but it was firmly established in the law, and 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. and 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 public liaison, and she's the first person that we at foia turn to when we have a case involving the state department. so, marianne, i'll let you take it away and talk about what you do. >> good morning. well, i just started in august of 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 that. 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 and everything is sort of like a puzzle. and so 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 listening 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, which, 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 been 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 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 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 sort of gets trained, for example, as they have to go back and look at their case really close 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 the one year. although they're all late. so it seems like we have to be on top of every single thing at the same time. and we don't want that person waiting five years who maybe didn't call today to be disadvantaged at the same time. so we have our own little world of problems every time -- something like this comes in, because we want to do everything we can. we want to stop and help and we should be doing everything. we should be getting it out. you know, being in the middle of this means i'm trying to get at least moving as much as i can. and the harder times have been if someone is like i'm going to sue. well, you know, sometimes what can you say to that? you can say we can try

mediation. i mean, we can try doing something with ogis. but if someone is that upset at that point, you can't really talk them out of something that they have the money to go ahead and file a lawsuit and do it. they're in their right to do that. so one thing, you know, i have learned doing this as well. i knew it before, but it's just how much work we have had on our side to do. we are trying our best. one of the things when you talk about like all the sort of the white collar and people doing things that are wrong, the government side of things. at least from what i've seen with how much we have to do, i don't know that we have the time to think of doing soming that crazy. i mean, we're just kind of busy. if we're messing up your file -- if you've sued us 20 times, and we messed up your other case, we didn't intentionally do that. trust me. so i think that discovering

where we mess up and trying to fix that and trying -- one of the things i have been trying to also do beyond this is just improve our foia processes in general from the foia program manager standpoint, and looking at what we're messing up on and trying to fix these things. learning from obviously all these mistakes that we do make. but also trying to fix it as much as we can. and so -- but ogis is very nice when they call and it's nice having them as well to talk to the requesters. especially to be able to send them to ogis as well. so that way that can get the help that they need and in the end, i think whether you're coming directly to me and calling, i will do my best to get the case moving and getting it done and if there are disputes or problems, we will do everything we can to fix that. i think ogis does the same y thing. and i also i'm always aware of how sort of understaffed they

are as well with six people, and so there are times when i'm thinking what can ogis be doing in the future, beyond just working sort of as a public liaison in the sense too? there's so much that it would be nice for them to look at all the things that we need from the government's standpoint to succeed, to look at our processes, to say okay, you know, they're not getting any of this done 24 in time. what could be changed within that? and getting that advice would be really helpful as well. because i mean, if you're in a job, you don't know always see what you can do to fix it. but if you have someone who comes out and in a sense you're set up to come and have this fresh view of it, you're in a better position to actually assist us to get there. so that's something that i would like to see more of, i think. and so -- i guess -- i don't think -- i'm good.

you can ask me questions afterwards. not case specific, please. but just -- >> you mean, you don't welcome questions about, where is my request in the queue? when is it going to get out? >> i'd have to say which queue? so -- >> gavin? and we will -- we actually envisioned this as being a great opportunity to have some give and take with those of you who are here. so i'm certain that you will get some questions. gavin? >> thank you, miriam. and thank you, dan and american university for having me. mariam said that i would tell you how government is doing and where it should be going and that is exactly what i would like to do. and i'm going to split the difference here between the topic that dan wants and the

topic that miriam wants and we'll talk about both ogis and foia, or, i suppose, the role of ogis and foia. so ogis today i think plays a very important and valuable role in our foia system. i want to highlight the three activities in particular. the first are the requester services or the facilitation in a that you've been hearing about, and before i go on, i'd like to get an idea of who's in the audience here. there's always such a diverse group of people at the collaboration of government secrecy events. raise your hand if you've ever filed a foia request. >> and you're willing to self-identify. >> raise your hand if you have used ogis' requester services. okay. a few. raise your hand if you are a foia professional. also a good bit.

raise your hand if you have been on the other end of ogis' request for services. okay. so a good number of folks with some first-hand experience here. for the rest of you, i think it's important to recognize that the requester services have a real value at both an individual and a macro level. there were somewhere around half a million foia requests filed across the government last year. i can tell you with absolute certainty that not every one of those requests received helpful and friendly customer service. this is not by any means to impugn the folks who have to do this day to day, but i think that the fact is that in not all cases the customer service message is getting out. that's despite the 2007 amendments where congress clearly indicated that they wanted an increased emphasis on

customer service. so i see ogis as a sheepdog. in a sense, that congress is driving the herd and has said we want to go here. and ogis is the sheepdog that has to go and catch the straggler and bring it back to the crowd. the stubborn sheep that doesn't want to move, ogis has to convince it to move and the idea is to bring everybody along and keep us moving and pick up the pace to go in the direction that congress has said we need to go. so at a macro level i think that's very important. at an individual level, it is -- i don't think this is too strong a word, infuriating to not know what is going on with your foia request. you know that it's an odds game

no matter what in terms of whether are you'll actually get the information that you want, but you shouldn't have to wait and wonder even whether your request is going to get an answer. so ogis i think does an excellent job and i can say that i am a satisfied customer in this regard. ogis does an excellent job of facilitating a conversation between the requesters and the agencies, getting requests unstuck and helping folks understand where they are in the process. the second activity that i want to highlight are the best practices that ogis has developed. if you're a foia geek and you haven't read the best practices, you have to. these hit on so many of the long standing requests of the open government community. and most of these once you read

them, they sound so obvious. i think -- and you can correct me if i'm wrong, every single one of the best practices i would wager is implemented by someone, somewhere in government. they are just not implemented consistently across all of the agencies. so these are all things that people have done and it's a matter of surfacing these best practices and scaling them out government-wide. the next step for the best practices i think is a matter of compliance. that's what i would like to understand more of -- is what is the impact of the best practices? i think that there are a brilliant set of ideas in terms of helping facilitate the process, making it more efficient. more effective. and the next step for me is to learn more about exactly whether agencies are learning these lessons.

so i know that omb watch has suggested that the department of justice and their next chief foia officers ask agencies to report on the steps they have taken to comply with the best practices. so however it's done, i would like to hear more about the evidence of what kind of impact these things are having, but they're great ideas, and i would really like to see them be more widely adopted. and the third activity that i'll highlight is ogis' role in the foia portal, which is an incredibly important project that is underway now, led by epa and also with the commerce department currently participating, to build the next generation of technical infrastructure for foia requesters as well as for foia professionals in a way that scales across the government, has shared services,

efficiencies, and improves customer service. we release so much information through the foia process, but in far too many cases it's still on an individual basis. you requested this, you get it and nobody else receives that information. in the 21st century that's silly. we need to scale up the way that information is released. foia is a hard process. it is time and resource intensive process. if people are going through all of the effort of collecting these documents, redacting them, clearing them for release, by the time they're actually cleared for release it's silly that we're not making them fully available to the public and in too many cases we are not. in terms of tracking the status of requests, congress has said you need to make it easier for folks to figure out where they

are in the process. and in many cases there hasn't been a huge leap in the way that that's done. so bringing that fully online and fully automated is something that the foia portal would do. extremely important. and kirsten talked about the websites of agency foia offices. in many cases these websites do now have a mechanism for filing a request online and in some cases for tracking a request online. this is great. it's exactly what agencies should be doing. but we shouldn't have to do it 100 different times. in many cases even within a single department there are dozens of components, each of which has a separate foia office. it's outrageous that a requester should have to deal with so many different interfaces in order to

seek information from more than one agency. so bringing that together and providing a common interface and a common way for requesters to track where they are, incredibly important things that the foia portal would do, this is not to mention all of the great things that it would do in terms of efficiencies of processing and ogis i think has played a really important role in helping move that project forward. so now i'll talk a bit about the futu future, and i'm going to counter with another yogi berra quote, which is, it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. but i think that within the existing statutory authority, that's some wiggle room for what ogis could be doing. and beyond the existing statute, i think we need to think long term about what we need as a government and as a country to make foia work.

within this statute, ogis has been tasked with making policy recommendations to the president and to congress. i'm not going to put anybody on the spot here, but on the table and the foia foyer there is a copy of an article about the recommendations that ogis has prepared and the difficulty that they have faced in publishing them. so that's unfortunate. it's something that should change. and it's one of the things that i look forward to ogis doing increasingly in the future. the mediation -- mediation is the term that the statute uses in terms of the office's responsibility. i think arguably the more accurate term for what ogis currently does is facilitation. so i think that there is room

for increase -- increasing move in the direction of mediation and a more active role for ogis. and in addition where mediation doesn't produce the result that ogis thinks it ought to, the statute tasks ogis with issuing advisory opinions which was -- which would essentially give it an opportunity to formally and publicly say we disagree with the way the agency has handled this. so i think that that is a way that i look forward to ogis doing more of that in the future. now, in general, aside from the statutory authorities, what my hope for ogis generally in the future is that it will receive increased resources and increased authority. some of the ideas that i just mentioned that are within the existing statutory authority i

think are largely an issue of resources and where the office has chosen to prioritize what they were going to to do in the first few years of existence. so don't take it as a major are criticism from me that these things haven't taken place yet, as much as it is my hope that that's where we'll go moving in the coming years. but in general, i think ogis is sort of an americanish version of the model that exists in other countries and we need to keep moving in that direction. my favorite example is the scottish information commissioner, which not only has the authority to issue binding decisions requiring government to disclose information, actually have the ability to raid government agencies and get the information forcibly if necessary and provide it to the public.

i'm not suggesting that that is something we should be doing all the time. but it really puts much more teeth into giving people an option other than the very expensive and time consumer and complex option of going to a federal court and making sure that we have a way for the public to enforce the transparency that the foia is supposed to deliver. so those are my thoughts and now i suppose we'll turn it back to the panel. >> thank you. thank you, everybody, for those ideas. what i'd like to do is maybe just respond to a couple things that came up. i know kirsten has some ideas and let's have a little give and take amongst the panelists and then throw it open for everybody else here. just gavin, i appreciate really the -- those kind words and particularly words of encouragement.

we do try very hard, and i know that there are people in the room who are maybe not satisfied customer, but we very much appreciate the opportunity to tackle -- including some very complex situations, and least to do our best. the foia portal that gavin is referring to, just -- >> [ inaudible ]. >> and i am so sorry i cannot sing along to that. actually, you're probably really glad i cannot sing along to that. the foia portal that gavin is referring to for those of you who don't know, we're happy to provide more information about that and in fact i think we're

probably going to be talking about that at a hearing in the house next wednesday, march 21. but this is a project that ogis is part of as -- with our parent, the national archives. along with the department of commerce and under the leadership of the environmental protection agency. it is the beginning of, and it is just the beginning, of building a one-stop shop portal for people to both make requests and also to easily find the records that are disclosed as a result of those requests. we are hoping the plan is right now actually this would roll out october 1. we're looking for agency partners. obviously the more partners that

participate, the better it will work. but this is just version 1. we are already thinking of version 2 and we've been developing it with very much input from both agency foia professionals and also members of the requester community. and we think it's a great idea, but of course it's only one of a number of efforts that are being made in the government to figure out better ways to use technology, but we're -- we think it's a great idea and we appreciate your recognition of that. one other thing i would just mention is in terms of the ogis priorities. we really sort of from the beginning knew that our first priority had to be actually dealing with people who are coming at our door. whether it's by letter, by e-mail, by phone, and asking for assistance with specific cases or with people who were just trying to fuger o figure out who

to make a request, or thousand make a request, and that has been our first priority. even so, we can't handle everything really quickly. some things can be handled quickly, if it's just a matter of getting people to the right place, but if it's a complex case, it can, in fact, take months to resolve. we're also building the capability of doing, being able to do formal mediation. we actually have that capability now, but if we had quite a few requests for it, and, remember, this has to be something that both parties agree to do voluntarily. both the agency and the requester have to agree. we've had some case where is the agency has wanted mediation, but the requester hasn't, and we've had somewhere the requester wanted mediation, but the agency didn't want to do it. everybody has to agree to do it, but we certainly want to -- want

to and have we're trying to build the capability to make that possible any time that is asked for. so -- kirsten, i'm going to toss it to you to maybe talk about the best practices that gavin mentioned, and ask if there are any other comments from gavin or from marianne and then we'll have time for, i think a pretty good exchange of information. from you all. >> thanks, miriam, and i just wanted to respond to a few things that gavin said. first, i don't think i've of been call add sheepdog before, but i actually really like the analogy. it's a good one. one of the things you mentioned, gavin, was requester services, and i just wanted to make it very clear to everyone that ogis exists not just for requesters but also for agencies. anyone is free to come to us at any time. in our first year we had mostly

requester whose came to us, but in our second year and now starting into our third year, we have had more and more agencies come to us for help with either complex requests, multiagency requests, difficult requesters, that sort of thing. so i just wanted everyone to know that. that we're not here to advocate for requesters or for agencies, but for the foia process. and the other thing i wanted to mention is, gavin talked about our best practices, and we just came up with some best practices for database requests. we have best practices for requesters and also best practices for agencies, and we've handled several cases dealing with databases and found that they can be pretty difficult for both sides of the request.

so we have those. unfortunately, we don't have them among the handout, but they are on our website, which is ogis poogi sch og ogis.gov, let us know and let you know what you think, and i think i'm going to end it there. >> okay. either one of you? >> let me say something -- perhaps more complementary than miriam being very modest, narrowly highlighted that ogis. that is, if you'd like to get a good sense, the most acute sense of what ogis is all about, i tell you, you can do that simply by looking at four words. and this is within plaub kags that ogis post and the 27th of january under the heading, "striking the balance with third party requests." and under the subheading, tips

for requesters, the third bullet says, "even if you suspect the requested records will be exempt or -- like the confirmed -- make the request anyway!" . those four words, make the request anyway, i think, are unprecedented on a government website, the government foia publication. i think more than anything else, they tell you what ogis is all about. i can also commend your attention, miriam's testimony, before the senate judiciary committee this week. this son initiative we'll be getting into certainly this afternoon when we have our congressional staff panelists, from the legislative session. this what has to do way decisiot came down more than a year ago, and now that the administration appears, finally, after more than a year, to have said, yes.

you know, we ought to do something about that. amend the foia. specifically exemption 2. miriam's testimony has a very thoughtful and, i think, comprehensive and well-stated discussion of that issue. well balanced, i think. addressing or taking comments of foia requesters. open as a government community and the concerns that agencies have, because there are some things, as her testimony points out, such as risk and vulnerability assessments for which there is no existing protection, as matter of law. so, again, i commend that to you, just those two things in particular. and i think they can make everyone feel optimistic about going forward. and on that optimistic note, got a question right there. >> michael, department of the air force. within the tables and rules