Director of Open Government's Introduction of OOG Day of Ethics Week 2026

On October 15, 2026, the Director of Open Government, Niquelle M. Allen, Esq., kicked-off the Office of Open Government (OOG) Ethics Week 2026 presentations.  (The PowerPoint presentation is accessible below.)

 

"Good morning, everyone. My name is Niquelle Allen and I am the Director of Open Government.

I want to begin with a very simple idea:

Open government is ethical government.

We usually think about government ethics in terms of conduct. What can I accept? What must I disclose? When do I have a conflict? What am I prohibited from doing?

Those are important questions.

But there is another ethical question that is just as important:

Can the public see what its government is doing?

Can people observe how decisions are made? Can they obtain government records? Can they understand why their government acted?

Because integrity in government is not only about doing the right thing.

It is also about being willing to do the public's business in the public's view.

That is where the Office of Open Government comes in.

And during this Ethics Week, as we talk about “Transitioning Ethically,” I want to tell you a little about who we are, what we do, how our work has changed—and why transparency matters more now than ever.

 

 

SLIDE 3 — WHY OPEN GOVERNMENT BELONGS IN ETHICS WEEK

There is a reason the Office of Open Government sits within the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability.

Ethics and transparency are different disciplines. But they serve the same fundamental purpose:

Public trust.

Ethics asks whether public power is being used properly.

Open government gives people the ability to see how that power is being used.

And I want to emphasize something that sometimes gets lost when we talk about FOIA deadlines, meeting notices, agendas and exemptions.

Transparency is not paperwork.

It is a relationship between government and the people we serve.

A properly posted agenda may seem like a small administrative act. But to the resident trying to participate in a decision affecting her neighborhood, it isn't small.

A properly conducted FOIA search may feel routine to an agency. But to the requester trying to understand what government did, it may be the only window into that decision.

So our work is ultimately about something much larger than compliance.

It is about making government worthy of the public's confidence.

 

 

SLIDE 4 — A BRIEF HISTORY

To understand OOG, it helps to understand why BEGA exists.

BEGA was created in 2012 during a period when the District was confronting serious questions about ethics and confidence in government.

The response was not simply: We need more rules.

The response recognized something more fundamental.

Government accountability requires both integrity and visibility.

That is why open government became part of the accountability structure.

When I became Director of Open Government in 2018, OOG was an extraordinarily small operation.

Our responsibilities, however, were anything but small.

Over the years, we have grown in staff, expertise, training, monitoring and reach.

But the mission has remained remarkably consistent:

Help ensure that the people's government remains visible to the people.

And that history matters because OOG was not created simply to process complaints.

It was created because openness itself was understood to be part of restoring and maintaining public confidence in District government.

 

 

SLIDE 5 — WHAT THE LAW CHARGES OOG TO DO

So what exactly do we do?

There are two major pillars of our work.

The first is the Open Meetings Act.

We train public bodies. We monitor meetings. We investigate complaints. We issue advisory opinions. We provide guidance. We promulgate regulations. And where necessary, the law gives OOG enforcement authority.

The second pillar is D.C. FOIA—the Freedom of Information Act.

We advise agencies and the public about FOIA. We train FOIA Officers. We issue advisory opinions and guidance. And increasingly, we help agencies think through difficult questions involving electronic records, searches, retention, technology and disclosure.

But here is how I would describe all of that without using a single statute:

We help government open the door.

Sometimes that door is a meeting.

Sometimes it is a document.

Sometimes it is a database.

Sometimes it is a text message.

And increasingly, it may involve an artificial-intelligence system.

The technology changes.

The public's right to understand its government does not.

 

 

SLIDE 6 — THE OOG TEAM

Now, none of this happens because of one person.

This is the Office of Open Government team.

And I want to pause here because I am extremely proud of what this group has built.

We have lawyers who investigate complaints, write opinions, teach, monitor public bodies and advise agencies.

We have staff supporting our legal and administrative work. I would like to especially acknowledge Chief of Staff, Christina Mitchell and her amazing team!

We have technology expertise because modern transparency increasingly depends upon understanding modern information systems.

And every name you see here represents a tremendous amount of work that the public may never see.

A phone call with a FOIA Officer trying to get an exemption right.

An attorney reviewing a meeting agenda before a public body convenes.

Someone watching hours of a public meeting because we received a complaint.

Someone answering a resident who simply doesn't know where to begin.

We are a relatively small office.

But our jurisdiction touches the entire District government.

And that means our effectiveness depends not only upon our staff.

It depends upon you—the attorneys, FOIA Officers, ethics counselors, board staff, agency leaders and public servants who make transparency work every day.

 

 

SLIDE 7 — HOW OOG WORKS DAY TO DAY

People sometimes encounter OOG only after something has gone wrong.

A complaint has been filed.

A meeting wasn't properly noticed.

A FOIA dispute has developed.

But some of our most important work happens before there is ever a problem.

We answer questions.

We train.

We monitor.

We explain.

We intervene early.

And that is intentional.

Because the best transparency violation is the one that never happens.

Enforcement will always be necessary.

But if we can help a public body understand the Open Meetings Act before its meeting—

or help a FOIA Officer recognize an issue before issuing a response—

that is a better outcome for everyone.

For the agency.

For the requester.

For the public.

And frankly, for us.

Our goal is not to catch government making mistakes.

Our goal is to help government get openness right.

 

 

SLIDE 8 — 2025–2026: EXPANDING THE TRAINING MISSION

One of the biggest changes in OOG's work has been the expansion of training.

And we made a deliberate choice about what that training should look like.

We did not want people sitting through an hour of someone simply reading statutes to them.

We wanted to teach the problems people actually encounter.

How specific does an agenda need to be?

When can a public body close a meeting?

What happens when government business occurs by text message?

How do you search for electronic records?

What exemptions are agencies actually struggling with?

How should FOIA Officers deal with increasingly complicated requests?

That shift matters.

Because the measure of a training program is not how many PowerPoint slides we produce.

The measure is whether someone remembers what to do three months later when the problem lands on their desk.

And that has become a major focus of OOG.

 

 

SLIDE 9 — THE 2026 FOIA SUMMER SERIES

Our 2026 FOIA Summer Series is a good example.

Look at these subjects.

Exemptions.

Legislation and litigation.

Contracts and procurement.

FOIA appeals.

Electronic records.

Text messages.

Artificial intelligence.

Preparing for litigation.

This isn't FOIA in theory.

This is FOIA where people actually work.

And notice where the series ends up.

Artificial intelligence.

That is not accidental.

Government records used to live primarily in filing cabinets.

Then they moved to computers.

Then email.

Then cloud systems.

Then Teams and text messages.

Now government employees are interacting with AI systems.

Every technological transition creates the same temptation:

To think that because the container has changed, the transparency question has changed.

Usually, it hasn't.

The first question remains:

Are we conducting the public's business?

If the answer is yes, then we need to think seriously about access, preservation and accountability.

 

 

SLIDE 10 — COMPLIANCE, OPINIONS & MONITORING

Another important part of our work happens quietly.

We monitor public meetings.

A lot of them.

In FY2024, OOG attended 242 public-body meetings and took corrective action in 25 instances. In FY2025, we attended another 185 meetings and took corrective action 28 times.

And one of the most common problems was remarkably simple:

The agenda.

That tells us something important.

Transparency does not always fail because somebody is trying to hide something.

Sometimes it fails because somebody didn't understand the assignment.

Sometimes because a process became routine.

Sometimes because someone copied last year's agenda.

And that is why monitoring matters.

It allows us to identify patterns.

Correct problems.

Educate public bodies.

And hopefully prevent the next violation.

We do not measure success by how many people we can punish.

We measure success by whether government becomes more open.

 

 

SLIDE 11 — A SIGNATURE INITIATIVE: EDUCATION PUBLIC BODIES

One area where we have deliberately expanded our work is education.

Think about a Local School Advisory Team.

Think about a charter school board.

The decisions being discussed may involve budgets, programming, school operations and issues that families care about deeply.

These are exactly the places where transparency should feel tangible.

But many of the people serving on these bodies are not professional parliamentarians.

They may be educators.

Parents.

Community members.

Volunteers.

So simply handing them the Open Meetings Act and saying, “Good luck,” is not enough.

We have developed training specifically for these bodies.

We explain notice.

Agendas.

Public participation.

Closed sessions.

Minutes.

Records.

And we try to do it in language that people can actually use.

Because open government works best when compliance is not treated as a trap.

It should be something people understand how to do.

 

 

SLIDE 12 — MODERN TRANSPARENCY

This may be the most important slide in the presentation.

Because government is changing.

A public record is no longer necessarily a memorandum with a letterhead at the top.

Government business happens through email.

Text messages.

Microsoft Teams.

Collaboration platforms.

Databases.

Cloud services.

And now artificial intelligence.

In August, I taught a program called “Electronic Records, Text Messages, and AI: Modern FOIA Challenges.”

And the title really captures where we are.

We are entering a period when the question “Where are the records?” is becoming much harder to answer.

An employee can generate information on a phone.

An agency can store information with a vendor.

A conversation can occur in a messaging platform.

An employee can ask an AI system to analyze government information.

Technology makes government faster.

But faster cannot mean less accountable.

And innovation cannot become an accidental transparency loophole.

Our challenge is to make sure that as government becomes more technologically sophisticated, our commitment to openness becomes more sophisticated with it.

 

 

SLIDE 13 — POLICY & LEGISLATIVE PRIORITIES [Read Slide if Short on Time]

Our work also teaches us where the law itself may need to evolve.

We have advocated for permanent remote access to public meetings.

We have called for a broader examination of the District's transparency laws.

We have discussed stronger enforcement tools.

And I have advocated for a FOIA ombudsman model that could help agencies and requesters resolve disputes before every disagreement becomes an appeal or lawsuit.

Why?

Because good transparency law should not merely create rights.

It should make those rights workable.

The world in which our FOIA and open-meetings laws operate has changed dramatically.

The way people communicate has changed.

The way agencies store information has changed.

The way residents expect to interact with government has changed.

So modernization is not about weakening transparency rules to make government more comfortable.

It is about making those rules work in the government we actually have today.

 

 

SLIDE 14 — WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE [Read Slide if Short on Time]

So what does success look like for the Office of Open Government?

It is not a perfect government.

That does not exist.

Success is an agency employee who stops before pressing “send” and asks:

Is this a public record?

It is a board chair who asks:

Is our agenda detailed enough for the public to understand what we are discussing?

It is a FOIA Officer who says:

Before I withhold this, let me make sure the exemption actually applies.

It is an agency counsel who calls us before the meeting instead of after the complaint.

Those may sound like small moments.

They are not.

Because culture is built from thousands of decisions like those.

And ultimately, our goal is not simply to have government employees who know the transparency rules.

Our goal is to build a government in which people instinctively ask:

How do we do this openly?

That is the culture we are trying to create.

 

 

SLIDE 15 — OUR NORTH STAR

I want to leave you with this thought.

Open government is not just about compliance.

It is about making accountability visible.

There will always be legitimate reasons that some government information cannot be public.

Privacy matters.

Security matters.

Confidentiality sometimes matters.

FOIA itself recognizes that.

The Open Meetings Act recognizes that.

But secrecy should never become the default simply because openness is inconvenient.

The public does not have to agree with every decision government makes.

That isn't the standard.

But people should be able to understand how their government works, observe its institutions, ask questions, obtain records when the law entitles them to those records, and hold us accountable for the decisions we make.

That is why open government belongs at Ethics Week.

Because ultimately ethics and transparency ask us to confront two sides of the same question:

What do we owe the people whose government this is?

Integrity is part of the answer.

Accountability is part of the answer.

And openness is part of the answer.

That is our work.

And that is the work we will continue to do.

Here is what is on today’s open government agenda (Read the Slide)

Thank you for your participation in Ethics Week and for your commitment to an OPEN and ETHICAL District of Columbia Government!