This series of workshops is based on the needs of federal government data actors and data consumers:

• Learning Agenda Development is designed for federal employees looking to integrate public and third sector data into assessments and decision making, especially with regards to climate change adaptation, migration, mitigation and environmental justice screening data.

• Needs Assessment Workshop identifies changes needed to legacy federal data systems and supports greater data dialogue between federal data systems and community-sourced data. This training is designed for technical administrators or data stewards.
• Prototyping Exercise catalogs federal data stewards’ knowledge needs and deeply engages with a narrowly defined restriction to data integration or access. This training is geared to those responsible for maintaining data and data platforms and for those responding directly to implementation requirements and/or data pull requests.

Political appointees, administrative level leadership such as chief innovation officers, regulatory program managers, and scientific program managers and technical roles in data infrastructure such as chief data officers, data stewards, and those responsible for legal chain of custody processes. This audience primarily deals with issues concerning environmental protection and management.

PROBLEM SPACE AND OPPORTUNITY

Federal Data stewards face deferred maintenance, siloed data streams, messy spreadsheets, and the politicization of public data. These challenges keep data maintainers and decision-makers from effectively leveraging both publicly collected data and publicly funded data to inform regulation, lawmaking, and scientific research. Further, these problems act to exclude the public in data and science-based decision-making. Two Executive Actions, released by the Biden Administration, address these needs:

• EO 14008: Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crises at Home and Abroad sec. 203 established the National Climate Task Force, with special attention to the mission and work of delivering on environmental justice.
• Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking.

21st-century data management will include new sociotechnical roles and information frameworks that will need to consider good use of public data and ensure data as a public good. This expanded data dialogue has the potential benefit of increasing public trust in government data and improving public participation in government decisions.

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WHAT WE OFFER

The Open Environmental Data Project offers data-forward agencies and bureaus co-designed learning-to-implementation plans with the goal of incorporating third sector data sources into data-to-decision-making processes. Through training workshops, OEDP can assist government data stewards and policy-level implementers in identifying the challenges to data usability and third sector data source normalization and turn them into opportunities to upgrade and increase the use of public data at the community scale and at the whole-of-federal government scale.

Workshop 1: Learning Agenda: Creating a Framework for Good Use of Public Information & Data Dialogue

Audience: Data requestors, agency and department policy implementers

Goal: Establish a Learning and Implementation Agenda that includes third sector sources

Workshop Themes:

• Increase potential for public contribution to federal climate change data outlined in the Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking
• Review federal understanding of third-sector data sources
• Make sense and make use of third sector data
• Examine how harmonizing community-structured contextual data could enhance its use in decision making with respect to climate change migration, adaptation, and mitigation
• Scope the Chief Data Officer’s responsibilities in government spaces that relate to environmental protection and management, specifically as the responsibilities target the uptake and business case for third sector data integration
  

Workshop 1: Learning Agenda: Creating a Framework for Good Use of Public Information & Data Dialogue

Audience: Those responsible for information flow of multiple data sets within federal agencies, data stewards, and roles responsible for organizing and maintaining federal data

Goal: Identify resources and technologies needed to advance the data “moments that matter” - decision making that requires substantive input from various data sources.

Workshop Themes:

• Review federal understanding of third-sector data sources
• Examine how harmonizing community-structured contextual data could enhance its use in decision making with respect to climate change migration, adaptation, mitigation and environmental justice initiatives
• Address resource-intensive data maintenance, updating, and access
• Create data narratives that articulate the role of third sector data sources

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