly from FOIA professionals just to hear you know what was good about their jobs what's bad about their jobs and it was really even better than the survey to gather information because we were hearing from people directly. And while we heard some oh some negatives as people were letting you know the challenges they were facing we also heard a lot of good things that you didn't hear directly from them that people want to do a good job but some of them do feel hamstrung by you know a lack of resources they want more training and they had questions about career advancement and I think that these are all the things that Kukaki is trying to take a look at to try to produce to help you know agency FOIA personnel do their jobs better. And then finally for 2023 it was time that we really wanted to start putting products out there making a difference and not just meeting but putting things out there for the FOIA professional to take a look at. The big thing from 2023 besides going to the the national training conference having a town hall was that the resources subcommittee held a best practices workshop in October of 2023 and that was very well attended we had several panels where we had people from all over the government come and talk about how they planned the resources for their FOIA offices how you know they looked to gather things help them do their jobs and that was a very very good session there. In 2024 we're now planning to have more products out there both the GIS subcommittee and the pandemic virtual FOIA subcommittee we'll be producing papers soon and other things which you'll hear about shortly when we get into the subcommittee updates. Finally Kukaki is going to conduct a follow-up survey from one we did two years ago and this is just to make sure that we're still on the right track we're still looking at the right targets and we just want to hear again from the FOIA professionals out there to make sure that we're doing our job to take a look at things that concern them and literally about an hour before this meeting started I sent an email to ASAP to lobby to make sure we can get another uh Kukaki and maybe technology combined town hall at the training conference coming up in June because that was really a good venue for FOIA professionals to let us know what they need to do their jobs and that's really Kukaki's number one purpose. Okay we're going to talk about the three subcommittees now provide updates for what they've done I'm going to start with the GIS subcommittee again that came directly out of the FOIA advisory committee and the GIS subcommittee is really just looking at ways to promote job initiatives and career trajectories for FOIA professionals as most of you know the GIS job series is fairly new it's been around only for about a decade or so and we just want to build on that and identify areas where we can coordinate with the agencies and other organizations like DOJ, OIP, OGIS to try to you know work on the job series there. Now the subcommittee did form several objectives that they wanted to work on very specifically they wanted to focus on recruiting strategies you know how do we find the best people to fill the FOIA jobs that are out there you know what can we do to locate them because sometimes it's not just you're not just able to put a job announcement out there you actually have to go out there and find them recruit them tell them you know why this is a good career field for them to be in. Next once you find them you got to find a way to hire them and keep them in your office once you do find them because if they don't have a career path that they don't know you know I'm not talking known as a careerist but you do want to know where you're going to go in the future where may be in five years and that's something that a lot of GIS professionals sometimes they see an artificial ceiling you know where are they going to go and so the GIS subcommittee they've been looking at having more ladder positions you know 12, 13, 14 something like that we did that here at DOT last year and we were able to attract a lot of good applicants for that once we went from simply applying for say we're putting out a GS-12 announcement we had a 12, 13, 14 announcement and we had a lot of great applicants. Another thing that the subcommittee looked at was uniform pay scale you know we found that some agencies a GS-13 was doing the same job that a GS-11 was doing at another agency so we want to make sure there's some conformity there so that you know we say if you're if you have the qualifications of your GS-12 these are the type of roles that you can and should be doing in your job and finally they're trying to come up with key components of the FOIA professionals there's been some attempts at it before where people you know they want some kind of certification testing just ways that we can tell that if you're a FOIA professional here's what you should know here's the kind of training you should get and just what to expect so that's that's really the targets of the subcommittee and over the last couple years they have made a lot of good progress I mentioned the survey that we conducted and what we're going to do again and it was the GIS subcommittee members who went out and spoke with and interviewed FOIA leadership from around the government you know what are they looking for in a FOIA professional what do they want to bring to their office and how can we put it down on paper so that people can see this is what you should aspire to if you want to work in FOIA and you need you know have a good basis of certification there this summer they're going to be putting out a white paper we'll make sure it goes on the website once it's out there and the white paper is in final editing right now we are just making some tweaks getting it through Obby and myself, DOJ and OGIS and it should be coming out within the next month or two hopefully by the June training conference for ASAP so that we can have a big make a big splash at the conference there other than that this year they're going to try to participate in the survey questions again make sure that they're on target for what they're looking at improving and then finally they're thinking about having a online or open event just like the resources subcommittee did but this might be sort of like a GIS career day just a day where they can focus on the career field bring in experts from HR for a leadership just things that we can talk about the FOIA career field and get feedback and give guidance on people who are interested in maybe even entering the field or continuing within the field so they can advance in their careers so that's all I have for the GIS subcommittee I'll now turn things over to Obby thank you Mike and I will read out updates from the pandemic subcommittee and the resources subcommittee so for the pandemic subcommittee the chair is Shantae Stanley Mike told you a bit about that subcommittee but it is focused on taking lessons learned from the remote work environment during COVID-19 to transform FOIA offices to thrive in a virtual environment they emphasize identifying tactics techniques and procedures necessary for effective virtual telework to process agency FOIA responses and to that end in 2022 and 2023 they surveyed government FOIA professionals compiled data from surveys distributed to FOIA professionals and analyzed the data the surveys that Mike mentioned that we handed out during the ASAP and a lot of you responded to which was very very helpful after reviewing those surveys the pandemic committee subcommittee drafted best practices for transitioning from an in-office location to a telework virtual location and hybrid work as well and they are in the process of finalizing that best practices document they received input from committee members and they will send it up for review with the target date of getting that out in the summer of this year and their next steps they want to be a part of that survey for this year's ASAP to survey FOIA professionals to gather information on their how their transition back to in-office work has been and what other post-pandemic work issues have come up for them that can be studied and possibly improved through collaboration and then for our resources subcommittee which is chaired by Brandon Gaylord they identify opportunities for standardization of a variety of resources that should be made available to FOIA offices with that special emphasis on small government agencies that Mike mentioned last year they held the best practices workshop in October excuse me with FOIA leaders from across the government who discussed how to build a rebuild a successful agency information program FOIA technology where it can help where does it fall short and innovative FOIA staffing opportunities it was a really great program and we had a high attendance and a transcript of that program will be out shortly on FOIA.gov and to follow up the success of that best practices workshop the subcommittee is now looking at developing a FOIA officer reference library the initial subjects that they're considering in phase one would include FOIA management acquisitions and SOP documents and the timeline for that phase one a rollout of the library is 12 to 18 months right now there's discussion to have it hosted on FOIA.gov that hasn't been finalized yet but we are looking forward to getting that reference library and then in addition to our outstanding subcommittee work we're also putting together a federal FOIA hiring guide called the FOIA toolkit with the goal of harmonizing FOIA hiring across the federal government right now it's in the drafting stage and has a target publication date of June 2024 so that concludes the readout from co-cacky thank you to all of our subcommittee chairs and members who are working to advance federal FOIA because collaboration creates better processes and output for FOIA professionals as well as the public and if you're not currently a co-cacky member we invite you to join us we always welcome new members there's so much to do and we have monthly meetings with really lively discussions at the end we always leave time for people to crowdsource solutions to individual members issues in their own FOIA agency and it's just it's a lot of fun so if you are interested in joining us feel free to email Mike or myself I put the link to our subcommittee our committee webpage in the chat and thank you very much for joining us and now I'll throw it back to you Alina thank you I'll just say any questions I wasn't able to follow the chat while we're talking I guess we'll give the opportunity now or I guess maybe later yes if you both could please stick around that would be great there are a number of questions in the chat from the public side so I don't see any chat questions from our government colleagues but if you could stick around that would be wonderful and I just want to correct one thing that Albie had mentioned at the beginning everything that we're posting now related to the Chief FOIA office or council is on FOIA.gov before we have been posting it on both the OGIS website and OIP's website but now everything is on FOIA.gov so please take a look at that there and listen we'll get better posting stuff I promise no worries you guys are doing a great job thank you again and I'm now going to turn it over to Eric Stein who has you know already been introduced so Eric over to you good morning Alina good morning everyone thank you for the opportunity to present here today my name is Eric Stein and I'm the co-chair of the technology committee we're giving a few updates about the work we've been doing since the last meeting including an upcoming event that may be of interest so may you please go to the next slide. First some background and context about the Chief FOIA officer technology committee we were established in 2018 our first meeting was actually shortly after this September 2018 date here on the slide and the technology committee was created in response to a recommendation from the 2016 to 2018 FOIA advisory committee so it's a testament to the work done by the FOIA advisory council and committee and since then it's hard to believe it's been over five years we've formed a variety of working groups and held a series of events and have been able to develop some guidance papers that are on the FOIA.gov link provided here on the slide but you would go to FOIA.gov and look at the technology committee page at the moment the committee of the technology committee has six active working groups those six are our data working group our five-way compliance and collaborative tools working group FOIA classified information FOIA IT platforms search and AI and technology best practices or we have a FOIA reference model working group that completed the deliverable last year and since it still is available as a body but the six of the active previous six mentioned was actively working and I bring this up because when we talk on the next coming up soon about upcoming events the work we've been doing has been focused in the area of the six working groups the technology committee continues to meet monthly and we have approximately 50 representatives from 25 agencies we are always looking to have new members join us so if you're interested in technology in any of the areas just mentioned for the working group we're just generally interested in understanding some of the discussions around these areas we highly encourage you to volunteer or just come join our meetings and that could be the extent of your commitment or if you're interested in joining one of our working groups they're always looking for additional support as well I have to say for the past five plus years now the monthly she FOIA officer technology committee meetings were an hour I very much look forward to every month innovation and engagement in the FOIA community on how to improve FOIA programs throughout the government and even specific agency issues as they emerged next slide please so I just mentioned we're always recruiting so if you're interested please contact OIP or OGIS and consider joining the technology committee I want to talk now about the next gen FOIA tech showcase 2.0 so next month we are hosting a two-day event for a next gen FOIA tech showcase and we just as the background we had hosted a next gen tech showcase two years ago and it was all virtual event and the way that the showcases structured and set up is that there was a request for information that was issued where companies could submit papers and based on the criteria and that request for information saying that they're interested in participating this the showcase allows the private sector and companies to showcase their capabilities based on the criteria in the request for information so what technology do you have for case management or a variety of other topics so the one from 2022 we were very much fortunate to have really good turnout participation and the papers we received I believe we posted online but definitely the videos as well each company was allowed to make up to a five minute video at the showcase event we play those videos and then allow agencies that tend to ask questions of those companies about their capabilities their videos and this year's theme for 2024 is two fold one is to look really at the FOIA case processing and backlog challenges or capabilities that technology can offer in assisting and processing cases and the second is looking at advanced technology including but not limited to artificial intelligence or AI which is very much promising in the in the FOIA information management field and we want to better understand what capabilities are available right now or will be offered in the future possibly by vendors so that government agencies can better understand and plan and for their needs as well these sessions are excellent collaboration offer opportunities for collaboration between the government and the private sector and I think we have already received we received great interest in this year's event as well and the request for information the link's available here it's publicly available ended just on the just recently on April 13th so very much looking forward to another successful event for the next gen FOIA showcase Eric if you don't mind I'm just going to interrupt for one quick this is hot breaking news because we've had so many vendors express interest in participating in the next gen FOIA tech showcase just yesterday we made a decision to expand it to three days so we're going to hold it on Tuesday May 14th Wednesday May 15th and Thursday May 16th so hopefully folks can join us for all three days there'll be slightly shorter days which is good thanks that's terrific news so glad to hear there's such great turnout and it sounds like there'll be a variety of options for agencies to hear from vendors as agencies really are looking at process technology and the different means of improving case processing and it's not technology alone that's going to solve many of the problems or that we're facing with the challenges of backlogs increased requests increased volume electronic data but really understanding what are the challenges what are the processes what are the workflows what are the options available with technology and through that the innovation that that ensues to determine possible paths ahead to for the best possible performance in agencies and their FOIA programs based on available resources and timelines and so forth so very exciting a third day of the next gen showcase 2.0 finally I was previously mentioned this will be my final meeting as the co-chair of the technology committee I recently started a temporary assignment as the principal deputy assistant secretary in my bureau here at the state department which is a great opportunity and I'm very excited about however I as a result I step down as a technology co-chair and just wanted to say thank you to Bobby OIP Alina Oges to my co-chair Mike Sarich to our various members of the tech committee our sibling work our sibling committee and koukaki the FOIA advisory council FOIA advisory committee the participants in our next gen showcase in the past the public inquiries the ones from the private sector just thank you to our FOIA program here at state as well really enjoyed tremendously this opportunity and I'm actually very happy to hear that Gorka will be serving as the co-chair as a former member of the FOIA advisory committee he's bringing great perspective of both from a federal FOIA perspective and also having worked with engagement with the private sector in the public so thank you again for this opportunity the best of luck moving forward and I will be around for questions at the end of the session as well thank you thank you Eric we really appreciate it so we're definitely way ahead of schedule but we definitely will leave the time for public comments at the end as we normally do Candace next slide please so we have now reached the public comment section of our meeting I do know there's been a number of chat comments that I'm going to ask Dan Levinson to read out loud so hopefully the questions will be directed to different participants today and hopefully they're all still hanging around and are ready to respond we look forward to hearing from any member of the public who has an idea or comment they would like to share I also want to remind everyone that you may also submit written comments to the council using the comment submission form on the OGIS website if you have written comments for the chief FOIA officers council please visit OGIS's public comments portal at archives.gov forward slash OGIS forward slash public dash comments and direct your comments to the chief FOIA officers council please note that all comments submitted to the chief FOIA officers council are shared with OIP for consideration of posting on the council's website on FOIA.gov. Moral comments presented to the chief FOIA officers council are available in the meeting transcript that would be posted on I'm sorry to the FOIA minutes sorry to the minutes that would be posted on FOIA.gov and in the videos of the council's meetings that are available on NARA's YouTube channel so at this point Bobby anything to add or correct me on because I kind of fumbled that last one no transcript but we will be making a set of minutes available. That's right and that's perfect I think we're ready for public comments. Okay so I know we have a number of chat comments so Candace I'm going to ask you to hold off on opening up our telephone lines for a minute and turn to our colleagues and Dan over to you and if you could please read out loud I know we have a number of comments go ahead please. Absolutely hi can everyone hear me? Yes you're a little soft. I'm still a little soft okay much better. All right let me hold the microphone up to my to my face so we had I'm going to start with the two more technical comments we had one asking about the ability to save the closed captioning from the WebEx and I would like the event producer let them know that that would have to have been turned on before the meeting so I'd like to remind everyone in attendance that we are simulcasting this on YouTube and the closed captions on that simulcast are on and will be captured in the recording on YouTube forever. The second question on the technical side was if the FOIA ombuds will join threads or mastodon instead of Twitter former or X formerly known as Twitter and I would like to say that we would be open to that as soon as the National Archives it investigates and confirms that those are platforms that NARA as a whole is open to as it stands NARA does not use those platforms and we are not able to use them until we get or until you know the main agency approves them and with that more substantive comments. First will OIP add new commitments to a National Action Plan 5.5 to implement in 2025 while a new plan is co-created or for example would OIP commit issue and guidance recommending a release to one released all policy model on the successful approach adopted by the State Department. Thank you for that question and of course we're open to additional open government commitments and look forward to working with Daniel York and his team on co-creation of the next National Action Plan and also any other open government initiatives that we're going to take on at the Department of Justice and certainly we'll consider during those discussions and engagements things like proactive disclosure policies. Okay thank you so speaking of proactive disclosure have any agencies proactively disclose the records that have been hosted on FOIA online on their FOIA reading rooms or data.gov as structured data and if so which ones and if not are there any pointers as to where the public can access those files that were on FOIA online. So I don't have that I don't I don't have that information specific to each agency. We did before FOIA online Sunstead we did send a memo to agencies reminding them of their obligations of posting certain records in their FOIA libraries and maintaining that but I don't have I don't have insight into how each each of the agencies on FOIA online handle that. All right thank you so in terms of OIP issuing guidance to mandate that agencies disclose logs as open data is there any conversation with OMB to coordinate and reinforce the message about proactive disclosures being open data and not closed proprietary documents. So is there any conversation with OMB? So certainly as the agency we will continue to work with and collaborate with OMB and OMB has been very supportive of all especially with FOIA.gov and the wizard where this is uh we're we're starting to develop this guidance and so we appreciate the partnership and we'll continue to work with OMB. Great thank you. Would OIP consider opening an RFI on a release to one release to all policy? Yeah like I said we look forward to co-creation and continued discussions on things like the release to one release to all so certainly we'll consider everything. All right bear that thank you. Do you currently track which records have been requested three or more times and or do you track which records have been released three or more times? So the rule of three that's that's codified in the statute is that records that have been requested and released three times that a discloseable portion should be posted in agencies FOIA libraries and those metrics of what the number of records agencies post are captured in the annual FOIA report and then also as far as tracking how agencies are doing it and keeping agencies and keeping ourselves accountable to how we identify those three frequently requested records we do ask agencies in the proactive disclosure portion of their chief FOIA officer report to report on the different ways they track for frequently requested records. Great so it's captured in the FOIA officer report. This is a very broad question so maybe it's not specific it doesn't seem specific to OIP but do all FOIA officers or offices have secure internet connections and other capabilities that allow for full-time remote work and if not are there plans to invest in that capacity? Again that seems much more broad than just OIP but if you have any insight to that? Certainly and I think you know a lot of agencies adjusted during the pandemic some were more telework ready and remote ready than others but I know a lot of agencies have overcome those hurdles but different agencies have different challenges as far as remote and telework particularly when it comes to classified work but other than that I don't have any specific insight to which agencies and what their their laptop situation is. All right that's fair. We have another commenter that was asking about the plans for staffing and the ability to acquire more analysts to process FOIA requests sort of across government I know this has been a huge issue but this questioner is asking about just increased capacity and increased staffing and any petition to acquire more analysts. Again I think that's going to vary by agency. The agency is certainly one of the things I know Cokaki has observed is that agencies have oh and the technology committee agencies have varying degrees and varying access to the resources and varying needs and so each agency is responsible for examining the resources they have and of course resources is something that we often find is limited in a lot of different areas. That makes sense yeah. Two more questions actually and one of them is directed to Eric Stein but let me ask Bobby you this the other one first. So why aren't there why aren't the showcases open to the public and to the press and who does it serve to keep them government only or between the government and the vendors? Make the next gen showcases. Eric do you want to take that one or do you want me to talk to you? I think it's a good point. This is our second time doing the showcases so I think the first time it was such a success and Alina as you just pointed out we actually have more interest this time which is very exciting. So a couple of thoughts come to mind. First there's a process for RFIs for request for information that agencies follow so there were some steps and procedures we had to follow and getting just the request for information out and hosting the event. I also I just checked we posted not only the responses from the vendors that came in but the videos as well proactively released to make sure that we're open and transparent about what the vendors were sharing what they were presenting and what the federal agencies saw. I think one of the main purposes or one or two of the main objectives of these sessions are to raise awareness among federal agencies of the capabilities that are being offered by different vendors in the private sector and this was a challenge in 2022 because we're still in the pandemic you couldn't have like you know your more traditional trade shows or conferences or events plus those those types of events cost money need space it comes into it was a whole bunch of challenges that were prohibited us from having like a physical event or maybe if we had done something like that we could have included the public but it was also discussed how as the technology committee we wanted to use technology to enable these discussions via Webex or online platforms and discussions and that's what we were able to do in 2022 and we're trying to do again in 2024. So I think you know as these showcases go on if there's a 3.0 or if there's a future iteration there are a lot of different options available but I believe the intent this time around is to also release the papers relieved by the vendors to release the videos that are made and I'd also just mention and I forgot to mention this during the technology committee session a section before update please share feedback and ideas up front this goes for everyone here whether you're a FOIA program member of the public a member of the private sector submit feedback to either Koch hacky or the technology committee directly or through OGIS or OIP we do receive it we do discuss it and it doesn't form decisions or just discussions about what the technology is going to do. We don't receive a lot of feedback believe it or not outside of these sessions and so I would encourage if there are thoughts or ideas especially like this one to share them so they can be discussed and considered because sometimes we're just doing the best we can with what we have and the time peers we have as well so that those are my thoughts on the showcase question I don't know Bobby and Alina if you have anything else before I turn to the other question directed to me. No I don't think I don't have anything to add I think you did a great job answering that Bobby. No thanks Eric I think you mentioned but if not we also will be posting the videos that the vendors are going to use or any of that. Yeah and they're worth they're worth watching they were very helpful I mean at the time two years ago agencies were really struggling to find what they're going to use for their case management system there was several agencies that found themselves that not having tools available so it helped to inform the decision making whether or not you know one of those vendors was selected I don't know it depends on the agency process of acquiring technology but it was important it was a great opportunity as we have right now with all the discussions of AI advanced technology and so forth to kind of figure out how will agencies in the government deal with the challenge of increased requests of growing volumes of data and so forth so I'm going to turn to the question Alex thank you for the kind note and also nice seeing you also during Sunshine Week the questions are has the adoption of a release to one release to all policy for proactive disclosure disclosing records requested under FOIA resulted in cost savings for the state state department as a result of publishing records in higher consistent demand I don't have a figure for cost savings the one cost avoidance that comes to mind is that instead of having FOIA employees check to see and analyze oh well is this request identical to this one or close to this one by by adopting release to one release to all we could we could at least not spend that time doing that analysis and instead just focus on posting content to our FOIA.state.gov public library or reading room virtual reading room so I don't know next question is any idea how much no not outside of the cost avoidance I just mentioned has it resulted in improved response times or other process improvements we have incorporated and looked at how requests how we could point requesters to information already released so that's helpful it by having more information and content on our virtual reading room it allowed us to also experiment and try new new ideas and process approaches such as the ones I presented during Sunshine Week with the artificial intelligence FOIA pilots that we recently had so that would be how I'd respond to that question and then how you or the technology committee have you or the technology committee created and shared best practices for the adoption of release to one release to all for other agencies I know but we've discussed it a few times and some of the themes that emerge from those discussions include that every agency structured a little bit differently so some agencies have an IT or technology component embedded in their FOIA programs others have to partner with a CIO or chief information office or shop or technology office some don't have the means of doing the types of postings at all or it's a challenge so I think the solution or the challenge is going to vary by agency so have we created or shared best practice I take it back we have shared best practices among the working group but we haven't created like or shared best practices document and I think I would go back to what Bobby previously said is the different things that the government DOJ and others are going to look at OGIS and so forth on what could be done in this space but there was recently mention of state's practice of release to one release to all by OGIS and OIP in a memo that went out or remember something that went out recently and I believe that could also be looked at as encouraging agencies to you know whenever possible and feasible to also consider adopting this approach to proactive disclosures or release to one release to all. Eric thank you so much for all of that. Dan Lovenson do we have any other questions that had come in during time in chat that we need to run through? I see comments but no specific questions. Okay well I see one additional comment that the commenter hopes that agencies will consider posting technologies using other FOIA pages along with associated costs maybe that's the one you're referring to. Thank you to our colleague Martha Murphy who just posted our email address again if anyone wants to send comments cfo-council at narra.gov and we're reminded also there's one more chat comment will DOJ do an open guv plan with stakeholders as it used to I guess that's directed towards Bobby. Thank you yep like I said we are committed and you know our office has been involved in a lot of initiatives that go to open government and the national action plans is this will be something we'll consider and I'll take back to the department as those plans involve more than just where. Thank you Bobby I appreciate that so let's open up our telephone lines Bobby are you ready for that? Let's do it. I'm going to ask you in a second to please provide instructions for any of our listeners on Webex how to ask a question or make a comment via telephone I want to invite our commenters to remember to limit your comments to three minutes please introduce yourself by name and affiliation before you speak and before you begin speaking and we will take it from there so Candace over to you please. As we begin the public comment period please click the raise hand icon located at the bottom of your screen to join the queue if you're not using Webex audio today you may press pound two on your telephone keypad to join the queue you'll be given three minutes to make your remarks if to assist you there is a timer on the right side of your screen it will begin counting down as soon as you start your remarks and you will hear a five second warning when your time is up you'll hear a tone when your line is unamuted at which time you may begin your comments so Candace do we have any speakers waiting to be heard we do I'm opening the line for Alex Howard thank you buddy I am so grateful to you all for offering such awesome and thoughtful answers I know I peppered you with questions but I've been enjoying the opportunity to do so forever you all have made you know much better foyer nerd and I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with you in the foyer advisory committee as a member as opposed to your frequent public commenter back at McGowan thank you all for your service thank you all for the readouts from the subcommittees I'm just over the moon to have gotten to sit here and listen to all this I think as I expressed I hope that you will come back in a session in person in DC once again but I'm grateful that this flexibility has allowed people to weigh in from all around the country and all around DC and and hopefully that that will continue in a hybrid fashion I just wanted to recognize that off the top Bobby I'm very grateful to hear that you are open to the idea of stakeholder engagement around a new plan I know that many different agencies have continued to do plans the Department of Justice hasn't done a new one since 2016 but in the context of a new national action plan I'm hearing and seeing some renewed activities around this as you know I was frustrated in the end of 2022 when although you you were part of the co-creation process the department chose three existing initiatives for the commitments for the national action plan the wizard the business standards thank you for taking comment and those you'll be hearing from us about that and improving the the toolkit but you didn't take anything from the civil society side bringing in recommendations from the committee or from the public comments that came in would do the department add an open government challenge commitment which is allowed under the open government partnership to add some more co-created commitments later this year may be coming out of this plan that you could then be implementing in 2025 because one thing Dan didn't mention is that the current plan is going to end at the end of this year and there won't be a new one in place until the end of 2025 and in the meantime they'll continue to be a lot of opportunity for the extraordinary staff you have at all the different agencies to continue to re-engage to revive the bonds the relationships and the interstitial tissue that characterized a lot of the very fruitful efforts around open government a decade ago that you all were involved in directly would you be willing to submit a challenge commitment or two or three to the national action plan independent of whatever gsa decides to do to show the department's commitment to this because i know you personally have done a lot and i guess that music means i'm done thank you alex i appreciate that and i appreciate the kind words um and very much in favor and we'll continue to um really endorse uh stakeholder engagement um either the uh three commitments that we're very proud to have the national action plan we're very much at the very beginning of um things we're working on so i was glad that we were able to get them in the last national action plan um and look forward to the many different ways we can engage stakeholders and where we want to um build on on those efforts bobby thanks um daniel york anything you want to add to any of this discussion regarding the next action a national action plan uh no not not much beyond what bobby said is where we'll continue uh keep on the lookout for the federal register as well as the the open give open gov civilists serve for opportunities to participate in uh the current uh stakeholder engagement sessions and future sessions for um the sixth national action plan okay thank you can't us do we have any other callers we have one more person in queue jackson i'm opening your line this is jackson at the last foyer advisory committee meeting i talked about three things first rights of civilian employees to free individual doj representation in foyer litigation gone bad citing 28 cfr at 50.15 second unauthorized records disposition complaints to nara third exploding foyer fee awards due to agency's utter behavior on civilian employee individual legal representation in foyer quote whenever the court orders the production of any agency records improperly withheld from the complainant and assesses against the united states reasonable attorney fees and other litigation costs the special counsel shall promptly initiate a proceeding to determine whether disciplinary action is warranted that is five usc 552 f i this is true even if the government ultimately produces records during litigation and then prevails on summary judgment having produced ordered records during litigation so if you were an agency employee involved in a messy foyer litigation where someone may have helped you with inaccurate sworn declarations or where records were altered or where records were destroyed you may seek immediate free individual doj legal representation in a closed case before a plaintiff files a fee petition with the court your agency counsel may have already obtained separate doj representation foyer is not exempt from other federal laws with serious consequences civilian employees must therefore protect their own interests litigation costs i read that litigation cases are exploding and that attorney and cost fee awards above $100,000 are increasing because of agency's utter behavior or bad behavior intentionally prolonging litigation for years hoping plaintiffs will quit in one case on pacer.gov the agency admitted that a foyer officer sworn declaration was materially false and the foyer officer admitted under out that he or she had altered records during litigation an agency manager admitted that he or she had destroyed records despite the agency being given five legal notices identifying records and with notices to preserve records for judicial review the agency cited parry versus block dc circuit 1982 as a reason for the court not referring matters to the special counsel but in parry the court had not ordered the production of records and the court offered an extensive apology to quote express our disapproval of the government's behavior visa v mr parry stating that the government acted in a disjointed, dilatory, and fitful fashion in one recently decided case in the district court of columbia nom's versus do d's department of the army the court awarded over $111,000 due to do d's author of behavior which only amounted to withholding documents to force litigation this is far less than the important behavior described in the pacer.gov case cited above and total billable fees were only reduced 18 percent in nom's versus do d also department of army did not place its civilian employees at risk of referral to special counsel whose decisions must be executed without recourse foyer is not exempt from other federal statutes civilian employees must therefore protect their own interests thank you okay jackson no identification or affiliation but thank you for all your comments um kandace um anything else that anyone else waiting to make any comments we have no further people in queue okay thank you very much does that bring us to the to the public comments yes i believe so i'm just gonna let's triple check with dan lovinson to make sure we didn't miss any other comments in the chat dam did we miss anything else um yes there's another question for bobby um given states great experience an example in a release to one release to all would oip consider adopting the approach uh i guess across the government or for the department of justice um yeah would would oip consider adopting that approach for the department of justice so oip um my office that processes for the senior leadership offices we practically do a release to one release all um and if you look at our foyer library you can see the wealth of um postings that we've been doing um of our uh our disclosures um and the components of the department were decentralized um just like other agencies have varying um numbers of requests and types of records they get and so um it varies the level of um proactive disclosure that they we do beyond the uh new statutory requirements of course we meet the statutory requirement and um as attorney general has encouraged all agencies um we strive to go well beyond it um because we do believe that proactive disclosures help um is the most efficient and effective way of informing the public of the government's activities and just uh briefly there was one further question um could you speak to this uh this questioner is requesting a link to the quote release to one release to all policy um so what we um we um like i said the attorney general's guidelines and our guidance encourages agencies to strive as close as they can to a release to one release to all um policy but we um a number of years ago uh conducted a pilot of um a number of agencies attempting to implement a proactive disclosure policy of release to one release to all and there was um and the numbers there was a couple of challenges um that were identified and in that process but a lot of also benefits and so that report is available on OIP's website under I believe the report section um there's a link to the the pilot and you can see both how the agencies implement the policy um and the findings based off their six months of trying to release to one release to all great thank you I believe those are the only questions I say great thank you so much Dan really appreciate it and thanks Bobby for answering all of that absolutely thank you um so I think that concludes our public comments uh section thank you Candace for advancing the slides um Bobby over to you for some closing remarks thank you Alina and thanks everyone for joining us for a really great meeting um vibrant discussion and special thanks to Daniel York um and our committee co-chairs Eric Michael and Obby um for the great presentations and insight to the work that they're doing uh and special thanks to all the FOIA professionals who are volunteering in their time to serve on the council's two committees and for all the great work you're doing um just one last plug please do reach out to us we've already I believe gotten some volunteers uh coming in please do reach out to us if you would like to participate um in either committee um and with that Alina I'll hand it back over to you to close us yeah thank you Bobby and by the way no prohibition on volunteering for both committees um and also just another plug for any volunteers that would like to help us create the chief way officers council charter and bylaws uh we have one volunteer so far so I hope that we can get several others to get a good working group together we hope to see all of you again this fall for another CFO council meeting please stay tuned for further announcements on an exact date and time as well as registration information um thanks again to all of you for joining us today I hope everyone and their families remain safe healthy and resilient and with that we are concluding our meeting thanks for joining us today that concludes our conference thank you for using enteller events you may now disconnect