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.

Building Strong Communities Around Open Source Software & Open Science - Part 2

This is a continuation of Building Strong Communities Around Open Source Software & Open Science - Part 1 with a focus on open science communities.

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).

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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 ESIP Biological Data Standards Cluster has been working on a primer for data managers new to biological data standards. After several rounds of community feedback, the cluster chose to share an initial version that was published to the ESIP Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16806712). Now that the primer is available, the cluster is beginning to look at use cases associated with the primer to help us determine 1) What questions come up when you work through the primer? 2) How can we help people using the primer? 3) What next steps become evident?

This session with focus on the first question in the primer "Do you want to provide context and understandability to your data?". We will have a round of lightning talks on the four metadata standards provided as responses in the primer to this question (CSDGM, EML, ISO, and MIxS). Representatives for these standards will provide information that will help users select the metadata standard for the data they are working with. Following the lightning talks we will go into breakout groups with a dataset and work through the process of selecting a metadata standard. We will use the information gathered from this session to guide our next steps in the cluster such as a creating a decision tree and/or instructional videos.

How to prepare for this session:
1. Review the primer infographic.
2. Consider how your current biological data workflows make use of (or don’t make use of) the tools and techniques suggested in the primer.

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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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Data should be accessible and usable by those making or influencing decisions. Those who need the data - whether scientists, local officials, or the general public - often don’t have access to, or are unaware of, the data that they need to make appropriate, informed decisions.

Small groups of undaunted experts get things done. Today, there are countless underutilized datasets, and the level of Data Access and Reusability varies widely by region, scientific discipline, and medium. We need to learn and share how others have improved data access and reusability.

This Do-A-Thon aims to utilize our shared knowledge to improve access to and awareness of a small but diverse collection of scientific data, with the long term goal of capturing these processes to develop leading practices to improve data access and reusability. After a brief presentation of background work including some preliminary “responsibilities and rights” with respect to improving data access and reusability, the majority of the session will be spent sharing and applying processes that have improved data access and reusability. Candidate datasets may be suggested to the organizers prior to the session. However, work can proceed in more general terms even without candidate datasets.

While this session will build upon work done in other spaces, no prior experience is necessary to participate.

Here are some recommended ways to prepare for this session: Some work on improving data access and reusability has been shared before. A review of the presentations in the 2019 AGU eLightning session, Dirty Stories of Data Rescue (you'll need to select the session from the drop-down), can help give a sense of the diverse efforts that are already taking place.

If you have improved access or reusability of a dataset, please come prepared to share your experience.

If you are aware of a candidate dataset that needs to improve access or reusability, please contact Denise Hills or Steve Diggs before January 10, 2022, so that we can incorporate that into the Do-A-Thon.

Most importantly, come prepared to honestly share the successes, the learning experiences, highlights, and frustrations that you have encountered in your data conservation efforts.

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Agenda and Notes
Presentation Slides

Global and local challenges are increasing from a rapidly changing climate that is fueling extreme events. There were 20 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2021, just two events shy of the record set in 2020. These events caused at least 688 fatalities and scores more injured. Two disasters occurred in December — the Southeast, Central Tornado Outbreak and the Midwest Derecho and Tornado Outbreak. December did not go quietly with losses from the Marshall Fire, which burned about 6,200 acres and more than 1,000 homes in Superior, Louisville and unincorporated parts of Boulder Country, are estimated by the Boulder County Assessor at $513 million, making it among the costliest fires in the state's history.

While the number of extreme events continues to increase, the impacts on people, communities, supply chains, transportation, communication and utility sectors also continue to grow due to aging critical infrastructure, increased vulnerabilities due to more demand from growing populations, and more people moving into hazard-prone areas that typically lack region-specific preparedness campaigns. In addition, the compounding impacts of Covid-19 have severely impacted the supply chain.

Data availability has also been increasing at logarithmic scales while the ability to discover, trust and use that data has lagged behind the ‘data availability’ growth rates. Non-technical decision makers, who crave trusted data that can be used to drive decision making, cannot find what they need, often due to the complex semantics of hazards and disasters. When they do find a relevant data source, they have to trust it in order to make a decision. Once they have gained trust in the source and used the data in their decision making processes, they are more than happy to provide feedback on the data that could lead to further improvements.

As the risk of wildfires continues to increase and the number of people moving into the urban wildland fire interface increases, communities want and need to be kept informed about their risks to wildfires and other extreme events, and how they can use data to improve their resilience, particularly BEFORE the fire breaks out. Once a wildfire threatens, communities need to jump into action. Before a wildfire develops is when community residents need to be informed about their vulnerability and identify what risks exist. What is being done to protect their communities and when it is safe to remain in place or evacuate? Today there are numerous disparate sources of information available and many choices to find data...but can that information be trusted and can it be aggrigated?

This session will bring together members from the ESIP #Ag&Climate, #AirQuality, #Envirosensing, #DataReadiness, #InformationQuality and #DisasterLifecycle clusters to engage in some active use case conversations, such as data sources for wildfire risk and possible impacts on communities, evacuation route datasets and how can we connect to communities effectively. We desire to leverage and grow a way to serve community and neighborhood residents and decision makers through lay language data discoverability and use to drive more rapid decisions. This could prove to be extremely valuable as we seek to cut the time between data discovery, trust, situational awareness and decision making.

We are excited to welcome Carol Ekarius, Chief Executive Officer of Coalitions & Collaboratives, Inc., a non-profit that works to foster on-the-ground conservation efforts that protect and restore natural resources and local communities by supporting collaborative conservation organizations, who produce collective impacts through stakeholder driven efforts. We will be engaging with Carol to discuss what communities need when it comes to data, particularly pre-fire, so they can become more resilient. Many of these communities are underserved. We will also hear from Dr. David Green, NASA Applied Science's Wildfire Program Manager that was recently added to Applied Science's portfolio. David will discuss where he sees the Wildfire program heading and inform us about a broader NASA multi-directorate approach to wildfires. We will have a 20-minute breakout session to address the following topics:

• Breakout 1: Challenges for pre-wildfire in communities
• Breakout 2: Data applications for pre-wildfire community situational awareness
• Breakout 3: Community Communication & Education Challenges (wildfire risk regions)

Recommended ways to prepare for this session: Think about whether you have candidate data potentially applicable to wildfire disasters especially before they develop.

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Data professionals who engage in CDI and ESIP Collaboration Areas have many mutual interests both in terms of technical topics and application areas. In an effort to increase communication between these groups, we will host a session to share and explore potential synergies. This session will make connections between people in both communities, bring to light lessons already learned or resources already produced, and help to identify common interests and challenges to collaborate on in the future. We will also explore mechanisms for continued sharing across ESIP, CDI, and other related groups going forward.

We will focus on connecting people, expertise, and resources from the ESIP Community Resilience and Disasters collaboration areas and the USGS Risk Research Applications Community of Practice. After brief introductions to the groups and their purpose by the group fellows, we will use this example to address the questions: How do you know where to go when you need help or expertise or want to share something? How can we usefully map the expertise that resides in these separate groups?

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Agenda

The ESIP Information Quality Cluster, collaborating with other groups from around the world, has led the formation the baselined International Community Guidelines for Sharing and Reusing Quality Information of Individual Earth Science Datasets (see https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/xsu4p). The baselined dataset quality guidelines offer an opportunity for improvement to serve multiple disciplines, use cases, and domains of applied sciences. In addition to the Earth sciences and related study areas, various disciplines and data types each need information about data quality when assessing data for potential reuse and when deciding how to use the data. For example, when studying climate change, environmental hazards, and other multidisciplinary issues, often, data from various disciplines are integrated. Such multidisciplinary data integration activities raise cross-disciplinary questions about the quality of individual datasets and approaches to fusing such cross-disciplinary quality information. Also, new questions about data quality emerge when planning to use the products and services that include datasets that have been integrated from various disciplines. Session participants will discuss use cases and data quality issues for interdisciplinary data (re)use and integration in terms of the implications for enhancing the dataset quality guidelines.

Recommended ways to prepare for this session: Identify data quality questions and issues of interest.

Session Notes

Session Recording