The FOIA Ombudsman

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 [...]

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 [...]

  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 [...]

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 [...]