is out we're not going to fulfill these requests unless we're absolutely forced to, why not make them personally liable for not fulfilling -- maybe not for all, but when it involves agency corruption, why not have something similar to sarbanes-oxley? is that completely impossible? i know it's not part of the debate, but you have that model now. >> part of the issue is often the front person, not the decisionmaker is who signs now, right? so are we going to make the head of the agency sign the foia response letters? because it's a practical matter. that's in part one of the reasons why the earliest sanctions i spoke of getting that court order that went nowhere, then the question is well, who's the responsible official and they decide nobody was the responsible official.

then what do you do? right? so i am after 40 years having sort of more rules, which assumes that there is a means to execute them and enforce them. you know, i'm not really -- i haven't seen that was really -- i mean, it is good. but you shouldn't bank at all that, you know, it's going to mean anything. and we -- we should be thinking more creativity and i realize this is a law school and that may be sacrilegious, but we should be thinking more creativity about, you know, this is the public's business and how do we get the public involved? and we have for the first time really a mechanism that allow that we see that happening in

different areas. you know, one may not agree with how everything goes with that model. but it's the best model that we have. it is the best model that we have. why not try it? why not try it in foia and often, you know, there are people in government agencies who really want to disclose and they simply aren't empowered to do so. >> wonderful segue into the next panel. but i think we have time for one more question over on this side here. >> hi, i'm claudia, i'm a student here. i want to know what's been your biggest disappointment? >> well, i started as an ordinary american and an ordinary, you know -- believe there's a lot and you've got --

you know, there's a lot. so obviously people will comply with it. and yet, the justice department, you know, justice, you know people are concerned about justice. that's not the way this system works. you know? i think that's really, really discouraging on the one side, and you -- but you need not to become cynical. because we don't -- you know, it's really easy to be critical. what can we do better about it? so you have to think about how do we make it work? how do we make it work better? >> well, sue, on that noncynical note, let me thank you again for all that you have done. around sharing your wisdom with us. thank you very much. and we're going to roll just about immediately directly into our next panel.

i know professor long will be joining us for our second panel in place of david bernen who had been injured. >> he had surgery today. >> surgery today. >> a good excuse. >> in the hall of fame of excuses that's pretty high. so we will roll directly into the first panel. we'll t we'll do a set-up and we'll be you in a couple of minutes. american university law schools conference on the freedom of information act continues now. they assist other government agencies in complying with foia. also on the panel is state department officer in charge of handling freedom of information act requests. this is just over an hour.

>> all right, folks, we'll start in again on the first panel. if everyone could quiet down. i know there are a lot of conversations going on upstairs where the handouts are and the -- and the refreshments. we call that the foia foyer. foia foyer. we call it that all year long. by the way, it does look like the sun is beginning to peek out a little bit, befitting this freedom of information day during sunshine week. i want to make sure that everyone here in the audience knows that we do have handouts, many handouts up there including detailed biographical sketch on everyone who's speaking here today. so you'll find that the moderators, including myself, we will not spend a lot of time

with respect to biographical details. we'll try to get as much content out during the day as possible. and i'm going to sit in on this first panel, but i'll introduce first mariam nisbet. hopefully, more and more people out in the viewing audience as the -- i can't say new director, you're the founding director, it's been in existence since 2009. it only feels like ten years or four weeks, depending on the department of the office of government services, ogis for short. she came back from paris to her husband's dismay to accept that

career position of ogis. >> he was with me. >> oh, i'm not implying a breakup. as a matter of fact, i saw him back there in washington. but michael made it clear to me had you turned that job down and allowed him to stay as a kept man in paris, france, for the near future that would have been fine with him. fair, fair characterization? anything beyond that is exception 6 information and if i go a half step further, it will be 7-c because miriam will come after me and this will be a law enforcement investigation involved. mariam has probably more varied experience in the openness in government related area, than just about anyone else. because prior to being the director of the information services decision at unesco in paris she was at the archives a where she was the right-hand

person to several ark viss over the years. she was the american counsel for the library association and 30 years ago mariam was the best darn deputy director that the office of information privacy ever had by far, a position she held for a dozen years from 1982 to 1994. so with that, i'm going to just let mariam go on for the rest of the panel and we're going to be able to talk about very interesting developments i would think not only about ogis in general, but during sunshine week in particular. >> thank you very much, dan. good morning, everybody. >> good morning. >> i know this is a little late in sunshine week to be mentioning this, but you do have

a little bit of time left. downtown the national archives building for the first time ever this week has been on display, the original freedom of information act. and if you -- i know some people in the room have made it by this week. if you haven't, and you have a chance to, i'm not suggesting anybody would want to leave this program early, but if you find yourselves downtown somewhere around pennsylvania and 7th streets this afternoon, stop in in the reopportuniotunda of the archives and look at the display. we were very proud to have the original law displayed there for the first time. >> does it show president johnson's signature in a shaking or a firm hand? we gather he was shaky about signing it.

>> we understand from historians that there was a bit of a kicking and screaming involved. but the signature is there quite firmly. and it did become law and there we go. i wanted to express appreciation for being able to have the benefit of sue long's historical perspective this morning. it really does make you realize how far -- how far we have come with changes in the law over the last 45 years. and certainly to the good, even though we still have some enforcement issues as sue points out. i don't want to spend much time talking about ogis. even though dan very kindly made it the subject of this particular panel. we really would like to focus more on the part of the subject matter that deals with the future, not so much the ogis

vision of the future, but also some of the ideas that those of you in the room have and starting with our panelists who can talk about what they see and what they would like to see. although a little bit of caution. one of my favorite yogi berra quotes is the future ain't what it used to be. so you can think about that as we go through the next few minutes. ogis is a very new part of the freedom of information act. a very welcome part. i think for many of us because we feel like it does -- it does embody some congressional discretion in having foia work in a little different way.

perhaps more collaborative. certainly for the first time in the freedom of information act congress was saying that it wanted to see alternative dispute resolution methods, mediation brought to the process as an alternative to litigation and that certainly which is only part of the ogis mission is -- i think a really strong, significant statement about what congress saw the future of foia being. at least a hope that we would be moving beyond adversarial approaches and moving to that culture change of disclosure, not with holding as sue talked about this morning. we approach that part of our mission mediating disputes, trying to find resolution to

some of the problems that arise. and perhaps even more importantly trying to prevent or avoid disputes before they arise as a really significant part of what we do. we see that as part of what we would like to believe is and can be a culture change. in the foia community. in terms of, again, that expectation that things will be disclosed. we have a little bit of a tough time with that and also with carrying out the other part of our mission which is reviewing agency policies, procedures and compliance. part of it is for a new office trying to figure out the best ways to do that. certainly we do -- we work with agencies every day. we get a strong sense of what they're doing, where there are trouble spots.

but frankly, being able to do compliant government wide with a small staff is probably a bit of an expectation that we cannot meet. that leads me to another just sort of a challenge that we have and this is expectations. what we can do and what we can't do. certainly a lot of what we do every day with our facilitators is just to open up communications. but there is i think an expectation that we can do more than we can do. we do not have enforcement mechanisms ourselves. but we really have to use communication persuasion and we rely upon certainly the very strong professional attitudes of most of the foia professionals with whom we work in the agencies and that is something

that, you know, we depend upon. we also have a hard time measuring our success. we've -- it will be may before we come up on the second anniversary of even being fully staffed with -- we have six professionals and a staff assistant. we're a bit challenged in that respect, but we also know that we have to make the most of what we have because in this budgetary environment, you know, we can't expect anything different. so we have to try to figure out how to be smarter with the way we work. but we are looking forward to sug gergss from -- suggestions from our customers as to how we can measure what with we're doing. the effectiveness of what we're doing. so if you have ideas, please let

us know. we depend upon our customers who are both requesters and agencies to do a lot of oversight. we'll talk about that a little bit with one of our panelists, gavin baker, who is a federal information policy analyst another omb watch. omb watch is among those organizations that i think the government really must depend upon to give us a sense of how we're doing and how we could do it better. the last thing i'm going to just mention is technology. i think we in the federal government are looking always for how we can do disclosure and do it smarter. and doing it in a way that does not depend upon people making requests. that -- i have actually heard people suggest that foia is going to become obsolete. i just don't think that's going to happen.

you really must depend upon people coming up with new things to ask for. serious demands about what the government should be disclosing in the way of information and data. we heard some good ideas from sue about that. and -- but technology is our friend, but we're i think -- that's one of our big challenges, is figuring out how to work smarter and how to work better and using technology to make particularly databases more accessible, more easily usable and user friendly. part of the few chush of -- future of foia too is the change that congress made in putting in a position -- statutory position

of foia public liaison. marianne manheim is a liaison at the department of state and we'll hear from her about how that part of the vision is working. but certainly the foia public lie y liaisons are a big way of the way that the ogis works. and as i said, avoiding disputes in the first place. so that leaves our third panelists that i have not introduced yet and i'm going to turn to first. that is kirsten mitchell who is an ogis facilitator. kirsten is one of those stalwart ogis staff members who works day in and day out to make our work as broad and accessible as

possible dealing with requesters and with agencies every day. to resolve disputes and also to help particularly agency professionals figure out better ways to disclose smart. so i'm going to stop there and i know we'll have some q&a at the end of this. but i'd like to turn it over to kirsten, then we'll ask marianne to speak and then gavin we'll turn to you as the third. >> good morning. so mariam talked about the culture change that we would like to see happen in the foia and i think as she said that is the future of foia.

so i'm going to talk about what we mean by a culture change certainly sue pointed to several things and miriam mentioned a couple. we have four things that ogis has come out for improving t the -- the administration of foia. these aren't things that would require amending foia or changing foia, but just things to improve the administration. and there are no particular -- they're in no particular order. so the first one would be to professionalize the foia career track and we're very pleased that the office of personnel management has committed to creating a job series. they have taken concrete steps for foia professionals. it would help enhance the visibility of foia professionals. and i think it would also go a long way in increasing the

likelihood that agencies could retain foia professionals. sort of moving a little bit beyond. we'd love to see a certification program for foia professionals. we at ogis have seen a lot of foia professionals who sort of end up in that job by default. either as other duties, as assigned or they just -- someone leaves and they get into the position and we'd really like to see some -- where they have more training, where the job is professionalized and where it's a real career track for foia professionals. and another thing along this vein is incorporating foia performance standards into performance plans for agency leadership as well as foia professionals. so the second thing is top down agency support.

agency leadership should actively support foia programs, policies and initiatives. certainly we have some of that that we think it could go much broader, government wide. things like senior official memos would remind foia professionals and all employees with the foia process. i think that happens in some agencies and others not so much. so things like that cut across the government. the third suggestion we have for improving the administration of foia is standardizing agency web pages. i don't know how many of you have spent time on agency web pages, but they can be dramatically different. they can be difficult to find things and the e-government act

of 2002 requires every agency's website to include information made public under foia. and one can find those things, but sometimes they can be extremely confusing. it takes many, many clicks to find things. so we think that standardizing foia websites would be a customer friendly and efficient way to find the confined resources. so when we were coming up with this idea we thought wouldn't it be great to have an easy to use template, a design template, with shareholder input from both agencies and requesters for agencies to customize. wouldn't online foia reading rooms be a great resource? and this one is pretty basic. wouldn't it be great to have

full contact information for designated foia professionals on every webpage? sometimes when you find contact information, there's no -- there are no names to go with it. sometimes it's just a general number. we think the standardization of this government wide would go a long way with making foia easy not only for requesters, but for agencies. >> are you suggesting that if you had full contact information that makes foia a truly contact sport? >> no. i'm suggesting there's greater communication. maybe not full contact, but better communication. we at ogis goes a long way to preventing disputes. finally, the last bit is training. i know you all know that attorney general holder in his

march 2009 memo suggested that foia is everybody's responsibility. what we would like to see is regular training to ensure that all agency employees including those in the senior executive service and political appointees are up to date on the basics of foia. one thing we'd love to see is day one training. every person who becomes a federal employee goes through an orientation service during their first day or so. we'd love to see 10, 15 minutes spent on foia. because it is everybody's responsibility. whether you are a foia professional or not, it's your responsibility. and we would really love to see that because so many government employees don't know that. we'd love to see refresher

training that all employees would receive annual refresher training. then finally, foia professionals training. specific training to help people like chief foia officers and foia public liaisons carry out their statutory duties. and in the 2007 amendments that created our office, in that office -- i mean, in that bill, the role of the foia public liaison was put into law. it had been created in a previous executive order. but it was firmly established into law. that person really is mandated with resolve -- helping resolve disputes. helping prevent disputes, helping do a lot of the things that we at ogis do. we would really like to see those professionals more fully

trained and better equipped to do their jobs. with that i think i'm going to turn it over to marianne manheim, the state department's foia liaison and she's the first person we turn to when we have an issue with the state department. we'll turn it to you and you can talk about what you do. >> good morning. well, i just started in august last year. but within a couple of weeks i got to know everybody at ogis so that i learned my job pretty quickly. at least the initial part about this. and then over time i learned the extent of how much there was to do within this position. so pretty much what happens as the public liaison as you probably know, i get phone calls and i get e-mails and there are

thousands of cases at the state department because we process in a centralized way. we don't have decentralized processing and it's like a puzzle. my job is to listen. i have taken their training about three times now for alternative dispute resolution and i have only had a few disputes, i think. but the key is just staying quiet at least initially and hearing. because sometimes our requesters have talked to so many different people already over years, because there's a 20 or 30 working day requirement by the time it gets to me it's long past that. so trying to maybe calm somebody down by listening is very important. and just listening to make sure they know that i'm listening.

and then once i have the facts it's also figuring out what's happening within the department and going through the file and talking to people who are processing and finding out what is going on because it's nev never -- i wish it were as simple as just looking at it and figuring out what's going on sometimes but it isn't. so i want to make sure when i go back to the requester and i'm able to help them and explain to them and what's happening, it's really what's happening. because i have, you know, there's so many different sides even within our own world that we need to make sure that we are getting our facts straight. so everyone gets strained, and they have to go back and look at their case really closely possibly for the first time because there's a queue. and obviously something that's been sitting around for five years really does need to have that attention versus