Blog Posts
Successful Lawsuits Challenging High Fee Demands for Public Records Break New Ground
September 16, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
Two recent court cases decided in favor of challengers facing high fee demands from government agencies break new ground in public records access laws—known in federal, D.C., and many state laws as Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA). FOIA laws typically allow charging requesters for costs but also allow waiving fees if the request is not […]
Freedom Forum Invites All to Celebrate First Amendment Freedoms
September 1, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
The D.C. Open Government Coalition and friends will be sampling the creative events to be offered by the Freedom Forum at its “1A Fest,” Saturday, Sept. 9, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m. at The Wharf – Transit Pier (9th St. and Maine Ave., S.W.), Washington, D.C. RSVP here. From the Forum At Freedom Forum’s 1A […]
August 24, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., by law, must keep a record of all arrests, stops, and other police-involved incidents and the records “shall be open to public inspection when not in actual use.” (No public records request needed and no exemptions and redactions.) Originally kept by pen and ink in an “arrest book” […]
Censorship Proposal Opposed by Coalition Fails in U.S. Senate
July 28, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
The D.C. Open Government Coalition and over 50 other groups joined a July 19 letter to the U.S. Senate expressing opposition to a censorship proposal offered by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) as an amendment to the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act (bill S. 2226). This and almost 1,000 other amendments proposed […]
July 2, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
The tsunami of backlogged FOIA appeals—challenges to D.C. agencies’ public records request delays and denials—may have crested, with only 39 unresolved cases reported to the D.C. Council as of June 2, a figure far below the 307 at last year’s oversight hearing, 237 in an official report in September and 108 at this year’s oversight. […]
Coalition Welcomes Niquelle Allen Reappointment As D.C. Director of Open Government
June 23, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
The Board of Ethics and Government Accountability (BEGA) has reappointed Niquelle M. Allen as Director of Open Government, voting unanimously to do so at its June 8, 2023, meeting. In her second term which begins July 2, 2023, Allen will continue to direct the Office of Open Government, a six-person unit established in 2012 that […]
Open Government Progress in D.C. Council FY24 Budget
June 21, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
Next year’s District of Columbia budget includes some dedicated funding and lots of advice to agencies for improved public access to government data and records, much of it resulting from the community and Open Government Coalition testimony and recommendations, according to legislative committees’ budget reports. Budgeting is complete with final votes last Tuesday (13). For […]
May 23, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
The Inspector General of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the local transit agency, can’t investigate thoroughly because of a blanket internal policy of discarding all emails older than six months, according to statements of a deputy director, James S. Smith, reported Saturday (20) by Justin George in the Washington Post. That agency policy, George wrote, […]
Open Government Coalition Training Sessions Scheduled on “Digging Into D.C.”
May 22, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
Have questions about how to get records from the D.C. government? Getting into public meetings you thought were supposed to be open? Join the D.C. Open Government Coalition, a group of volunteer watchdogs, for “Digging into D.C.,” a series of community conversations on finding D.C. government information via records and meetings. In collaboration with the […]
Coalition Website Shows Up in AI Training File
May 9, 2023, by Fritz Mulhauser
The D.C. Open Government Coalition website is among those used to train AI systems—according to a dataset reviewed by experts and reported in The Washington Post. Data scientists analyzed a file called C4 (Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus), created by Google from data gathered in 2019 by Common Crawl, a California nonprofit. The result is “a […]
