2022 ESIP January Meeting

Building Strong Communities Around Open Source Software & Open Science - Part 1

NASA is making a long-term commitment to building an inclusive open science community over the next decade. Open-source science is a commitment to the open sharing of software, data, and knowledge (algorithms, papers, documents, ancillary information) as early as possible in the scientific process. This session will offer a platform for building awareness of and facilitating discussion around NASA’s open science efforts.

This session will focus on NASA-funded efforts to build an open science community around open source software. Those open source software projects that thrive do so because they have broad community support. Speakers  NASA's open science efforts will discuss how they build community around software. This will be followed by an open discussion on improving community outcomes (and open source/open science projects).

The session will be followed by Building Strong Communities Around Open Source Software & Open Science - Part 2 which will focus on efforts to bring Open Source Science to the community.

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In 2012, ESIP’s Data Stewardship Committee produced a set of 34 related educational modules called the Data Management Short Course for Scientists (Short Course) targeted to research scientists on RDM and data stewardship related topics. These succinct educational modules were some of the first to be created in this topic area, and also the first put together to form a cohesive whole of modules under four key categories: The Case for Data Stewardship; Data Management Plans; Local Data Management; and Responsible Data Use. Data Science Education is a critical part of enabling Data for All People, both with respect to creation, use and understanding of data. As part of the innovation lifecycle, the Data Stewardship Committee has undertaken a process of reviewing these Short Course modules and this working session will discuss the outcomes of that review process, determine the status of the ESIP Short Course modules, and plan for future work that will maintain the currency, relevance and value of these resources. Future work may involve revising or deprecating the Short Course modules and filling gaps in topics either by the creation of new modules, or identifying other educational materials to recommend.

Recommended ways to prepare for this session: Visit the Short Courses in the ESIP Data Management Training Clearinghouse.

The United States federal government makes available a great number of datasets around environmental governance. But how easy are these datasets to use in answering real questions from environmental justice advocates?

Building on some of the work and ideas from this summer’s session “Designing a Public Portal for Participatory Environmental Governance”, participants will engage with questions from various environmental justice stakeholders and advocacy groups, attempting to map questions to public datasets using new tools provided & researched through the ESIP Lab-funded project “Developing an Environmental Enforcement Data Portal for Grassroots and Congressional Action” and their own savvy and ingenuity.

For those who joined this summer's session: welcome back, let us show you all the new things we've built!

For those who are new: welcome, we have lots to show you!

What to expect

• This is a high-participation session! Come ready to roll up your sleeves.
• Ideally we'll have a mix of attendees: people totally unfamiliar with this space, people who know EPA datasets really well, etc. It's helpful for us to get a range of perspectives; come as you are!
• The majority of the session will be in team breakouts, working together to solve specific challenges. We've designed these challenges so that your work will materially advance the project.
• Expect to walk away with a better understanding of the needs of environmental justice advocacy groups and the tools at their disposal (including some we are building).

Recommended ways to prepare for this session:

• Newcomers are welcome to participate. NO preparation or prior experience is required.
• Prior work in this space can be seen at environmentalenforcementwatch.org and https://github.com/ESIPFed/Environmental-Enforcement-Watch.
• It might be helpful to skim the notes from the summer session

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The federal government’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)-Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs are highly undervalued by the very agencies they were intended to benefit. SBIR-STTR programs can provide federal agencies with young but proven technologies that can be rapidly adopted to address agency goals and objectives…on a sole source basis. Established in 1982 (SBIR) and 1992 (STTR), these programs provide billions of dollars in competitive funding for high tech development by small businesses that could be tapped by more agencies and their contractors to promote innovation and rapid adoption of new technology.

SBIR contracts/grants could be a valuable source of support for public-private collaboration and innovation in the ESIP community and could help ESIP increase private sector participation in its initiatives while making more data available for all people from Data Generation to Data Use and Understanding.

A key challenge, however, is that many agencies and federal contractors don’t understand the value that SBIR-STTR contracts and subcontracts can bring to the table, or the steps needed to access these resources. This session will identify specific SBIR examples and discuss the benefits and gaps that exist in the program that may be hampering their agency adoption. Opportunities exist for agencies that need to share their data, work across line offices, and use their data as strategic assets—as well as to meet their goals for diversity and equity in procurement. Diverse opportunities exist for small businesses as well as academic and nonprofit organizations that work with small businesses as subcontractors to access procurement opportunities that could scale up your work in high-impact applications. Come to this session to learn how you can take advantage of SBIR-STTR technologies and accelerate procurement opportunities for your organization and accelerate data-driven decision making!

You will leave this session with a clear understanding of how your agency, your non-profit, or your commercial enterprise can move forward and engage SBIR small businesses as we work to rebuild our nation’s economy.

We will hear from: Jason Kessler, NASA SBIR Program Executive, NASA Headquarters who will provide us with an overview of the SBIR program
We will also hear about a successful STTR project from Bob Chen, Director, NASA SEDAC & about a successful SBIR Phase III technology from Dave Jones, CEO, StormCenter Communications, Inc. and John Williams, Director of Innovation and Technology, Office of Innovation and Technology, Office of Investment and Innovation, U.S. Small Business Administration will be available during the session to answer any questions from the SBA.
Please join us for this exciting ESIP Session.
Recommended ways to prepare for this session: This session will offer excellent information about the SBIR-STTR programs which is good for any level of participant in the ESIP Federation. This session should also provide good information for program managers and contract officers in any US Federal agency, government lab, prome contractor and university. It will be highly educational for agency representatives, non-profit leaders and commercial company leaders.

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The need for common data standards and domain knowledge has reached a precipice. Across ESIP it is no different; ongoing, potentially disparate, conversations about data quality, resource discovery, and domain knowledge are prevalent and yet implicitly rely on a shared view or interpretation.

In this session we bring together members of active ESIP clusters to share topics of interest, needs and gaps with respect to data standards and domain knowledge we endeavour to reuse in some human and machine readable format – e.g. controlled vocabularies, data models, thesauri, taxonomies, classifications, property graphs, ontologies etc.

The following questions, while not exhaustive, are indicative of relevant topics for discussion:
What has prompted the interest in data standards and/or semantics?
What is the goal or use-case?
What is currently available in the space and is it reusable?
Is the community making contributions to any resources?
Where are the gaps in knowledge, standards, or structure?

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As the world in which all people work and live becomes more data intensive, the need remains for data researchers, stewards, managers and users to discover and instructors to reuse education and training materials in order to further their formal and informal education and their professional development. New and existing education and training resources can help people achieve the skills and competencies necessary to compete and perform in their work and living environments. A number of organizations within the research data teaching and learning communities across many subject domains have been working hard to come up with ways to improve the chances for discovery of existing materials, and encourage the sharing / adapting of new and existing training resources. These ways include recommendations for metadata and other documentation, the development of metadata application profiles and implementation testbeds for learning catalogues, registries, repositories, and learning platforms. In addition, these organizations (including participants from the Research Data Alliance Education, Training and Handling of Research Data Interest Group ((RDA ETHRD-IG)) have identified some core characteristics that service providers who provide search and discovery services  can use to help them remain sustainable as project funding comes and goes, and education and training needs change. This session will cover some of the important recent developments that will hopefully, improve the discovery and reusability of learning resources, and platforms that service them.   ESIP partners and managers of two learning resource catalogues, ESIP's Data Management Training Clearinghouse (DMTC) and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Digital Research Skills Australasia catalogue (DReSA), who have been involved in the RDA efforts will discuss their plans for aligning their catalogues to the RDA efforts.  After initial presentations, the organizers will provide opportunities for members of the audience to participate in group discussions on topics related to the motivations, barriers, and advantages of sharing the education and training materials that instructors create.

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This session will bring together a diverse set of leaders across the U.S. government to highlight open science contributions that support data generation to data use and understanding and to identify a common agenda that the collective is moving forward. We aim to support open practices and community building that accelerate data-driven solutions and increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in science. Researchers and researcher support staff from NOAA Fisheries, California EPA, and NASA Openscapes (LP DAAC, NSIDC) will share vignettes  about open science in government and how we can support and connect open science work sna strengthen channels for inter- and cross-agency learning as we prepare for the Year of Open Science 2023.

Recommended ways to prepare for this session: Review slides from a December 2021 AGU talk (will provide a link following the presentation).

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