While environmental and scientific data proliferates, ensuring that it is usable within a social, cultural and political context, has declined.
Through pilots, workshops, research, and narrative building, the Open Environmental Data Project articulates ways to see a different future for the role of scientific and environmental data in building collaborative and participatory systems for environmental management and protection.
With trust in governance and science at an all-time low, the Open Environmental Data Project is engaged in creating improved processes within current workflows, while also designing to envision an environmental future that is generative -- communities are healthier, natural systems are robust, and both the right and responsibility of collectively ensuring integrity in our environmental decisions is recognized.
The Open Environmental Data Project is forging an innovation space for envisioning and testing how we better use scientific and environmental data and information, and its narratives. We build these bridges through four core activities:
Pilots: We partner and collaborate with institutes, nonprofits, individuals and universities to help articulate best practices for new data commons models in the environmental context.
Workshops: We partner and collaborate with government, nonprofits, universities and institutes to host events that will serve as a model for catalyzing cross-sector solution-finding.
Research: We provide insight that identifies, evaluates and summarizes scientific, legal, economic and cultural incentive and strategy levers for advancing environmental generative actions.
Narrative Building: We create multimedia short-form and long-form narratives allowing others to imagine a strengthened role for scientific and environmental data and information in creating a generative world.
To learn more about current projects and bodies of work, please visit our initiatives page.
The methods to collect and store environmental and scientific data and information have never been greater. However, the access, usability and usefulness of data require dedicated attention in order to create an environmental governance landscape where the value of community input is recognized and weighted equally. Conceptualized in 2019, the Open Environmental Data Project aims to address this critical point in the lifecycle of environmental governance and decision making. In 2020, with support from the Shuttleworth Foundation, the Project launched with a focus on building stronger environmental management and governance practices within existing systems and envisioning different futures for environmental governance in practice.
