Sunshine Week 2013 was so bright, it just keeps on shining. Last week’s post brought you up to speed on many of OGIS’s Sunshine Week 2013 activities, but one event was absent – the Sixth Annual Freedom of Information Day Celebration, hosted by American University Washington College of Law’s Collaboration on Government Secrecy. This event … Continue reading The Sun Keeps on Shining!
Whew! We at OGIS have caught our breath after a hectic Sunshine Week during which we joined folks from both the agency and requester communities in promoting the importance of open government and freedom of information. (Of course, these values are just as important during the other 51 weeks of the year.) If you weren’t … Continue reading OGIS’s Sunshine Week Wrap-Up
We are pleased to share OGIS's 2012 report, Office of Government Information Services: Building a Bridge Between FOIA Requesters & Federal Agencies. We hope that you will read about our accomplishments over the past year and our thoughts for the coming year. Please email us with your thoughts and feedback.
Those of us in the FOIA and Privacy fields have long desired to “professionalize” the Government information access field. Traditionally, FOIA and Privacy professionals in the Federal government have had no consistent job titles or descriptions and no clear career path; instead, agencies have taken a patchwork approach, squeezing FOIA and Privacy professionals into sometimes … Continue reading Professionalizing the FOIA Profession: The 0306 Government Information Specialist Job Series
OGIS will celebrate Sunshine Week along with the National Archives, our parent agency, with two back-to-back events at the National Archives on Monday, March 11, 2013: A display of the original FOIA with remarks by Archivist of the United States David Ferriero and OGIS Director Miriam Nisbet A demonstration of FOIAonline, the multi-agency FOIA portal … Continue reading Mark Your Calendar for Sunshine Week!
A few of us from OGIS recently attended a presentation by the Interagency Alternative Dispute Resolution Working Group, an organization for Federal employees who work in the area of alternative dispute resolution. The title of the presentation was “How an Ombuds Office Serving Employees, Customers, and Citizens Can Bring Greater Success to Your Agency.” The … Continue reading In Good Company
Editor's note: This guest post is from Wendy Schumacher, Ph.D., PMP. Wendy, thank you for sharing your story. I started my job as the FOIA Officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about a year after the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. My new colleagues had collected, organized, reviewed, redacted and … Continue reading Navigating a Sea of Records
With 100 departments and agencies, the Executive Branch can feel downright massive sometimes. Although each of the 100 has a separate and distinct mission, and no doubt creates very different kinds of records, there is also some overlap in the way agencies operate and with the records they keep. Since its start, OGIS has been … Continue reading Requesting Records Across Agencies
OGIS Director Miriam Nisbet appeared on WAMU radio’s award-winning Kojo Nnamdi show on January 29, 2013, for a discussion titled “Following Through on FOIA: Progress and Pitfalls.” Daniel Metcalfe, Executive Director of the Collaboration on Government Secrecy at American University’s Washington College of Law and Thomas Blanton, Director of the National Security Archive at George … Continue reading Radio Free FOIA
On January 21, 2013, representatives of 12 agencies and several requester groups gathered to discuss online FOIA “libraries.” The Attorney General’s 2009 FOIA Memorandum encouraged agencies to post information online in advance of a formal request. Many agencies’ FOIA regulations also require them to post records for which they receive multiple requests, and other agencies … Continue reading Thinking about FOIA Libraries
You must be logged in to post a comment.