 Welcome, and thank you for joining today's FOIA Advisory Committee meeting. Before we begin, please ensure you have opened the WebEx participants and chat panels by using the associated icons located at the bottom right of your screen. And please note that all audio connections are muted and this conference is being recorded. To present a comment via WebEx audio, please click the raise hand icon located right beneath your participants panel to place yourself in the comment queue. If you are connected to today's webinar via phone audio only, please press pound two on your telephone keypad to enter the comment queue. If you require technical assistance, please send a chat to the event producer. With that, I'll turn the meeting over to Committee Chair Alina Simo. Please go ahead. Thank you, Chris. And I just want to welcome everyone. Good morning, everyone. As the Director of the Office of Government Information Services, OGIS, and this Committee's Chairperson, it is my pleasure to welcome all of you to our second meeting of the fifth term of the FOIA Advisory Committee. This meeting taking place so soon after our last week's meeting is a bit unusual, but it is our hope that last week's briefings from our Committee's designated Federal Officer, DFO Kirsten Mitchell, as well as our returning members, Tom Sussman, Patricia Weth, and Dave Collier, help lay the foundation as we roll up our sleeves and get to work today. Committee members, I look forward to a lively but orderly discussion today as we hone in on the three subcommittees this committee will form. And I also want to welcome our colleagues and friends from the FOIA community and elsewhere who are watching us today, either via Webex or with a slight delay on the NARA YouTube channel. Members' names and affiliations are posted on our website and member biographies will be posted soon. I have a few housekeeping matters to go through first. I am advised that Committee Member Michael Heiss is unable to join us today, but I'm going to turn over to Kirsten to ask if she has taken a visual roll call and if she could confirm we have a quorum. Indeed, I can confirm that. Okay. Thank you, Kirsten. You're welcome. Meeting materials. Thanks. Meeting materials are available on the committee's webpage. Click on the link for the 2022-2024 FOIA Advisory Committee on the OJA's website. We will upload a transcript in minutes of this meeting as soon as they are ready in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act. During today's meeting, I want to encourage committee members to use the all-panelists option from the drop-down menu in the chat function when you want to speak or ask a question. Of course, also visually, I'll be looking at my little tiles that I have on my screen to see if anyone is raising their hand. But please also remember to keep the chat function to only administrative matters. Nothing substantive in order for us to comply with the Federal Advisory Committee Act. No substantive comments should be made in the chat function as they will not be recorded in the transcript of the meeting. If any of our committee members need to take a break at any time, please do not disconnect from the WebEx event. Instead, mute your microphone by using the microphone icon at the bottom of your screen and turn off your camera by using the camera icon. Send us a quick chat, me and Kirsten, to let us know if you'll be gone for more than a few minutes. And join us again as soon as you can. Today, we have not planned to take a break as we do plan to wrap up by noon Eastern time. So we're going to try to keep to our posted agenda. And a reminder to all committee members and also to myself, because I'm guilty of this, please identify yourself each time you speak by name and affiliation. This helps us greatly down the road with both the transcript and the minutes, both of which are required by the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Finally, I have a few other housekeeping issues to go through before we roll up our sleeves. For those of you watching us on the NARA YouTube channel, the chat is not on today, but we do want to hear from you. If you have questions and comments related to the agenda of today's meeting or any comments or questions, please address them to FOIA-advisory-committee-at-nara.gov. If you have questions on any other topic for the National Archives, you may direct them to public.affairs-at-nara.gov. I also want to note that we have received and posted several written comments in advance of today's meeting. We review all public comments and post them as soon as we are able. And if they comply with our public comments posting policy, we have also alerted committee members and have invited them to view the public comments on our website. If anyone wishes to submit any additional written public comments regarding the committee's work, you may do so by emailing FOIA-advisory-committee-at-nara.gov and we will consider posting them to the OGIS website. In addition to the written public comments we have already posted, we will invite oral public comments at the end of today's meeting, as noted on our agenda. And as we noted in our August 22, 2022 Federal Register notice announcing this meeting, public comments will be limited to three minutes per individual. Okay, with that, I am going to just ask if any of the committee members have any questions about housekeeping or administrative rules that I just went through. No. Okay. All right. Life is good. All right. So I think we're ready to roll up our sleeves. And again, after Thursday's meeting, everyone knows on the committee that Kirsten emailed asking each one of you to provide your top two or three FOIA issues that you would like to see the committee focus on this term. And I want to thank everyone for everyone's robust responses. I definitely want to thank Kirsten publicly, as I have thanked her privately already, for all the hard work she's put into compiling everyone's fantastic ideas. They are represented in a spreadsheet that we have posted on our website under the minutes for, I'm sorry, under the meeting rubric for today's meeting. And what Kirsten has done that I think is very helpful is to put the ideas into broad buckets to help start our conversation today. It was interesting to me, I'm just going to comment, that there's definitely a lot of overlap in members' ideas. There are definitely a lot of folks thinking on the same page. So I was very heartened to see that. And definitely seems to be some consensus around, you know, a number of the topics. But certainly the idea center around four very broad areas that, as Kirsten has identified, the first one is review of past committee recommendations. There definitely seems to be a lot of interest in that FOIA funding and fees was the second category Kirsten identified FOIA process issues. And the final one, technology can't seem to escape that anywhere we go. So there's plenty to talk about. I look forward to our terrific discussion today. As a reminder, after we discuss priorities for the term, the goal is to form three subcommittees. Please, not four. Four was too much last term, I just, I'm here to say that again. And I just also want to add that does not preclude the formation of smaller working groups under one or all of the subcommittees. So that certainly happened in the last term, we found that quite productive. I certainly want to encourage that again. And as everyone has heard last week, much of the committee's work does get done at the subcommittee level in between the full committee meetings. And I want to encourage all committee members to join one or more of the subcommittees. You are by no means precluded from joining more than one. And I definitely want to encourage all of you to think about volunteering for a subcommittee co-chairmanship. We usually encourage one government member and one, one non-government member just to even things out as co-chairs. So hopefully you're thinking about that in the back of your minds. So I've done a lot of talking with that. I am going to turn everything over to all of you. And I want to invite all of you to what I hope is a terrific discussion. And I'm going to pause. Who would like to go first? Alina, this is Kirsten. Pardon the interruption, but if we could ask our event producer to please advance the slide to number three. Thank you. So we have the chat information out there. And then as the committee begins its discussion, the ideas that you just summarized are on slide four. Terrific. Thank you, Chris. OK. All right. So I'm not seeing anyone waving at me frantically yet. And I don't expect all of you to jump in at once. But does anyone care to go first? Alina. All right. Adam, are you waving at me? Yes, I am. Adam Marshall. Adam Marshall from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. First of all, I really appreciate the efforts as needed by Kirsten to try to categorize these in different ways. One of the categories is funding and fees. And I was wondering if some of the people who posted shorter comments just on FOIA fees or FOIA funding could speak a little bit more as to what they were interested in, because it seems that some of those might be able to be combined with the process category or be a sub-working group within the process category. And that might be an easy way to get us down in terms of the subcommittees. Yeah, I just, the process subcommittee was very active in the last term to address Adam's point. And fees were definitely discussed and looked at. So nothing, no recommendations came out of that last time. But I see that there's continued interest in that. So I definitely want to encourage that. Does anyone else want to take up Adam's invitation to speak to their fee comments? Katrina? Can you hear me? Yes. OK. So when I put up there the FOIA funding, I was just speaking of, sorry about the barking in the background, the funding for resources for the program, for rightsizing, staffing, things like that. The cost for fees, I guess that could actually be lumped into the processing side, which was, I think, Adam was looting to. I wasn't really looking at that, because at the department, most of the DHS, we don't really collect fees. So that's not a huge issue for us. I'm sure it might be for others. But mine was more so rightsizing offices, getting funding for the federal FOIA program that are needed. So that's why I was coming from Adam. OK. Thanks, Katrina. Anyone else want to follow up on that? Hi, Alina. This is Patricia Weth from EPA. Regarding fees and FOIA funding, the legislation subcommittee last term, which I co-chaired, we had a working group for both. We had a working group for FOIA funding, as well as for fees. We did prepare a subcommittee final report. And the two folks who led those working groups, Matt Schwartz and Alan Lautstein, did I pronounce his name right? It did a really nice paper on it. And we didn't have any recommendations coming out of those working groups. And if I remember correctly, I think Alan's paper really did a great job explaining why he didn't feel that it could go forward. Also, the 2014 to 16 committee, I believe, had a subcommittee just devoted the fees. And I think I showed their subcommittee page. They have a lot of information there. So I just kind of throw that out to share for some help. For the FOIA funding, I don't think we, in the legislation subcommittee, had enough time to review it. And it was really to look at ways that agencies could get the resources that they needed to accomplish the mission. So I hope that's helpful. I think I saw in the chat the Ginger McCall wanted to win. Ginger? Yeah, this was on the more general. issue, though, not to answer it. Oh, I'm sorry. I just saw it, so I apologize. Should I come back to you? Yeah, I don't have an answer to Adam's question, because my responses to the request for comments were lengthy. OK. All right, we'll come back to you. Alina, this is Kirsten again. I am terribly sorry to interrupt, but I'm trying to get the attention of Chris, our event producer, to please move the slides forward to slide four. So that the committee can see these categories. And again, sorry for the interruption. No problem. Guaca, I think I just saw you chatting. Yeah, now, this is unrelated to the topic of fees. So as long as that sort of thing concluded then, what I'd like to do is get a sense, just take the temperature on my fellow members' interest in exploring vexatious requests. Because I think it's fertile ground for work. I think one of our remits here is to make FOIA more efficient. And it doesn't happen often. But sometimes you'll get a request or that just want to give up the works. And it's on some remit directed fishing expedition. I think it'd be helpful for us to explore that topic in order to facilitate FOIA for the rest of the world. Thank you, Guaca. I know that I saw several other people. Oh, people are waving at me. OK. Ginger, do you want to go first? And then Katrina? Sure. Yeah, I'm probably going to get myself cast out of the requester community for saying that I am interested in investigating that topic. I will also note that to my recollection in the very first iteration of this committee, there was a bit of study that we did on vexatious requesters and provisions from governments around the world. And I think maybe state governments. I recall working on that as part of whatever committee I was on. So I think we've already sort of laid some groundwork for that. And though that wasn't one of the three topics that I picked, I think it's a useful topic. Because there are certain requesters who are taking up an outsize amount of government resources. It's clogging up the queue for everyone else. Oftentimes, the requests are not at all clear or narrow. And oftentimes, it seems like they're submitted just to harass agencies or harass particular officials or gum up the works. So I think it would be a useful thing to look at given that there are limited resources to process FOIA requests. And when one person takes up all those resources or clogs up the queue, it does affect the rest of us who are requesting. OK, Katrina's next. And Ben, I see you waving. So you'll go right after that. And Tom? I'd like to look into this a little bit too. And it's not for the purposes of one of the things that I've tried to do in the 27 years I've been doing FOIA is trying to be reasonable with requesters, especially with people stewing up on the 21st day, trying to give them something. If not, I can't sometimes give them everything. I just can't. I don't have enough resources. I've never had enough resources. Like I said, I've been doing this back in the day when we were using exacto knife, cutting holes, and papers. So I've always tried to be accommodating to the point that let me give you something. And sometimes there's requesters out there that just won't do that. And some of the requests that they write are very large, very voluminous. We don't have the resources to, again, like everybody else has said, we don't have the resources to. I would love to accommodate people. I'm sure everybody else here feels the same way. I would love to be able to do them all. But we've got to figure out some way to balance that a little bit better or come up with some kind of way to have a mutual agreement, some kind of way to come together with that. So if there was a way that we could talk about this topic and maybe find some approaches to address it, I would be 100% supportive of that. OK. Thanks, Katrina. I appreciate it. I think Ben was going to go next. And then Tom, and then I see Dave waving at me too. Yes, thank you. This is Ben Tango. My fourth Gorka's recommendation, I do think that it's probably the first task in addressing this is really defining what it means for a request to be vexatious. And it sounds like there would actually be several categories, whether that's a request that's submitted in bad faith, whether it's a particularly voluminous request that's intended to gum up the works or a duplicative request in coordination with others. That's sort of I think what we've seen some recent news items about sort of physical denial of service attacks as they've been described in the media for election offices, getting duplicative requests that are intended to take up resources in time and are really not serving the purpose of FOIA of actually getting the information that's requested for transparency purposes and for helping with governance. But it does seem like that's sort of the first issue is really defining what it means to be vexatious. And I think what we'll find is that it will lead into several of the other topics that several committee members have identified as being sort of subtopics, whether it's proactive disclosures, search, ability to toll the clock when you're sort of crafting a request and getting to what the substance is and what you can do on a rolling basis to help somebody understand what they're looking for, what they're going to be getting and what the timelines might be and helping to limit some of that. So I think that maybe for under a process framework, that would be a sort of good start to then lead out of that into several other working groups but really lock down that definition in the beginning of the term in a way that you can then lead and define it a little bit more detail of then how do you address each of those categories in a reasonable way without sort of leaving it open to interpretation on a agency by agency basis of really saying, well, this is vexatious to us and so we're not going to respond or do this our own way but in a way that can really be tailored in a meaningful way to educate requesters is what might be categorized that way and maybe leading eventually towards some sort of codification of that type of category or what the options available are to the agency and FOIA personnel as a whole across the board. Okay, thanks Ben, I appreciate all that. I think Tom had been waving at me and then Dave but Stephanie Drew, I'd also want to chime in. Stephanie, I'm sorry if I skipped over you. Is there something you wanted to talk about back to fees or are we on vexatious requests? No, thank you. My comment went back to the FOIA funding and I just wanted to comment that I submitted the FOIA funding and it was mostly in the realm of technology. So I think mine could definitely be moved into technology. I was looking at what resources would be needed to fund the technology. Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. All right, Tom. Yeah, I had a chance to sort of look at David's having divided up the four general categories into three. And it does seem to me that resources is a sort of good separate category both at the larger level and then going down into the more specifics. And implementation is, as you know, every time I talk about FOIA and the advisory committee, I talk about implementation going back to the fee recommendation of the first committee. And there's always, you know, the... What am I saying? I lost the dashboard is only halfway helpful because it says, yes, the archivist made the recommendation, forwarded the recommendation to wherever, but it doesn't say that the recipient or target has done anything with it. So I feel very strongly that, and that may well involve some working groups looking at very specific issues and coming up with strategies really to advance it. The bigger challenge in, I guess, David's third category process and technology together is a lot of sort of apples and oranges or apples and rocks. I mean, I'm not sure how the technology and vexatious requests kind of fit together. I mean, in the same category, but except for maybe the vexatious and burdensome issue which there seems to be some interest in, I think technology does cover most of the process issues. So I'm not sure where do we, I guess I'd like to focus in on where we put the issue since there is interest in addressing burdensome, vexatious, unreasonable, et cetera. Where do we put that? And if we figure out how to put that in a way that makes sense, then I think we've got three subcommittee, subcommittees that would be pretty self-evident at that point. So Tom, just to summarize, and I know Dave, you wanna go next, what I'm hearing you say is resources, implementation of past recommendations, and then I'm hearing process slash technology as the third one. Okay, I just wanted to make sure I heard. Dave. Thanks, Alina. And I wonder if I could be enabled to share real quick. I emailed Tom kind of, I tried to clump all that stuff into three working groups or subcommittees that make sense. And then within those subcommittees can have any number of working groups, right? And certainly vexatious requests is probably gonna come up. It came up last term. So I'm happy to show just what Tom was talking about to the group if I have the ability to share. Oh, thank you so much. All right, so this is kind of what I was thinking about. Do y'all see that? Okay, so it seemed like they, I mean, because our objective right now, I think first is to get the three subcommittees nailed down. And then within those, anybody could create working groups to kind of get specifics. This isn't perfect. I mean, things can float among different subcommittees. But it seemed clearly like some kind of follow-up subcommittee made sense of taking stocks of committee to review all the previous work and studies because there's been a lot of work already done on vexatious requests, for example. And maybe figure out like Tom said, what's been completed and what needs to still have work, there are recommendations that probably need more work. And then the OGIS stuff. And then how we break down the other two subcommittees, you know, it's up for debate. We could have a resources subcommittee, funding fee subcommittee, where we're talking about money stuff. I put vexatious under there mostly because last term that came out of our discussion of fees. You know, we're finding out that, you know, fees I think are sometimes used as a way to get requesters to hone their requests overly broad so they just throw out lots of fees and it's a tool to combat vexatious or overburden some or what voluminous request. So maybe it fits under there. Maybe it's under process, but we could clump process and tech under one subcommittee. I mean, if it makes sense, I mean, processing records through AI or machine learning seems to could fit under process. And I'm not sure we had enough subtopics to create a single tech subcommittee this term. I only saw a couple like truly tech topics in the spreadsheet. So that's one way to approach it, form three subcommittees like this. And then from there, we can discuss what working groups people wanna, you know, do, start up. Certainly that probably doesn't have to be handled today. That could be done, you know, later once the subcommittees going. But if that makes sense of clumping these topics and there may be others that come up, you know, another approach is to instead go ahead and throw the funding stuff into process and make tech separate, you know. But again, I don't know. I'm kind of varying toward the first one. I think the process subcommittee under this scenario would be pretty huge. And boy, whoever would be on that and co-sharing it, well, it wouldn't be me. So that's just my thinking. That's just my thinking. And I'll stop sharing. But if anybody else would like to go another way, you know, it's not, I'm not like tied to anything. I'm just trying to get the discussion going so we can form three subcommittees and then create working groups from there. Great, thank you, Dave. Anyone else inspired by David Collier's presentation? Patricia, was that you raising your hand or no? Oh no, Gorka was raising his hand. I was just thinking through this and I'll just say I'm new to the committee. Does it make sense? Because it seems like process, for example, has a lot of topics. And then, you know, this recommendation to review past work, which I endorsed, right? It's really just one thing. Does it deserve an entire subcommittee when it's really one thing? And then we have things like process which have a list of 17. Does that make sense? I mean, can we make the review of sort of historical recommendations and their progress and their effect, a topic for a working group? Yes, that's always possible. Yeah, Jason and I seek gender waving at me too. Jason, go ahead. I have my hand up. Okay. As for a past committee recommendations committee, we've had 51 recommendations and my view is that it's extremely important in this fifth term to look at compliance with those recommendations. OGIS has done a fantastic job with the dashboard and in many respects, OGIS and OIP have completed the first step in implementing past recommendations, but there has been no survey of compliance. And I suspect, even though I've been out of government for a while, that many, many agencies are either unaware of our recommendations or are not prioritizing them in a sense that they would be reporting to NARA or OIP about what they have done. So I think there is kind of an enlightenment factor. I think we could, it would do well and it's an extremely big effort to try to come up with strategies for finding out what is going on. We have a huge government, 300 reporting components to NARA and it would take a tremendous amount of work. So I strongly have advocated, I wrote the paragraph in a prior final report that advocated that the committee devote substantial time in a subcommittee to look at past recommendations. Let me also point out that I really appreciate David's work in clustering this. A number of the line items under process have been in the past considered. And I think it would be, we would do well to limit any kind of process slash improvement slash implementation type committee to a limited set of topics. For example, records management. We devoted substantial time and there's many recommendations that came out of two terms ago. So there are ways to limit it to make it more even. I lastly, as many of you know, I have been on a soapbox about technology and machine learning. And there are other aspects of this including the growth of text and a federal messaging that's been in the news and a number of ways to approach technology including kind of an adequacy of search that we could discuss in such a committee. So in some, my recommendation is to balance what's going on in process but to have a past recommendations subcommittee, a committee that is either called under Tom's words implementation or process. My favorite would be FOIA improvement committee. I know that's everything we do but I think we could use that as an umbrella term. But whatever term you want, process has already been used in a prior iteration of this committee. And then an advanced technology or just a technology which has also been a term used but I think it's an extreme, technology is an extremely important issue to look at as we're looking forward. We had a vision committee a couple of terms ago. We're looking to 2030 and the growth of billions and billions of agency records that are going to be FOIA-able. So I'm an advocate in that way to have three committees. And Jason, thanks for all your comments. I just wanna be clear. I understand your proposal. You want past recommendations, the FOIA improvement subcommittee and a technology subcommittee. That's correct. Okay, and you're volunteering to co-chair all three of those subcommittees, correct? No, I actually am volunteering a couple of others to co-chair. But yes, I would take on the technology committee and I would be happy to serve on all three subcommittees. Okay, I was just kidding about that but I wanna leave that floor open. So Ginger has been waiting very patiently and then Mende would like to also comment. So Ginger first. So I was going to suggest that we just kind of roll the review of past committee recommendations into each of the other committees but having heard Jason's comments, I actually do think it's important. I'm swayed on the idea that perhaps we should include that as a separate committee on its own but I don't think that we should drop FOIA resources as a committee. I think that is the single most pressing issue and it's a place where our recommendations stand to actually make a difference. Congress keeps passing bills with more reporting requirements with more changes to FOIA and at the end of every bill it says no additional resources are allocated. So I think having a conversation about resources and the way that resources affect processing times and the efficiency and effectiveness of responses to FOIA requests is really important. I will note that both OGIS and Congress have asked GAO to do an investigation into FOIA resources. I don't know if that's forthcoming but I think this is an area where the committee could do some investigating, could look at some numbers, could talk to some folks and make some real meaningful recommendations. And I think under that umbrella technology fits really well. I will also note that I co-chaired a subcommittee on technology, I think two terms ago which made very robust recommendations. You know, we have spent a lot of time talking about technology already. You know, we've made a long list of recommendations which were very specific to my recollection. So I think we've already done a lot of work on that. I will note, I have not had time to go back and review all of the advisory committee's prior work and prior recommendations but I think that that's something that would be a good investment of time on my part and on everyone's part. I think that that's homework that we should do before we do our next meeting is go back and look at all the recommendations that this committee has made in the past. So we're not, you know, redoing work that has already been done and reinventing the wheel. Okay. Thanks, Tender. Thanks for all those comments. So instead of Jason's FOIA Improvement Subcommittee I'm hearing you say FOIA Resources Subcommittee. Okay. Just want to make sure- I would have it be review the past committee recommendations, process and resources. So basically what David did and thank you David by the way for putting that together. That's really helpful. Okay. Alina? Alex? Yes, would like to speak. Yeah, but I promise mandate sheet would go next. Okay. All right, thanks Alina. This is Baymond Day Johnson, University of Georgia and actually I had a comment that was going in the direction of Ginger's initial comment about the review. And maybe this is where Gorka was going as well in terms of having the review of past recommendations being folded into three other categories because I wonder if you can have a situation where there's some review of past recommendations happening on that committee, but in the other areas in looking at the new recommend, the new suggestion thing before that will also involve reviewing past recommendations. So I wonder if you would have some duplication there. And one way to prevent that is by having say a funding subcommittee, but having a working group that's focused on looking at their past recommendations in that area to perhaps reduce some duplication. But if the review is a separate committee, I think making sure there's a way of communicating between the review committee and the other substantive committees about what's being reviewed and what's being looked at towards going forward. Okay, thanks, Mandy. I do wanna say, I feel as though Kirsten and I do a fair amount of trying to promote continuity among all the subcommittees. And certainly when we hear topics that are being raised in one subcommittee, we make sure we bring it to the attention of the others. And there's going to be overlap. Unfortunately, there's just the nature of the beast. We try to coordinate as much as possible to make sure folks are talking to each other. And in fact, I believe in the last term, maybe some of the folks who were on the last term can nod if they agree. Working groups crossed over a couple of the subcommittees and it just seemed to work out very well. Dave is like maybe not so sure, but I think it worked out okay. Certainly everyone was talking to each other and that's the most important thing. Alex would like to go next or not. Alex, are you there? There we go. I think that's working. Okay. Yes, we can hear you. So I just to quickly circle back to something earlier, my primary concern with vexatious requests and spending any time on that is whether that might lead to endorsing effectively an unwritten exemption from FOIA. Because I can tell you that lots of public officials find their requests from journalists and watchdogs pretty vexatious. And so that'd be mindful that the committee isn't essentially taking the position that I would think Congress should. And I'd just be careful about that from the requester side because it's not hard to see how that might be abused. That aside, I wanted to suggest that there's an opportunity for the committee to meet its charter in a way that I think hasn't fully done before. And that's the impending retirement of FOIA online.gov. Something that we've talked about in the past these meetings, certainly that's been in the public sphere because OGIS testified about it. We had a FOIA hearing back in Sunshine Week in March, but it hasn't come up very much. And the administration is not to my observation engaging the public about this. It seems to me that if we're gonna talk about committees that a technology committee that's specifically looking at how the roughly two dozen agencies that were using the EPA's FOIA online site, what they're transitioning to and how that transition is going and using that as a case study to understand what's happening and to really reach out to the requester community for each of those agencies and understand what's happening, that could really inform our recommendations. My sense is that there's a natural interest in using the expertise of the people on the committee to focus on making recommendations. But the more that we can bring the public specifically the requester community into those, I think it will strengthen them. It'll certainly I think add to the legitimacy in terms of its perceived legitimacy if we are actively soliciting feedback from the people who are affected by that change and then look at how each one of those agencies is approaching this in terms of a blank slate. If you're leaving this approach, what technology you're choosing? How does it affect your processes? Are you putting up your FOIA liaisons number? Are you asking for feedback from the requesters? Are you, if you're adopting a new platform are you building it with the requesters or not? And I'd love to see that that transition is something that the committee is actively monitoring and engaged in and that is providing recommendations in response to what I think we can expect will be some bumps along the way. So I just wanted to throw that out there and to yes and a lot of the other things that have been said about the other issues. Okay, thanks Alex. Ben, did you have your hand up earlier and I missed you? Yeah, I did. I was gonna say basically just to, I guess jump on board with David's grouping. I think that that makes a lot of sense the way he has it and I agree with you Alina and other people that have said that there's most certainly going to be overlap between prior recommendations and some of these other categories and we would obviously be remiss to not build off of what was done before and what was suggested before and that will come up particularly in technology and funding and resources and a lot of these other areas but it probably does make sense to have it as a specific subcommittee so it gets the attention and the focus that it deserves which will really go also then to the heart of what the committee is here for and measuring effectiveness without having it totally buried within a working group within a subcommittee but really elevating that impact. I would just note from Alex's comments recently too just honestly from an industry perspective that a lot of this is moving forward is currently an activity of agencies transitioning from their FOIA online platforms to other platforms. It looks like the experience is not so much process focused but really in a market research phase where each one is finding the tools that best meet their needs and I know from our experience that when agencies are going through this process of finding new technology in these areas they are very influenced by making sure that they're not leaving any technology behind and that they're not leaving anything on the table or any functionality behind and so what they're trying to do best they can is match up current functionality, current process to a new tool to a new adoption. It may not have so much requester input specific to it but to the extent that the requester community makes suggestions through these other committees like process suggestions, reporting suggestions certainly resources and all that. Those do filter into these platforms and these tools that are then available on a commercial market to every agency to leverage as part of their FOIA process. So I'm not so sure that FOIA online specifically deserves the subcommittees attention but it will come in at the fringes of process, technology, resources, not just when you're looking at what's gonna be happening in 2023 from the transition on the case management perspective but also pushing out to Jason's perspective view of 2030, right? We're sitting on top of a mountain that is only getting larger and larger and so it's one thing to say what's happening now which is in process and we might not have a lot of ability to sway that process from a committee perspective but we may be best sort of being able to focus and keep our heads up a little bit above the fray and look a little bit forward to things that we actually can influence. Okay, thanks Ben. I just wanna repeat a comment that was made in the chat from Dave Collier just clarifying to Alex that he's signaling follow-up process and tech as the three subcommittee recommendations as per Jason. Alex, does that sound right? Yeah, sorry, I'm slow on the mute button today. That does sound right. One of my specific priorities is to harmonize the Open Government Data Act of 2018 with FOIA and proactive disclosure. That's the thing I sent in tardily and the extent to which the committee can, I think, promote and extend and defend those best practices around the default being open both in format and in disclosure will be well served. I certainly would like the committee not to just limit our influence, so to speak to putting out recommendations or reports. I think that we can and should be using this platform as a way to actively encourage agencies to be embracing not just modern technology but a more forward stance with respect to the request to community than is currently the case. I think that the committee as chartered has that within its remit and it's up to all of us to decide how we wanna approach that. Okay. I know Gorka has been waiting really patiently. Gorka, please. Thank you. Gorka from NIH. You know, one of the things, I think that my camera will touch on a few topics here but then there was what's concerned about duplicative efforts. We're all, I think, they're interested to see how much the recommendations from these committees are being followed up on. And one thing that strikes me is during its 2016-2017 term, this advisory committee recommended that the Chief of Officers Council form a technology subcommittee. And they did. And I've been part of it for three years. And I've been co-chairing some of these working groups that have been dealing with these issues for about three years, like fully online. So obviously I think technology is important because I've been dedicating my time to it for three years. I'm a little, I'm interested to see what you all think about the fact that we're proposing to start up a subcommittee on something that my subcommittee has been working on for three years already. And, you know, like just to give you an idea of the topics that we've been dealing with and we're dealing with now, certain AI, artificial intelligence, FOIA IT platforms to address the fact that FOIA online sunsets, we have a data working group, we have an IT integration group, we have a 508 compliance working group, we have a FOIA and classified records working group, we have a technology best practices working group, and we have a FOIA reference model working group. And these are just this year's working groups. We've been working on other topics over the past two years. So, you know, obviously, and by the way, everybody here is very close to the topic. People volunteered based upon their expertise. So I think what we can add from our perspective is the fact that we have members of the public, right, that can contribute to these conversations, which is something that is important than the Chief Lawyers Council subcommittee. But at the same time, I wonder whether delving into these topics three years after the technology subcommittee started dealing with them is somewhat duplicitous. I wonder whether there is space for maybe communication with that subcommittee, you know, and maybe I'm speaking out of line and I hope I'm not slipping anybody's toes. I just wonder whether, you know, we can launch, you know, into a two-year term dealing or talking about artificial intelligence when, you know, we've been doing it on the other side for three years. Dave, I saw that you were raising your hand. And then, ERA wants to go next. Okay. I think you raised some good points, Dworkin. Just the last term we did have working groups working on some of these issues. And in fact, one was on AI, I believe, but it, and we had some recommendations specific to technology come out of all that. But that's what they kind of discovered was, and they started looking at the FOI online replacements. And they realized, oh, wow, there's this other group that's been working on this for some years. What can we really add? And I think they, you know, for whatever reason didn't proceed probably because of that. So, but there's nothing to say that, you know, we can't have a working group looking into AI and FOI online and other tech issues in tandem with the other group. I think perhaps that's what's gonna happen with the OGIS recommendations. We might be working in tandem with the feasibility study that is commissioned perhaps. So, yeah, I think you're right, Gorka, that it's useful to look and see how we can work and fit with that to be most effective. Like Alex is saying, you know, it'd be nice to have some impact and not just toss out recommendations that may be followed or not. So really to me, it comes down to, I mean, again, I'm kind of focused on just getting three subcommittees arranged. And then, you know, the working groups kind of fall into place. And certainly under the process, whatever implementation FOI improvement committee, subcommittee, it doesn't have to be 20 working groups. I just tossed everything that was mentioned. Some of those will collapse into some, some, you know, we have to triage and go with priorities and won't really be handled. Or some will be picked up halfway through the term which happened in previous terms. And taken up later. So I guess to me, the question is, do we go sub, follow up subcommittee? I think most people are on board with that. To, I mean, really, I think you're right, Jason. This is our taking stock term. I mean, there's so many recommendations. We gotta figure out what's happened and what needs more work. What hasn't moved forward? Maybe there's agreement on that. Then it comes down to the other two. You know, how do we do resources and process slash tech? Or do we do process and tech? You know, I don't have strong feelings either way because either way, the work's gonna get done. Either way, working groups will be formed under one or the other and we'll get moving. But if people have strong feelings either way on those clumpings, probably now's the time to rest assure that up, get that done. Thanks, Alina. Jinder, I see you, but Eri, I promised Eri she would go next. Ben, did you also wave at me? Yes. Okay. So I'm gonna say, and Katrina's now waving at me. Adam, are you waving, Eri? You're just sitting back. You're just sitting back. Okay. And Eri, before you go, I just wanna remind everyone, please don't put substantive chats in the all panelists chat comments. I see a comment from Alex that I'm gonna read out loud. Note that there are no deliverables for public engagement or feedback on FOIA online transitions for FOIA officers council. I assume that means FOIA chief officers council. No event for requisites nor transparency about what platforms or tech agencies have chosen or why or cost. Okay. Eri, over to you. Hi, Eri Tansy, University of Cincinnati. I am a new member of the committee. So I hope I'm not speaking out of turn or taking us on a detour that people with members of the committee would wish that we don't go down. I noticed when I was looking at the spreadsheet that there are at least a few of us who are interested in the legislative question of expansion of FOIA to Congress and the judiciary. And I know that also thanks to Patricia who had mentioned in the chat that under the last term there was a legislation subcommittee and there was a recommendation about expanding FOIA to Congress. So I think my two part question for my fellow members of the committee are, is there appetite for engaging in some of these larger legislative questions of expansion of FOIA for this term? Because if I'm the only one I'm happy to serve elsewhere. But the second is that where do we think since this is the question of expansion of FOIA and to places where it doesn't currently exist. And a lot of the prior discussion has been about improvements to places where FOIA already exists. Where do we think that fits into some of the subcommittee models that are under discussion? So I just wanted to step back and listen. Thank you. Okay. Kara, thank you. And I know that I promised Ginger and Ben that they would go, but Bobby I think also wanted to speak earlier. So I apologize, I'm going to take everyone out of turn that Bobby over to you. Thank you, Alina. Bobby to leave in department justice, OIP. I just wanted to try to look and I think I don't feel strongly about the three groupings because I think I agree with Dave that I think under any variation of how we categorize them we could fit pretty much the working groups that we want to prioritize. I would probably suggest that we do review resources and process because I think technology could fit under both process and funding. And also agree with Corka that we want to be careful not to duplicate efforts. So in picking like what technology things we're going to look at that's something that we should consider. The one thing I wanted to turn back to is there's a lot of discussion about vexatious requesters. I think that's just maybe it's unfortunate categorizing or description of what the issue is. So I think it's an issue that should be looked into and it's important, but we shouldn't characterize it as a vexatious. It's really the impact of high volume requests and high volume records or substantially large requests in one. And the reason I think it's it'd be great for this committee to look at it is because what I thought was really successful when I really enjoyed the last committee and some of the other committees is the insight that was shared between what the requesters perceive and see and what the agencies see and perceive. And I think we learned a lot and we're able to make really great recommendations based off that. So I think there's an area here. Now I'm not saying that this is something that would lead into it. I don't think it should. Something that is a barrier to access because that's not what the mission of FOIA is and that's not what we want as FOIA professionals. It's just an understanding. And then maybe next we're exploring of how we can help the system. You know, communication is something that's come up, but there may be other things. I think it's something worthy of one of the committee's working groups, but I thought maybe we shouldn't categorize it that way and we should look at it more positively because it's an issue and I think it's worth exploring and it could fit under funding or process. Okay, thanks, Bobby. I appreciate that. I just also want to chime in, taking off my chairperson hat and putting on my co-chair hat of the Chief FOIA Officers Council along with Bobby. It was definitely a challenge and maybe Allison will speak to this when it's her turn, but it was definitely a challenge to coordinate the discussions that were going on between the Technology Subcommittee of this committee and the Technology Committee of the Chief FOIA Officers Council. And Gorka was actually, I just want to applaud him for one second because he had graciously volunteered from the Technology Committee to be the conduit as well and he was keeping folks posted on what was happening at our FOIA Advisory Committee meeting. So that was very helpful as well, but it was definitely a challenge and I'm really a big fan of not reinventing the wheel or also duplicative work. So I think if we can avoid that, that would be really helpful. So that's just my two cents. I wrote in the chat just administratively, Ginger, Ben, Tom, Allison. And then in between, I might have missed Katrina and I apologize to Katrina. So Katrina, can I add you at the end? Okay. So this is Kirsten. Yeah. Oh, good. Okay. Luke, I will add it to the list. So Ginger is first. And Elita, Jason Barron, I'd like to- And Jason. Okay, got it. I had suggested technology as one of the three and I'm withdrawing that suggestion based on what Gorka said. I just think we have limited time and resources. There's no reason to duplicate what we have already done on this committee, which again, I would encourage folks to look at the prior recommendations that we made on technology. They were granular and fairly comprehensive. And I think that technology can be folded under all three of the categories of reviewing, past recommendations, resources and process issues. I mean, I think it slots into all of those categories. We've already done a work, as Gorka said, there's another committee doing the work on this. And I just, I don't want us to miss the focus on the resources issue. And resources isn't just about technology, it's about staffing, it's about agency investment in FOIA. And until we address the problem of agency investment in FOIA, I don't think that we can address any of the other problems with FOIA. So yeah, just withdrawing my initial suggestion for technology. All right, sounds good. Thank you, Jennifer. Ben, Ben Tang, what's next? I wanna say, I actually do, I agree that Gorka raised some very valid points here and that it seems like, not just that we do wanna not have duplicate of effort, we also don't wanna be spinning our wheels in an area where we'll have to bring in a lot of the same resources that the chief FOIA committee has already engaged with and sort of going back over and doing that. But it does sound like to Alex's point, we do have an opportunity here that they don't necessarily have, which is getting a lot of requester input and also educating the broader requester community and everybody about what is out there, what's possible and what activity is going on within our government to address these problems. Is that obviously at the forefront of everybody's minds? So I think that there's two parts where this will probably come up in some of the current committees. One is reviewing prior recommendations regarding adoption of technology and the prior suggestions about adopting technology and checking on the status of that, which will likely lead into the resources issue as well. And also maybe reviewing our engagement with the chief FOIA officers council and making some recommendations around transparency, around their activities or suggestions to them about educating the general public about their activities and maybe doing, I don't know exactly what's been happening necessarily. I understand what you said, Gork has been sort of a conduit, but maybe having a better outlet so that people can know this is something we're aware of, this is something we're on top of, this is something that is being worked on and managed. So that might be something we would wanna consider under a process or prior recommendations there too. To Aira's point though, which branches off in a new area, I'm also very interested in exploring sort of expansions of FOIA. I do think that will come under maybe prior recommendations as to see what sticking point was. I think that there were some prior recommendations around that and maybe also in a process and just as a general matter, I think it may help. I know that there's probably a lot of resistance in Congress to making themselves subject to this, which is something worth exploring. But if it happened, that might be what it takes to break the logjam and resources and funding frankly, is that if they're sort of feeling the pain and seeing it from the inside of what the executive branch is currently experiencing just my two cents, I think it's something worth exploring and at least getting to the heart of and publicizing what the difficulty is. Great segue into Tom who led the effort on recommendation 2021-01 for Congress, certain congressional offices making FOIA-like rules applied to them, Tom. So just quickly on that subject, I do think that we have a foundation on legislative branch and we started to work on judicial branch, we gathered information, we had some data, we didn't wanna move further without having some conversations with judicial branch representatives. And so that didn't happen. And so we sidetracked it, but it certainly is one that would, I think there are a few of us would like to build on. I wanna come back to Aira's comment about legislative recommendations and expanding FOIA. Ginger will know well that there's been efforts for the last two years bi-weekly meetings of large numbers of civil society people trying to put together and work with bipartisan groups on the Hill on some FOIA amendments. And it never happened. And so I think that there's a lesson there that if groups with access to the legislative process, lobbyists, political persuasion can't make progress with the chief FOIA proponents on the Hill, Cornyn, Leahy, Grassley, then a advisory committee recommendation might be really interesting and useful from an academic perspective, but I certainly wouldn't put it up there as something that was likely to be implemented in the, I would say my lifetime, but that may not be that long. Okay, thanks, Tom. Ginger just commented that we still have hope. So one can hope. Okay, I think over to Allison Dietrich next and Allison not to call out on you and put you in a difficult situation, but I just want to say you did coach here the subcommittee on technology and perhaps you have some thoughts on how technology fits into this term. I do actually. Two things, one, the earlier comments about FOIA online, the technology committee, our subcommittee did actually kind of have a working group with some of the process subcommittee people about ways to go forward from the sunsetting of FOIA online. We weren't able to make any recommendations during the last term, but that was something that we were very aware of, especially from commerce. We were one of the 20 or so affected agencies. In terms of input, there's a short timeframe with the acquisition schedule. I'm not so sure how much work can be done in terms of the successor to FOIA online, especially because agencies need to make their own choices about which software fits their needs going forward. So I'm not sure how much we could do with that, but in terms of technology, I agree that it probably could be looped into process or some of the other committees, but there is an advantage to having request or input as compared to just what the CFO council is doing. And we did have some of the CFO councils come talk to us on the technology committee, and we were trying to come up with ways where we could build on the work that they were doing and not step on toes and reinvent the wheel. So that was something we were very aware of during the last term. And then thirdly, I'm not a big fan of the prior recommendations committee, subcommittee, but I know I'm very outnumbered in that regard. I think they could be wrapped into the other committees that we create. And also there's only so much that the advisory committee could do in terms of how the agencies decide to implement the recommendations are not implemented. So that's my two cents on that. Thanks. Okay. Okay, then next after Alison, we have Katrina. Thank you for waiting so patiently. Katrina. This is Kirsten. Katrina, are you on mute? I just make sure your phone isn't on mute either. Okay, we'll come back to you. Yes, we'll circle back to you. Luke is up next and thank you, Luke. We haven't heard from you yet, so welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Luke Nectar, a Chapman University, busy discussion, tough to elbow my way in here. Just to have a couple of great comments. I'm not so concerned about what the committees are called. I think it's been said by others. I think the working groups will do the work no matter what. I feel like most of my interest is on process. I figured that's where I'll end up landing, but I do have a couple of comments on that but also other subjects. I'm interested in Aira's comment and others on expanding the reach of the FOIA and I'd like to know more about past recommendations and work that's been done on that front because I wonder if the right criteria have been proposed or established that might make that a more welcoming idea and not itself a kind of vexatious request, which is gonna be my second comment, but I am interested in one of my comments was focused on certain categories of legislative records. That might be the kind of low hanging fruit based on the age of the records or the subject matter or something and make this, I guess a friendlier conversation with the other branches of government is kind of my idea there and I'd like to know more about past activity. And then on vexatious requests, I don't know that I will be on that subcommittee if it's grouped out the way that it is, but I would just make a suggestion that I was gonna comment initially when Ben brought that up early in the meeting and then it was kind of overtaken by events, but then Alex brought it up again. So I figured, let me jump in here before it moves on. I think how we define vexatious requests and requesters needs to be really carefully done if we get into this. I have submitted many FOIA requests. I have never submitted a FOIA request in a vexatious spirit. I think the average age of the records I request is at least 50 years old, yet I have been routinely listed as a vexatious requester by a major government agency. And that's definitely not what I do. And so I think it's to be really careful that this concept is not used to deny requesters simply because the nature of their requests happen to be complex or involve a lot of agency referrals or happen to be large volume, high tier, whatever you wanna call it, types of requests. So it's gonna be very careful on that we're not accidentally creating precedent that we don't end up wanting to live with. Otherwise, that's my piece. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much, Luke. So I promised Jason next. Kirsten then wants to weigh in and Mende came back and then Katrina, we'll circle back to you. Is that good? Okay. Jason. Can you hear me? Yes. So really good ideas on the committee structure from everyone. Let me say I was impassioned about technology. Let me, as a first thing say that it probably from an optics perspective, naming committees that are the same names as a prior term is probably disfavor. And so process and technology are probably not the best terms to use for any subcommittee. I have my favorite, which is Tom's idea about FOIA implementation, rather than process. And for technology, I like Alex's friendly amendment that it would be better served to call something modernization, which is a broader term that in my mind, I liked Alex's point about FOIA online. I know what Ben said and others, but there are lots of ways that we could think about modernizing FOIA. And let me get on my soapbox here again, that I think this committee, even if Corka, there is a FOIA chief counsel's committee that is working on many forward-looking issues. This committee has a different charter and it is public facing with public members and input. And it is the signal issue of our time. If you ask anyone in the requester community, and I have become one of those requesters, probably not vexatious, but I've only filed one request to 40 agencies and gotten very little back. The fact is that the signal issue is that FOIA doesn't work very well in for many requesters in the public interest community and the greater community at large. I think we have to acknowledge that. I think during this term, I'm going to be suggesting that individuals that litigate against the government talk to us about what we can do as a committee. It is really important to think about modernizing FOIA for the future because 10 years from now, the government will be simply overwhelmed by the volume of electronic records that exist. And so there, I continued to lobby for that being a prime focus of the committee. Having said that, I don't really care as long as the ideas are part of some subcommittee, it doesn't have to be that we're talking about machine learning as a prime subject of a modernization committee. It could fit into an improvement committee or a process committee. Yeah, I echo what people have said, which is that as long as good ideas are somewhere in some working group, doesn't really matter. However, from past experience serving on this committee as a whole, two terms ago, people tend to gravitate to committees, I feel most comfortable with, that have some holistic view of what they're doing. And so there is, for me, a modernization committee would be a place where those of us who are more inclined to think about technology and about the world of electronic records would gravitate and an improvement committee or an implementation committee would be a place where people who are passionate about resources and funding would be part of that. And the last thing I say is about past recommendations in that committee, I conceive it as limited in scope, not 51 recommendations with a survey necessarily, but triaging what is important in what the last four terms of the committee have done and try to focus in areas that are greatest interest. So it's not a boil the ocean subcommittee, not intended, at least in my mind, to be that way. That's it. Okay, so thank you, Jason. There's been a little bit of activity on chat, Tom Sussman, I guess chalking up another vote for modernization, along with Alex and Jason now, and it looks like modernization, implementation of past recommendations and resources seem to be the current. Tech would be subsumed to modernization, is what I've heard Jason say. So we have a few other people queued up and I definitely want to circle back to Katrina, who hopefully will be able to come on, but Kirsten is next. Thank you, Alina. Kirsten Mitchell with the office of government information services, Alex Howard put a comment in the chat that I just want to read into the record. It was 20 minutes ago, so I just didn't want it to get lost. Alex's comment is, yes, to the appetite to extending FOIA-like process to legislative and judicial branch. This came up last term and is worth recommending again, especially support agencies, US Capitol Police and that sort of thing. Okay, thanks Kirsten. Thanks Alina. All right, Gmende, you're next and then Katrina and then Stephanie. Thank you, Alina. Gmende Johnson, University of Georgia. Since earlier we were talking about duplication, actually had a bit of a question. So one of the things that I mentioned was a survey FOIA professionals understand challenges, opportunities, understand what makes the job great, if they want to leave why, but I also know from the chief FOIA office's council meeting in April, there was also a discussion about a survey of FOIA professionals and I'm wondering if that's moving forward or if it's maybe been fielded because it seems like it's also an opportunity to get at this idea of challenging requests, trying to get away from the word fixations because perhaps asking those which requests, when you process them, which are the ones that are most difficult and seeing which key terms are perhaps repeated most frequently to get an understanding of, not necessarily fixations, but when we get requests of this nature, we have an extremely difficult time dealing with them because of X, Y and Z. So there are a couple of things in there. The first one, and maybe that's for you, Alina and Bobby about the survey recommendation from the chief FOIA office's council and maybe building in the question about the fixations request. So Bobby, I don't know if you want to comment. I'm just going to chime in and say that I think what you're referring to Gmende is the Kokaki committee, which is the cross agency committee on innovation and collaboration. Did I get that right? Collaboration and innovation. I'm sorry, we just have labeled it Kokaki. It's just so hard to remember anything else. It was actually a committee that was formed as a result of another FOIA advisory committee recommendation from the past term. They did launch a survey that closed August 31st to FOIA professionals. I don't remember and I don't think overly burdensome requests was among the topics that they asked about. Bobby shaking his head, no, thank you for confirming that recollection. Bobby, any other thoughts on this? Yeah, no, that's right. And I think I'm going back to the value of it being something studied under this committee term or this committee is bringing both sides view and insights to the table. That's why I think it's really a good fit for the FACA. Okay, thank you so much. Katrina, hopefully this time will work. Yes, okay. So one of the things I was going to say and I didn't think that I was going to go to this route when I first originally first didn't ask them for ideas. And this is Katrina Pavlikini with Department of Homeland Security. So I was actually going through the 51 recommendations really while everybody's talking, just looking at them. And I really think that we need to go back and look at those because every so far what I've looked at and I like I said, and I looked through probably about 10 or 15 while people were talking. Every issue that we have almost everything that's on this list for us to look at has been addressed somewhere in some form or fashion in these previous 51 recommendations. And so I really think, especially since, if I'm not mistaken and correct me if I'm wrong because it's the first year I'm on here, isn't this the fifth year this committee has been in existence or are you guys, this is the fifth rendition? Okay. So five years, you need to really start making a bank for the buck and show them what we're making some looking at these 51 recommendations and taking them. And there are some of these are repeated. When I looked at the 51 recommendations, some of the committees, previous times have reiterated or restated maybe a little bit differently than a prior committee. I really think that we should focus on this and I know some people might not agree with me and that's fine, but in order for us, everything seems to be linked together now the path to the future. And I think we need to really focus on this and because we could, I don't want us to look at anything, come up with an idea that was already thought of by someone else, because this is just gonna continue to be a vicious cycle if we don't address what's been looked at as a path, see what progress we made on it and then what further work needs to be done. And so that I'm gonna stop there and that's just my two cents worth though. Okay. And I did not think that that was gonna be something that I was going to, when I first asked me, I didn't think that this was gonna be the way I was gonna go, but I started looking at this and I see a lot of value added from prior committees and councils that recommendations and we could really work from that and build off of that. And some of the things have been done and we should recognize that they have in some areas. Yes. Thanks, Katrina, I appreciate it. And this is exactly why we're having this dialogue so we can all learn from each other too. Okay, Stephanie, who has been very patient. Thank you. Thank you. Stephanie, Jewett, US Department of the Interior, the Office of Inspector General. I just wanted to bring up that I had also raised that we look at raising the FOIA profile within agencies and how we gain support from senior leaders. My thoughts are if we do not have any support from senior leaders and agency, then it's very hard to do any of the things we are raising such as getting FOIA resources, funding for staff, funding for technology, electronic. The other thing that I had raised that we look at, and I know it's not a popular topic, is the, which I think is one of the greatest issues facing the government right now is the increase of FOIA litigation. The issue with the FOIA litigation, especially under the constructed denial litigations is that most of the time you're put on a FOIA production schedule and the ones addressing the, let's say 500 pages a month or the very people who are the FOIA processors who are supposed to be doing the FOIA request. And what the requester community does not often know is that yes, there may only be like, let's say 50 cases backlogged in front of you, but they don't know or realize that you also have to produce this 500. It doesn't get reported in the DOJ. In a report, it's very difficult to let requesters know that you are stuck with these very burdensome production schedules, which is fine. You missed your timeframe, that's fair. But it's just, I just wanna put another vote for FOIA resources. I think if we could somehow get leadership in government to get the funding that is needed, that would play, you know, feed down for so many issues, including the FOIA litigation. If there's enough staff, then we wouldn't get sued. So frequently for missing our timeframes. So another plug here for me for the FOIA resources funding committee, I wanna put in another vote that I would just say we still keep technology. I've heard what everyone said, and I think it's valuable, but I still think technology, like others have said, is such an up and coming thing for FOIA, like so many have said as well. Electronic records are where we at. There are so many agencies that are struggling, struggling, processing requests with just Adobe. They haven't expanded the resources. And the only way we're gonna be able to speed up in the trickling effect of avoiding litigation and avoiding all these other things is to get the proper technology to get the resources into the agencies. Thank you. Okay, great, thank you. Kirsten. Yes, hi, Kirsten Mitchell, the Office of Government Information Services. I am reading another comment into the record. This from Alex Howard at 1112. Alex writes, I'm curious if agencies are aware this committee exists, much less if they've read any recommendations or adopted and implemented any of them. Understanding if there's a missing feedback loop or communications channel could be valuable in terms of maximizing the committee's impact and influence past and present. So that might be a good comment for the follow-up committee or subcommittee. Kirsten also just to piggyback on that. Katrina commented, what Stephanie was mentioning is addressed in a previous recommendation that I just read. Katrina, can you just loop us back to what Stephanie was, which part of what Stephanie was saying? The part about the raising the profile of FOIA within leadership. That was already mentioned in a previous, actually a several, I think I read it three different times in some of the recommendations I was reading in. So that has been something that has been a recommendation all along. And so, and then, but I wanted to also say that I agree with her about the constructive denial. I think that that is an issue we probably should address if it falls underneath the processing section too. Okay, thanks, Katrina. David Collier wanted to share his screen again because he has been my de facto secretary, which I am loving. So, David, can I turn it over to you? You kind of reclumped everything based on all the dialogue we've been having. Well, sure. Again, just to try to get our subcommittees nailed down, all these are great comments, by the way, I love it. It's gonna be a great term. If I can get the share screen thing, I can be God here for a second. And so, I've been listening, I think I've put down the three options that I've heard and correct me if I'm wrong, but basically the three options that have seemed to boil up, probably can see that great. So, either a follow-up committee, resources and implementation, or follow-up implementation modernization, break tech out, or resources, implementation and modernization, no follow-up. Those are the three things I've heard and I apologize if I didn't get, miss something that someone said. So, if you look at how it breaks out, and again, we're not gonna have all these many working groups, probably so, but it's kinda how that would follow up an option one, if we really believe follow-ups important. And I added, by the way, Tom, your comment, communicating, educating lawmakers on top priorities, how do we connect what this committee's works to impact, really is what that's about. I like that idea if we wanna explore that. Option two, and I think this is what Jason was, and some others, Alex and others were talking about, or follow-up implementation improvement process, et cetera, but not including technology and modernization, technology as its own separate thing. Now, I only found two items in the spreadsheet that kind of fit under technology modernization, but I'm sure there are more, and I'm sure people could add more to this if they wanted. And of course, technology kinda fits across a lot of things. And then the third thing, and I guess I think was Tom, what I saw he put it in the chat, eliminate the follow-up subcommittee and just go with resources, implementation and modernization. So those are the three that I saw, and Jason, you made a good point, I think, it's like, yeah, I mean, the working groups, we can create any working group under anything, but it is worth figuring out early on what subcommittees we have because they can drive the train in topic areas. But anyway, those are the three kinda things I saw and I guess if I were to go with one, my, you know, and I could change my mind if I hear more, but I still kinda gravitate toward option one. I think it's follow-up and examining all this is important and we will have to coordinate well, right? Because imagine a subcommittee doing this research, looking at what's been done, they're going to have to communicate to the other subcommittees, hey, we found that on the issue of fees, there's all this has been done, this is what's not been done, this is not been achieved, we encourage you to maybe take this up, or what have you, technology. So it would be an interesting subcommittee, the follow-up and how it works with the other subcommittees, but I think it's important. And, you know, resources seems to pop out and then implementation, of course, I think that's the slam duck. The question really is how much time and effort to spend on tech, I think is really the question and of course, different people have different feelings on that. My feeling is it's to be part of implementation because that's part of implementation, technology, but of course, certainly people may wish to break that out as a separate subcommittee instead of resources or a follow-up, but I guess if I were to vote right now, I'd go option one, but if people went the other way, I wouldn't be all bent out of shape or anything. All right, actually, Dave, could you leave your screen sharing up? Ginger wanted to make a comment and I actually had the same question that Ginger does. Ginger, go ahead. So my understanding of implementation, and I'm sorry, I'm currently scrolling back up on the chat. Okay, so Tom's framing was modernization, implementation and resources. My understanding of implementation was that that meant the implementation of prior recommendations by this committee and investigating that. And in that framing, I absolutely think those three are the right subcommittees and would happily volunteer to co-chair the resources subcommittee because I feel that strongly about it, but I think modernization, implementation and resources, I like that framing. Oh, okay, so Tom, make sure I understand. Ginger, you're saying it was, what three? Modernization? Modernization? Modernization, implementation, which includes implementation of the prior recommendations and resources. I threw those in there and it includes all the process stuff and stuff. I mean, I think the process stuff would probably get filed under modernization. That was sort of my thinking in it, but I'm happy to yield to others on that. And especially Tom, I'm happy to yield to Tom's interpretation of Tom's own words. I mean, the process stuff would come out under all of them. I mean, I'd say probably three quarters of the existing recommendations are process oriented and so implementation would be by definition covering most process issues. And I think modernization because of the technology implications for process may be the more cutting edge and significant ones, but I do think that most of what we wanna do does fall under those groupings. And yes, I just didn't like the follow-up just seems kind of pedestrian. I think implementation is more of a big word, a multi-syllabic word. So I kind of like it better. You and Jason are teaming up to come up with new and creative names. Okay, I'm with you guys. Okay, so Tom, is that accurate on the screen there for what you're saying? By the way, I changed vexatious to voluminous. Just like last term, we recommended that no longer do we say glomar, it's either confirmed or denied. Maybe this term we say, we're vexatious. Let's call it voluminous or whatever. I was just thinking you said no. Okay, I'm joking. Tom, is that accurate? Well, it's a little teeny tight, but I'm so. And the other thing is I'm not wanting to do committee drafting. So I think you've generally got it and people can add to it. And I'd leave to Kirsten and Alina to finalize a proposal for the committee. Alina, it's Jason there. So what's up on the screen at the moment is too ambitious for the modernization committee, I think. And it slides into lots of different subjects. So all I could say is that when we are finally ready to vote on this, I don't think we should, in our minds be locked in that there are 14 working groups within modernization. I think these categories can be collapsed. Some of them I don't believe should be. I am a big proponent of what Alex named as modernization. He gets the prize for being proactive and creative here. What was his name, Jason? Warren? Auditorial. Oh, Auditorial. Auditorial. Yeah. And Alina. Sorry, I'll call on you in one second. I'd also just wanted to add past experience is shown that working groups form and then sometimes they devolve into other working groups because they find that there's not enough traction gained on a particular subject. So I don't think any one of us should be wedded to all these subtopics. I do wanna thank Dave for trying to group them. I think that's very helpful. It gives us a lot to think about as the subcommittees kick off, but no one should feel like they're wedded to all of these subtopics at any time. And a lot of them are very ambitious. So we may end up only getting to a few of them. Ben, go ahead, please. Yeah, thank you. Ben from AINS, Ben Tingo. If we were here voting on these subcommittees today, I would agree with this formulation of being implementation slash follow up, resources and modernization. And then to your point and Jason's point of leave the working group and the nitty gritty identification of the subtopics to those subcommittees to sort of hash out and everything. But I hope this isn't throwing too much of a monkey wrench in the process, which is to say that it seems like we are all, sounds like we're all in agreement that review of prior implementations is very important to make sure that we're an effective committee. It's a good time period to take stock and to go back and review and not only to make sure that we're effective and see what the log jams are on prior recommendations and check on the status of those, but also that given the volume of prior recommendations and the breadth of prior recommendations, those prior recommendations are going to by necessity have an impact on each one of these other subcommittees, activities, choices of topics, choices of working groups and where their starting point even is and how they engage with these issues. So maybe I would just throw out there and take the temperature on whether it makes sense for us to take another cycle to really take stock as a committee of what the prior recommendations are and then hash it out from there as to what the actual subcommittees would be, which may be that we end up with two subcommittees at that point because we'll recognize that these follow ups are going to be critical components of another subcommittees working group topic. And then we can really have a better handle on what we're all gonna be doing rather than maybe having an implementation follow-up subcommittee do three months, four months of work and identifying what they're working on only to find out that that's gonna have a dramatic impact on what the modernization or resources subcommittee working groups have been working on for the past three or four months, which is going to potentially set them back or realize that we've been doing duplicative work all that time, which will end up with us all being a little bit less effective. So then thanks for all those comments. First, I just wanna say I always encourage the subcommittees as they get started to go back and review the prior recommendations. That's always a homework assignment that I think everyone should have so we're not duplicating efforts. I also think your concepts are not mutually exclusive. I think we can continue with these subcommittees and as we hone in our thoughts, perhaps we end up only tackling a couple of these subjects for under each one. I think they're all very ambitious, but I'm also hearing folks who are feeling very strongly about the implementation follow-up that they not only wanna study what's already been implemented, but they really want to take the pulse, if you will, of agencies. Our agency is actually implementing recommendation number name 2018-15. What have they done to implement? How can we study that further? What surveys might we be able to affect in order to find out whether agencies are following a particular recommendation? So I think what I've heard from folks is that they envision a pretty active engagement of trying to nail down exactly what's happening. So I don't wanna detract from those folks who feel strongly about that with that subcommittee. I mean to stop sharing the screen is everybody cool? That's a sense of stuff. Yeah, I think I really wanna start wrapping up because gosh, can you guys believe it? We're almost at our bewitching hour of public comments and Alex, do you have one other comment you wanna share? I do. I just wanna reflect that the process is part of the product here. And I think we just need to be careful about not focusing so much on committees and so much on the recommendations or a board or white paper that comes out of that, but that the remit of this is to foster dialogue between the administration and the requested community, solicit public comments and then make recommendations. And the more that we can create, I think architectures of participation for that, the better. And as we talk about a lot of these different things, it strikes me that having the office of management and budget involved in the committee would be relevant, both to the respect to a cap goal for FOIA, which used to exist, but then disappeared the last four days or four years rather. And the more that we can think about this committee as a vehicle for getting the requested community's concerns before the administration, the better. I don't wanna just go down the rabbit hole of focusing only on committee assignments. I think we're gonna lose a lot of people that way. That's what I wanted to share. Okay, Tom. This is just a one minute comment responding to Ben. Kirsten as our official officers, is sits in on the subcommittee meetings, and she is a good link to prevent what you have concern about happening, which is one subcommittee going off and not knowing what anyone else is doing until they get to the end of the rope. So I found last year where we had way too many committees, too many subcommittees, too many working groups. Nonetheless, we did know what was going on. And as Alina said, as things went along, I guess Kirsten, some would disappear, some would be folded into another. So I think that all in all, that the coordination function that OGIS performs works quite well. Okay, so we're at 11.45. I would like to say that I think we've had a very, very robust discussion, as I expected that we would. I wanna thank everyone for their comments. I'm generally hearing, and I'm gonna exercise my chairperson rights at this point to the extent that I do have any. I'm definitely hearing a general consensus towards modernization, implementation of past recommendations and resources as the three subcommittees with lots of shifting around of working groups that can fall under each of those three. So I would like to ask if everyone is in favor of that, if I could get a voice vote or a hand vote. Let's take a quick vote on that now. I wanna hear if there are any nays. Can we all vote on those three subcommittees? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye, okay. All those opposing these three subcommittees. Okay, I hear silence. Okay, so we have our three subcommittees set, working groups, TBD. I would like to now solicit subcommittee co-chair of volunteers. First for modernization. All volunteers, a co-chair. It's Jason Barron. Jason, I need a government person for modernization, please. I wonder whether it makes sense for me to participate as well in that regard. Given, I don't work in the technology subcommittee Yeah, Gorka and I. So, Gorka and Jason, you have to promise to work nicely together. I welcome Gorka to be a partner. Okay. Implementation, past recommendations. Oh, this is Dave Coolier. I'm interested in that, if nobody else is on the requestor side anyway. I would, but we could rock them or you could have it. An arrow. I would. This is Katrina. I wouldn't mind doing it on the government side. Okay, so Katrina and Dave Coolier for implementation. Okay. I'm not ignoring you. Alex, I saw you too. I really appreciate all the enthusiasm. And then resources. I'm sorry, Dave, go ahead. Sorry, Alina, I was just gonna say, I mean, I certainly, if someone really wants to do it, I'm happy to let them on the requestor side for implementation. No, Ara will serve on that subcommittee and she will work very hard. Not sharing. Sorry, I did not mean to put my hand up. Let me just say, Alina, it's Jason Barron, that David did Yeoman service in writing up reports in the last term and he would serve as chair extremely well. I think David will do a great job. I second that as well. But then you're welcome to join all three subcommittees. So we really want your participation. By the way, I was a member of three subcommittees last term. I encourage you to do it if you have nothing else going in your life. So, otherwise, I'm not on David's committee anymore. Yeah, I would, there's benefits, but I'd discourage more than two. One's probably fine. That's just my experience. Others may have other thoughts. Okay. All right, so resources is the last one. Do I have a volunteer? I volunteer, I volunteer, I volunteer a million times over. Ginger for non-government. Do I have a government volunteer for resources? Come on, guys. Paul Chalmers from PBGCO volunteer. Okay, Paul, thank you very much. You've been silent the whole time. I chatted you to make sure you were, didn't have anything to say, but thank you for volunteering for the co-chair. So just to review modernization, Jason and Gorka, implementation, Dave Collier, Katrina, Pavlikinan resources, Ginger and Paul Chalmers, right? Do I have that all right? Okay, again, everyone should join all three subcommittees despite what Dave Collier just said. Okay, so let me turn now to our public comments part of our meeting and know that we look forward to hearing from non-committee participants who might have ideas or comments to share. I wanna remind everyone that this is not the appropriate venue for concerns about individual FOIA requests or non-FOIA topics. Again, if you need OGIS assistance, please feel free to email us at OGIS at narra.gov. All oral comments are captured in the transcript of the meeting, which we will post as soon as it is available. And just a reminder, public comments are limited to three minutes per person. So as I turn over to this section, I'm gonna first ask Kimberly and Kirsten to let us know if there have been any relevant questions or comments that have come in through Webex Chat. I'll give you a second to collect your thoughts. And Chris, I'm gonna ask if you could give instructions on folks who could call in through the telephone line. Sure, and as a reminder, if you would like to ask, or I'm sorry, if you would like to make a comment on Webex, you can do so by pressing on the raise hand icon located at the bottom right of your participant's panel. And if you're a doubt into the phone line, please press pound two on your telephone keypad. And we will call on you. Okay, so Kirsten and Kimberly, do we have any comments on chat? Yes, so this is Kirsten Mitchell, Office of Government Information Services. Before we get to the public comment, I just wanna read one of Ginger's chat into the record. She was responding to an earlier chat and she says she thinks that most agencies are aware of the FOIA Advisory Committee, but they are in triage mode, just trying to keep up with requests. When resources are this limited, agencies are not able to address best practices. So just wanted to read that into the record. And before I turn it over to Kimberly, we got quite a few comments about vexatious requests. Comments such as, why are you calling requesters vexatious? Please stop calling us this. It is inappropriate and disrespectful. I will say that I think we totally agree with that. And Bobby addressed this in his comments earlier and another comment or noted, the problem is resources, not requesters submitting complex requests. So I just wanted to get those thoughts into the record. And then I wanna turn it over to Kimberly because I think there are one or two more comments. So over to you, Kimberly. Thank you, Kirsten, Kimberly Reed, Nashar, guys. We do have one that I wanted to share from a commenter who something for the, this is a comment for the committee. Have we collectively considered limiting the scope of the focus of a subcommittee to facilitate taking one bite at a time versus trying to work on too broad of a topic? In other words, think of the old cliche about eating an elephant one bite at a time. So I think you all have kind of discussed a little bit of that already, but that was pointed out as you all were having a conversation. And that is all we have. All right, thanks, Kimberly. Chris, anyone waiting on our telephone line to make a comment? It looks like we do have one caller in queue. And caller, your line is unmuted. Yes, hi, good morning. This is Bob Hammond. Great stuff. I need to get this into the record for Deborah Wall and Benita Gupta. It is deeply disturbing that narrowed disabled YouTube chat for the 8th of September in today's meeting. My comments are professional and relevant. I had not planned to, but I placed them into the all panelists chat to be part of the official record. This new advisory committee, we need to let members of the public participate. I've already submitted an OIG complaint and you may expect a congressional inquiry. So life as a grandpa is good. My nine-year-old grandson played his third ever baseball game, got his first hit and scored a run. Life in FOIA is not good. In fact, it sucks. And things are going in the wrong direction, which is why I'm spending my precious time with you today. I'd rather be playing tea party with my seven-year-old granddaughter. When my time expires, I'll be calling back in to use the full 15 minutes, allotted for public comments if there are no other callers. You've all heard me say, I believe agency budgets you contain a line item for FOIA supported by what they would do to improve FOIA, increase staff and grade levels, reduce backlogs, et cetera. Place the onus on OMB and Congress to provide funding. In my conversations with Senate and House staff, Congress is receptive to supporting line item budgets. That's not direct funding from Congress. That's a budget in every agency's budget alignment. Lack of funding is the greatest impediment to FOIA for OGIS, DOJ, OIP and the agencies. When I talk to chief FOIA officers and FOIA professionals, the message is always the same. As they told GAO and FOIA audit this year, litigation is skyrocketing and draining resources to process FOIA requests and increasing backlogs. And everyone is under funding. OGIS mediation by statute is supposed to reduce litigation. I do not believe that OGIS has done a single mediation case in years. OGIS owes that answer to this committee. Closing 4,100 mediation cases with three people, if that can be believed, is one every hour and a half. And that doesn't include bathroom bakes or a cup of coffee. Then DOJ data supporting the GAO findings is completely inaccurate and unusable for any purpose. Bobby and Alina had a tough time at the Senate Judiciary hearing regarding the utter lack of FOIA compliance and oversight mediation. Both are grossly underfunded. The problem lies with NARA and the archive of the United States, DevWall and DOJs, Benita Gupta. Every meeting I asked OGIS and DOJ, OIP about. To apologize, that is three minutes on the timer. And at this time, I do not see any more hands raised. Okay, Chris, thank you very, very much. Out of respect for everyone's time, I want to just check in to see if there are any other public commenters. Kimberly, anyone else submitted any comments? Not at this time. Okay, all right. So I just want to thank everyone today for the robust conversation that we've had. The hard work begins now, so please roll up your sleeves, volunteer for subcommittees. You all know who the subcommittee co-chairs are. We can facilitate conversations among subcommittees and intra-subcommittee conversations. So Kirsten and I are ready and able to help. I want to thank everyone today for joining us I hope everyone continues to remain safe, healthy and resilient. And we will see each other again, virtually in the same space at our next meeting, Thursday, December 1st, 2022, from 10 to noon or possibly 10 to 1 PM. Usually our typical meetings go three hours. We typically take a 10 to 15 minute break. So that's what I expect. Any committee members have any questions or concerns before we adjourn? Elaine, that's Jason. Yes. Well, given the time period until the next public meeting, I would expect that you and Kirsten will be sending out messages to everyone to quickly make decisions with respect to subcommittees and then subcommittee chairs to reach out to begin holding subcommittee meetings. Am I right? Yes, and thanks for pointing that out. I think the success of the last two committee terms in particular were a no small part due to the fact that subcommittee co-chairs set regular meetings monthly or bi-monthly, bi-weekly, whatever you would like. It's completely your call as to cadence. But I think having regular times is really important. And if you can set it up so it works for most folks, that's ideal. And for Kirsten. Yes. And for Kirsten. Yes, we have to work around her schedule. She is the DFO under FACA. She has to attend all subcommittee meetings. I will point out we have two alternate DFOs. Yes. So should I get hit by a bus or something? We will have continuity. All right, hopefully that will never happen. Okay, so we're at 11.59 AM. I just want to thank everyone again for your time and for your anticipated work. And we stand adjourned. Thanks very much everyone.