Everyone in the world of public records has one experience that’s straight out of Kafka - maybe the agency gave an estimated completion date of next century, or the “responsive documents” turned out to be a couple hundred blank pages.

In that spirit of commiseration, MuckRock is proud to announce our partnership with the EFF and the Sunlight Foundation for the first-annual “Foilies” Awards Gala during Sunshine Week in DC.

The details for how you can nominate your most memorable public record responses are below, and we hope to see you there!

While a week of sunshine is mostly just wishful thinking this time of year, we are happy to make your wish a reality by participating in the national Sunshine Week celebration from March 15-21st (even if the rays of sunshine are metaphorically casting glorious light onto government information). This year, Sunlight is partnering with EFF and MuckRock to bring the glitz and glamour of an award ceremony to the responses of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Sunshine Week Happy Hour “red-carpet” event will be held on Thursday, March 19th, from 5-7pm at the Lost and Found. We will be announcing winners of the Foilies in the following categories Absurdly Over-Redacted Documents and Extraordinarily Long Wait for Records, just to name a few.

Send nominations to foilies@eff.org with “FOILIES 2015 NOMINATION” in the subject line by Feb 20th. You can nominate multiple entries in a single email, just make sure to enumerate the nominations so we can easily separate them. For more information on the submission process, check out this post.

For MuckRock users, you can expedite your nomination process via the form below:

We look forward to seeing you at the Sunshine Week Happy Hour, but in the meantime dig through those FOIAs and get nominating!