The Chief FOIA Officers Council will be meeting on July 27, 2017 at 10 am to discuss strategies for improving customer service and improving coordination between agency FOIA Public Liaisons and our office. Be sure to RSVP today to join the audience in the William G. McGowan Theater and ensure you have an opportunity to … Continue reading Register Today to Share Your Thoughts with the Chief FOIA Officer Council
On June 30th we passed the one-year anniversary of the enactment of the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016. Over the past year we have published blog posts suggesting ways agencies can implement some of the amendments, including the requirement to update FOIA regulations and notify requesters about our dispute resolution services. Today, we want to … Continue reading FOIA Improvement: Proactive Disclosure
The Federal FOIA Advisory Committee will reconvene on Thursday, July 20th at 10:00 am in the William G. McGowan Theater to continue its work to develop consensus solutions to some of the greatest challenges to FOIA administration and processes. If you have comments to share with the Committee, or would like to join the live … Continue reading Register to Attend the July 20th FOIA Advisory Committee Meeting
Are you a student who is looking for an opportunity to gain valuable work experience and use your skills to make a real difference in the work of your government? Thanks to the State Department’s Virtual Student Foreign Service (VSFS) program, there are hundreds of opportunities for you to participate from anywhere in the world! … Continue reading We Are Looking for a Few Good Students!
OGIS and the Office of Information Policy (OIP) at the Department of Justice are happy to announce that the next meeting of the Chief FOIA Officers Council will be held on Thursday, July 27th from 10 am to noon. You can register to join the audience in the William G. McGowan Theater beginning on July … Continue reading Chief FOIA Officers Council Meeting Scheduled for July 27
As we have discussed before, OGIS is not the only entity that requesters can go to for help with the FOIA process. In fact, agencies were directed to create FOIA Requester Service Centers and appoint FOIA Public Liaisons in December 2005 – about two years before passage of the bill that created our office. Since … Continue reading Dispute Resolution: It’s a Team Sport
We’ve written before about the profound impact the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 has had on our workload, and that impact has only continued to grow. Demand for our services has roughly quadrupled since the passage of the bill, while at the same time there are two open positions on the mediation team that we … Continue reading An Update on Our Dispute Resolution Program
As you might have heard, the Federal government received a record-breaking number of FOIA requests in Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 – 788,769 requests. Did you know, though, that one of the more than 100 Federal agencies and departments that process FOIA requests accounts for almost 40 percent of that total? In FY 2016, the Department … Continue reading DHS Provides New Insight into FOIA Processing
We hope you like the new look and feel of our updated website (do not worry if you do not see the updated version yet, it might take some time for the changes to roll out)! Over the past few weeks we have used this blog to give you a preview of the new site … Continue reading Help Us Keep Improving Our Website!
Because we help resolve disputes between agencies and FOIA requesters, we see a broad sample of the kinds of requests that members of the public file with agencies. Seeing this range of requests also gives us a pretty good idea of what strategies seem to work well, and what seem to cause unintended problems. One … Continue reading Keep It Simple and Specific
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