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OIP Co-Hosts Proactive Disclosure Workshop with the White House Open Government Team

Last week, the White House Open Government Team and OIP co-hosted a proactive disclosure workshop, bringing together a diverse set of government personnel to brainstorm how agencies can improve their processes for proactively providing information to the public.

Attendees at OIP's Proactive Disclosure Event

As a part of his FOIA Memorandum, the President directed agencies to “take affirmative steps to make information public.” Additionally, Attorney General Holder’s FOIA Guidelines stressed that “agencies should readily and systematically post information online in advance of any public request” and that “effective FOIA administration belongs to all of us.”

Since the issuance of these memoranda, agencies have engaged in a range of initiatives to improve proactive disclosures. Building off these efforts, and in response to the President’s and Attorney General’s directives, last week’s event brought together various personnel from agency FOIA, open data, and communications offices to discuss their roles in their agency’s proactive disclosure process and how through collaboration they can further improve such processes.

A collaborative agency approach to proactive disclosures was highlighted as a best practice at OIP’s July workshop on this same topic, and encouraging this type of dialogue was the basis for last week’s event. Over the course of the event, participants noted that just their preparation for the workshop provided immediate benefits as even their initial cross-agency collaboration generated new ideas on how to identify and make proactive disclosures.

Attendees at OIP's Proactive Disclosure Event

In the first breakout session of the event, the participants were grouped according to their specialty, with all the FOIA professionals forming one group, the data experts forming another group, and the public relations specialists forming the third group.  Participants discussed best practices they had identified at their agencies as well as common challenges they face with regard to proactive disclosures. When discussing obstacles, participants also brainstormed ideas for overcoming such challenges. During the second breakout session, the participants got back together with their colleagues from their own agencies to discuss what they had learned in the first session and how they could apply those lessons to their own proactive disclosure processes. The participants were all energized about the possibilities that their cross-agency collaboration could achieve.

This event is just one step in our efforts to assist agencies in improving their proactive disclosure process. OIP and the White House Open Government Team will continue to work with the agencies that participated in the event as they apply the information learned and put it into practice. In the future, we will plan to hold additional events on this topic for other interested agencies. We look forward to seeing how the collaboration between and across agency offices can help improve proactive disclosures and access to information.

Updated January 15, 2015

Topic
FOIA