practice you don't see much of. we shouldn't think of the practicality of it, but certainly sunshine seems very reasonable. >> one other thought. the sarbanes-oxley has a law where the ceo of a company and the chief financial officer has to sign off on the financial statements and they are personally liable. >> yep. >> why not when it comes to foia, where you have an agency official who clarly has a self-interest, because you're investigating agency corruption and the word is out we're not going to fulfill these requests unless we're absolutely forced to, why not make the senior agency person personally liable for not fulfilling a foia request? 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 hasn't been 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 as a practical matter that's in part one of the reasons why the earliest sanctions i spoke of, of getting that court order that went nowhere, you know, 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 creatively and i realize this is a law school and that may be sacrilegious, but we should be thinking more creatively about, you know -- you know, this is the public's business and how do we get the public involved? and we have for the first time really mechanisms that allow that, and 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. how to we empower them. >> wonderful segue into the next

panel, the office of government information services. but i think we have time for one more question over on this side here. >> hi. my name is claudia, and i'm a student here. i just wanted to ask you, looking back at foia over the last 40 years, what has been your biggest disappointment? >> well, i started as an ordinary american, and an ordinary, you know -- believe there's a law and you've got -- you know, there's a line. so obviously people will comply with it. and yet, you know, the justice department, you know, justice, you know, people are concerned about justice. that's not the way the system works. you know? at all. 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.

the question is what can we do better about it. right? 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. [ applause ] and sharing your wisdom with us. thank you very much. >> thank you. >> and we're going to roll just about immediately directly into our first panel. i know professor long will be joining us for our second panel in place of david burnham, who had been injured. >> he had surgery today. >> surgery today. >> a pretty good excuse. >> in the hall of fame of excuses that's pretty high. so we will roll directly into that first panel, we'll do a set-up, and we'll be you in a couple of minutes.

the laibt reports that's the lowest level since april of 2008. today's unemployment benefits report comes ahead of tomorrow's report on march job growth. the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.1% in august to 8.3% in february, the lowest in three years. this afternoon, president obama will sign the jump-start our business start-ups act, called the jobs act.

it includes initiatives to help start-ups grow through initial public offerings and reduces regulations on how small businesses raise funds. the signing will take place in the rose garden, and c-span will have live coverage at 2:10 eastern. today marks the second anniversary of the worst mining accident in 40 years. 29 workers died in the upper big branch mine in west virginia. a house committee recently held a hearing on mine safety and lessons learned from the accident. we'll have that hearing about 2:20 eastern. and at 5:15, a look at president obama's 2013 budget request for the defense department. defense secretary leanne pa net ta is joined by joint chiefs of staff dempsey in explaining the plan to the house budget committee. you can see the hearing here on c-span3. this saturday at noon eastern on c-span2's book-tv, join our live call-in program with distinguished former navy

s.e.a.l. chris kyle, from a rodeo rider to a u.s. sniper in american history. at 10:00 p.m. on "afterwords." >> if you think of yourself as a family and you think of yourself as a team, and she said when i get a raise at work, he's so proud of me, and it's like we got a raise, our family got a raise. but she had defined including what her husband does and had a respect for what her husband was doing. >> "the richer sex" on the changing roles of women as the breadwinners of the family and how that impacts their lives. also this weekend, "america the beautiful." director of neurosurgery at johns hopkins compares the decline of empires past with america and shares his thoughts on what should be done to avoid a similar fate, sunday at 3:30 p.m. book-tv, every weekend on c-span2. we continue our look now at how the government is doing in

responding to freedom of information requests. a house committee recently gave the federal government a c-minus in handling requests. in this hour and ten-minute discussion, official from the office of government information services. they talk about their challenges and progress. all right, folks. we're going to tart in again on our 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 don't do it just during sunshine week. we call it that all year long. by the way, it does look like the sun is beginning to peek out a little bit, as 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 spend some time on that, because 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 meriam nesbitt, who is known to everyone here in the audience, i'm sure, and hopefully more and more people out in the viewing audience, as the -- i can't say new director. she's the founding director of the office of government information services. it's been in existence since

september of 2009. so it's been 2 1/2 years. it either feels like it's been ten years or only four weeks, depending upon probably one day to the next within the office of government information services, ogis for short, just like foia for short. miriam is someone who came back from paris, to her husband's dismay, to accept that senior service 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 very 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? >> oh, yeah. >> 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.

okay. enough of that. miriam 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 division at unesco in paris she was at the archives, where she was the right-hand person to several archivists over the years. she was the american counsel for the american library association. and back early in life, nearly 30 years ago, miriam was the best darn deputy director that the office of information privacy ever had by far, a position she held for about a dozen years from 1982 to 1994. so with that, i'm going to just let miriam 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 perhaps 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 in the rotunda of the

national archives and take a look at the display. we're really hoping this becomes an annual sunshine week event. but we're very proud to have the original law displayed there for the first time. >> does it show president johnson's signature in a shaking hand or a firm hand? because we gather he was a little bit shaky about signing it. >> well, 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've 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, 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 expression of strong interest in having foia work in a little bit 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 withholding, 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 compliance 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 that 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 our 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 about the way that we work. but we are looking forward to 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're going talk about that a little bit with one of our panelists, gavin baker, who is a federal information policy analyst on 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 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. marry -- marianne mannheim 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 liaisons are a big part of the way that 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. i know we're going to 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. but we've got four specific things that ogis has come out with for improving 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 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've taken concrete steps to creating a job series just for foia professionals. it would really help enhance the intent and 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 we think could go much broader, government wide. things like senior official memos would remind foia professionals and all employees of their duty to assist openly, accurately and completely 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 ensure the public can find foia 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 standardized and indexed online foy yao 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 foia web page? 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 just for requesters but for agencies. >> are you suggesting that if you had full contact information as you say, that might make holding a foia truly a contact sport? >> well -- no.

i'm suggesting that there would be greater communication. maybe not full contact, but better communication. and, of course, we at ogis think it goes a long way towards 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.