Many individuals who have been privileged enough to draft the Annual FOIA Report will tell you it is a daunting task requiring many hours of dedicated work. For some this may hold true, and year after year the Annual FOIA Report occupies a few weeks of their lives. However, this
Examining trends in data collected within the Annual FOIA Report is a great exercise in identifying FOIA goals, monitoring progress, and finding weak aspects of FOIA operations. This can be done for individual FOIA offices or for agencies as a whole; or as will be done in this post, for
Over 250 FOIA case workers and their managers representing over 70 federal departments and agencies attended the 2013 FOIAXpress Users Group Conference yesterday in downtown D.C. This annual event is hosted by AINS Inc., the creator of the leading FOIA technology in North America. At the conference, attendees gathered to
From the time since the Freedom of Information Act took effect on July, 4, 1967, it has provided any individual the right to obtain access to federal agency records. The FOIA has been a means to ensure that those who are governed can hold those who govern accountable. It provides
“An area that I believe holds great promise in increasing the efficiency of agency FOIA processes is the use of litigation software in the FOIA context. Agencies often have to manually review hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of paper and electronic records for both responsiveness and duplication before disclosure
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the promoters of FOIAonline would like you to believe that FOIA case processing technology within the Federal government is dysfunctional. Nothing could be further from the truth. FOIAXpress, built and supported by AINS, is the leading FOIA case processing solution used by over 200
Last week, at the 2013 National Freedom of Information Day celebration held once again at the Newseum Knight Conference Center in Washington, DC, the American Library Association (ALA) presented its annual James Madison Award posthumously to Aaron Swartz who, before his untimely death in January of this year, was an
AINS looks forward to celebrating Sunshine Week 2013 with the Freedom of Information Act community. We built our FOIA request management solution, FOIAXpress, with the purpose of helping speed and automate the request process- ultimately helping keep government more transparent. Check out this schedule to keep up with all the Sunshine
As 2012 winds down, we wanted to take a look back at the past year at a few of the major events of freedom of information in the U.S. March 11 – 16: Sunshine Week celebrated nationwide As part of Sunshine Week 2011, the 13th Annual National Freedom of Information Day Conference was
Government travel costs are hitting the news again as Bloomberg News reports this week that “only about half [of the 57 major federal agencies] provided the records and costs” required under the Freedom of Information Act when Bloomberg News filed requests for the out-of-town travel records for fiscal year 2011 for
