Nate Jones is the FOIA director for The Washington Post, where he works with reporters to target documents to request, appeal and sue for. He fights to obtain local, state and federal records and to think strategically about public records in all formats. He gives FOIA training sessions and advises reporters on how to write, refine and track requests, navigate delays and overredactions, and overcome other bureaucratic resistance.

He is also author of the “Revealing Records” column which describes The Post’s battles for public records and has been part of two Washington Post reporting teams which have won Pulitzer Prizes. He has served two terms on the Federal FOIA Advisory Committee and holds a JD from the University of the District of Columbia. He previously was the director of the FOIA Project for the National Security Archive, where he used FOIA to write a book on the 1983 Able Archer nuclear war scare.

Margaret B. Kwoka holds the Frank R. Strong Chair in Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Prior to joining the Moritz faculty, Kwoka was a Professor of Law and Director of the Information Transparency Project at the University of Denver. She also practiced as an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, a public interest law firm in Washington, D.C., where she focused on government transparency litigation in federal court. 

Professor Kwoka’s research focuses on the Freedom of Information Act and government transparency and her scholarly articles have appeared in numerous leading law journals.  In 2021, her book, Saving the Freedom of Information Act, was published by Cambridge University Press, and in the 2022-2023 academic year, Professor Kwoka completed research on independent oversight of transparency laws in México under a Fulbright-García Robles grant.  She regularly provides expert commentary to the press and consults on FOIA matters, she has twice serviced on the federal FOIA Advisory Committee housed at the National Archives and Records Administration, and has twice testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary in FOIA oversight hearings. 

Professor Kwoka holds an A.B. from Brown University and a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law, and she clerked for the Honorable Phillip Rapoza, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court and the Honorable Michael Murphy, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

Adam A. Marshall is the director of national litigation at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. His work includes transparency litigation, education, and policy at the federal, state, and local levels. Adam has co-authored numerous book chapters and journal articles on the federal Freedom of Information Act and government transparency. 

In 2017, he was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30: Media” list for his work promoting government transparency, including the development of the FOIA Wiki. Adam is an alumnus of  The George Washington University Law School, Kalamazoo College and the London School of Economics.

David McCraw serves as the lead newsroom lawyer for The New York Times.  In addition to advising the newsroom on libel and other legal issues, McCraw and his team are among the nation’s most prolific litigators of freedom of information cases. The Times team has brought more than 135 FOI cases in the state and federal courts over the past 15 years, enabling Times reporters to get access documents about topics ranging from chemical weapons in Iraq and the government’s secret justification for targeted drone strikes to the mistreatment of inmates in America’s jails and the exploitation of immigrant child workers in U.S. factories. He has been at The Times for more than two decades and currently holds the position of Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel.

In 2023, McCraw and his newsroom legal team were honored with the Tony Mauro Media Lawyer Award from The American Lawyer Magazine for their advocacy on behalf of press freedom. Last year, McCraw received the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

McCraw also oversees international security for Times journalists working in high-risk areas and has served as the crisis response manager when journalists have been kidnapped or detained abroad.

In 2022, he became a co-founder of the Journalism Refugees Education Fund, a nonprofit that helps exiled media workers and their families pursue higher education in the U.S. and Canada.

McCraw is the author of the book “Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts,” a first-person account of the legal battles that helped shape The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, national security, and the rise of political partisanship in America.

He teaches press law as a visiting faculty member at Harvard Law School. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Cornell University, and Albany Law School.

Kirsten B. Mitchell has made two careers out of cultivating curiosity and asking questions — first as a journalist and now as an advocate for freedom of information and public access. Kirsten leads FOIA compliance efforts at the federal FOIA Ombuds office — the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) at the National Archives — and manages the federal FOIA Advisory Committee as its Designated Federal Officer. Kirsten’s work has spanned both of OGIS’s statutory functions — providing mediation services and reviewing FOIA policies, procedures and compliance. She built OGIS’s compliance program from the ground up, focusing on identifying broad systemic issues ripe for attention and advocating for a better FOIA process for all.

A longtime journalist before joining government service, Kirsten spent the bulk of her journalism career in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., at New York Times-owned regional newspapers and later at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Sunshine in Government Initiative. As a journalist, Kirsten frequently used state and federal records as well as database analysis to shine a light on how government operates. Kirsten served on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Access Professionals (ASAP) for eight years, including as president (2019-2020), and as a fellow in the Excellence in Government leadership program at the Partnership for Public Service (2017-2018). In her free time, Kirsten serves on the board of the D.C. Open Government Coalition.

Kirsten is an alumna of Mary Washington College and American University where she earned her B.A. in English and her M.A. in journalism and public affairs, respectively. She holds a certificate in mediation from NVMS Conflict Resolution Center, an affiliate of George Mason University’s School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Michael Morisy is the co-founder and chief executive officer of MuckRock, a nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening transparency and accountability through public records. Under his leadership, MuckRock has helped connect millions of requesters with training, request templates, and other practical resources to access government information at the local, state, and federal level. MuckRock also maintains an archive of tens of millions of pages of released records and supports more than 4,000 newsrooms through tools including DocumentCloud and FOIA Machine.

Morisy has also contributed to the advancement of federal transparency policy through two terms of service on the federal FOIA Advisory Committee. He previously served as a digital technology editor at The Boston Globe and was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

He is a graduate of Cornell University and has served on the boards of the American Society of Access Professionals and the National Freedom of Information Coalition.

Ginger Quintero-McCall is a partner and co-founder of the Free Information Group (https://freeinformationgroup.com), a public interest law firm focused on affordable and accessible Freedom of Information Act litigation. She has worked as both a government public records attorney and an attorney for the requester community.  

She previously worked at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Communications Commission, and U.S. Department of Labor.  Quintero-McCall also served as Oregon’s first Public Records Advocate, where she provided statewide training on public records laws and offered public records mediation services to requesters and government employees. 

Prior to her work in government, she was the Associate Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a public interest research center, where she directed the Center’s Open Government Program and legal internship program. Quintero-McCall has twice served on the FOIA Federal Advisory Committee and has taught a course on the Law of Open Government at Georgetown University Law Center. She co-edited Litigation Under the Federal Government Laws 2010; has been published in the New York Times, the Oregonian, and the Bulwark; and has co-authored several friend-of-the-court briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Quintero-McCall received her law degree from Cornell Law School and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh. 

Carol Rosenberg has been filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act since she returned to the United States in the mid 1990s after years of reporting in the Middle East.

First for The Miami Herald and later for The New York Times, she has leveraged FOIA to unearth government records and contracts , FBI files, military investigations and historic photographs. Sometimes she has sued. Sometimes she has cajoled. Often, she has filed appeals for returns that took months, even years, and came too late or too redacted.

“It is an important tool in a reporter’s toolbox that can sometimes yield information otherwise hidden from public view,” Rosenberg says. “It can be the tool of last resort. But it has served me well.”

Her filings have produced solid information and meaningful results.

In 2018, a FOIA request returned the employment application of a U.S. immigration court judge who had secretly sought the job while serving as an Air Force judge in a Guantanamo case. He had failed to disclose to the parties that he was seeking a post-military job from the same entity that had a role in prosecuting the case, the Justice Department.

Defense lawyers for the prisoner were stunned by what they saw as a conflict of interest, which government lawyers had not disclosed to them. The lawyers appended the file and her article to an ongoing case, resulting in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacating two years of that judge’s rulings. That FOIA discovery reverberated throughout the Guantanamo court and in a military court-martial case. Now; military judges and their staff are bound to disclose their pursuits of other government jobs.

One favorite – and surprising – return occurred during the coronavirus pandemic. While working from home, she opened a zip file from the National Archives and two-decade-old photos of prisoners in orange jumpsuits arriving at Guantanamo spilled out onto her computer screen. She was there that day, January 11, 2002, and had seen military photographers documenting the mission from a far, as a pool reporter.

But the photos were hidden away until a series of FOIA requests and follow up phone calls  released them. The work then began on The Secret Pentagon Photos of the First Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, an annotated study that fronted a Sunday edition of The New York Times. The project gave the public a new opportunity to explore an episode of U.S. history whose consequences are still felt today.

Daniel Schuman is the Executive Director and founder of the American Governance Institute, a non-profit organization focused on strengthening the institutions of American government.

Daniel is deeply involved in efforts to strengthen our democracy, including strengthening mechanisms for federal governmental accountability, transparency, and reform; reforming Congress; providing appropriate checks on the Executive branch, including expanded transparency and accountability; modernizing government technology for improved responsiveness, accountability, and efficiency; professionalizing federal employees; improving government ethics processes; empowering civil society; and ensuring that the people’s voices can be heard.

He is a nationally recognized expert on the federal government, known in particular for his expertise in government accountability and transparency, the appropriations process, Legislative branch operations, data and technology, and congressional rules and procedures.

Daniel is the founder and editor of the First Branch Forecast, a weekly newsletter that covers government accountability and transparency, with a focus on Congress and its interactions with the Executive branch. He is responsible for the creation or improvement of many federal government transparency and accountability websites and created EveryCRSReport.com, containing 20,000 Congressional Research Service Reports.

He is a co-founder of the Congressional Data Coalition, co-directs the Advisory Committee on Transparency, and coordinates the OpenGov Roundtable. Daniel is a senior fellow with the Data Foundation. He routinely testifies before Congress on government accountability, transparency, modernization, and operations, and his work has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Roll Call, Politico, FedScoop, Wired, The Hill, C-SPAN, Federal News Radio, and other news outlets.

Daniel was named by Washingtonian Magazine in 2022 as one of Washington DC’s 500 most influential people. In 2013, he was named by FedScoop as one of the top 25 most influential people under 40 in gov and tech. Daniel lectures on congressional information for Data Skills for Congress, a certificate program at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and on a variety of topics for the International Law Institute. He is a former CodeX fellow at Stanford University.

Daniel served as Chair of the inaugural Open Government Federal Advisory Committee from September 2024 to March 2025. He previously worked as governance director of the POPVOX Foundation, policy director at Demand Progress Action & Demand Progress Education Fund, and policy director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Daniel was policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation and a legislative attorney with the Congressional Research Service. He graduated cum laude from Emory University School of Law, where he was a Ruth and Paul McLarty scholar. Daniel also worked at the Constitution Project, the American Constitution Society, the House of Representatives, and the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association.

Alina M. Semo has served as the Director of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Ombuds, since December 2016. OGIS, a part of the National Archives and Records Administration, opened its doors in 2009 and is charged with providing mediation services to resolve disputes between FOIA requesters and federal agencies, improving compliance with the statute, educating its stakeholders, and improving the administration of FOIA across the federal government.

Semo brings more than 35 years of experience in federal information law, litigation, and oversight to her role. Prior to becoming Director of OGIS, Semo served as Director of Litigation in NARA’s Office of General Counsel. Before joining NARA, she spent nearly fifteen years in the Office of the General Counsel at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including over a decade as Chief of the FOIA Litigation Unit, a unit she helped create shortly after 9/11.

Semo began her federal government career at the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Programs Branch, Civil Division, where she served as a trial attorney and later as senior counsel. Prior to her federal service, Semo practiced law in Washington, D.C.

As Director of OGIS, Semo has overseen the office’s dispute resolution, compliance review, and policy recommendation functions and has supported the consistent administration of FOIA in accordance with statute. As the FOIA Ombuds, Semo is known for her leadership in strengthening FOIA policy and compliance across federal agencies, and works regularly with agencies, requesters, public-interest organizations, and Congress to improve public access to government records.

Semo received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University Law Center. She is a member of the District of Columbia and Maryland bars.