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On my left side, there is.
Don Walker, she is
a member of.
Inventor Michael Doctor and
government initiative,
it's called E
the category and
Ph.D. student at the Faculty
of Information of Toronto.
Their talk is ensuring climate
data remains public,
and it's something like the Data
Liberation Front helping us
in these times to get all the
information for all people
on the long distance achieved
a warm applause.
Hi, everyone.
Is that on OK?
I hope you're enjoying your Congress so
far, so like
I was introduced, this talk
is ensuring climate data remains public
and that I'll speak to the question of
how we keep important environmental and
climate data accessible
amidst political instability and risk.
In particular, in this past year, I think
many of us have been paying attention to
the United States. And I'll speak to
recent data preservation efforts
there.
So the plan is to have an intro
of why I'm talking here today a bit about
what makes now a pressing moment,
kind of a whirlwind tour of efforts
to identify, preserve and rethink
access to climate data and then hopefully
some sort of rousing call about futures
for climate and environmental data.
This isn't work I've been doing alone.
I'll speak to about many projects and
organizations that thousands of people,
various variously coordinated, have
worked on.
And if you leave with one impression, I
hope it's that climate science, climate
data collection and the use
of archiving and grassroots organizing
around data are all collaborative
efforts.
My plan was to try and leave room for one
to two burning questions, but I'm really
more than happy to talk after
here by the stage.
And I have stickers, so please find me.
I want to give them to you.
OK,
great.
So first, I'm not an expert
and actually climate science isn't my
background.
I'm a PhD student really interested in
how designing with a framework of data
justice ensures more equitable outcomes,
both in forms of data collected and
access to technologies to try and
think through this.
I've been looking to those actively using
data to try and push for otherwise.
Is this takes the form of DIY science,
counter mapping and increasingly
decentralized Web projects?
I actually got involved with thinking
about climate data somewhat circuitously,
and a member of a local civic tech meetup
shout out to Civic Tech Toronto
that served as a meeting space and anchor
for many of these early efforts.
And so what's edgy, edgy, which is kind
of a mouthful, is Environmental Data and
Governance Initiative, a distributed,
consensus based organization of more
than 150 scholars, organizers
and nonprofit groups.
Hedgy was formed from an email thread
that started in November 2016 in
the immediate wake of the US
presidential elections.
For more than a little over a year now,
we've been documenting, contextualizing
and analyzing changes to environmental
data and government governance
practices in the US.
I've tried to include at least a portion
of the people who've been involved in
e.g. projects on the slide, but many
more exist.
So first, to unpack the data
infrastructures of climate and
environment a bit more climate
science and environmental data rely on a
collaborative, often state supported
research infrastructure.
I think there's been many talks earlier
in Congress that have highlighted how
data contributes to knowledge about
climate change, climate modeling,
satellites, building our
own DIY satellite ground station network,
which I now want to get a ground station
up on.
And so I would check to those or check
those out for examples.
But I kind of just want to stress the
sort of coordinated global scale
of this collection and processing and
something that scholar Paul Edwards has
described as a global knowledge
infrastructure, making global data
in the United States.
At the federal level, there are a handful
of agencies, departments and institutions
involved with the creation and publishing
of this data NOAA, USGS,
NASA, DOE, EPA and more.
In addition to these are research
institutions like Columbia University
or the Center for International Earth
Science Information Network is based.
Given the coordinated collection and
holding of this data, there's certainly
no singular form of public access,
but publishing of data and data products
has been increasingly public through a
combination of policies, portals,
libraries and archives and open
government data initiatives in the U.S.
under Title 17, Section one and five,
most data with some exemptions is
considered a work of the US government
and therefore in the public domain
and historical climate, environmental
data is critically important to
contextualize and understand current
observed phenomena.
However, in addition to the data itself,
there are reports, summaries and analysis
that really open up the topic to a
broader audience.
And I kind of consider myself that
broader audience to sort
of beyond those with domain expertize.
So I kind of just want to pause for a
moment here and untangle climate and
environmental data,
people can use them interchangeably and
I've been doing so right now.
But I think there are some differences in
the way certain communities use them that
are important.
So in many cases, when people
say climate data, they're really
referring to atmospheric weather and
hydrologic conditions data,
whereas environmental data, when people
use that are often explicitly
referring to environmental health and
hazard. This includes air and water
quality, toxic and pollutants as well as
waste.
So both are really vital to help
characterize and navigate our
relationship to our environments.
But I think at times can can maybe feel
at different scales. And so this is the
first of two terrible attempts
to position them against each other.
So access to climate data and methods has
already faced challenges prior to the
past year, in many cases from
those disputing global warming.
And this has led to motivated targeting
of climate scientists and their data sets
in cases, in some cases with financial
support from lobby groups.
One of the more well-known examples is
the hockey stick controversy, where a
graph showing the gradual cooling and
then recent rapid warming, roughly
resembling a hockey stick, was
highlighted in an Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change report.
It had been published in subsequent
years, the results of which the results
have been replicated numerous times with
different and additional data.
But at that time, the results were new
and compelling.
As a result, they were then disputed.
Michael Mann and his colleagues wound up
personally targeted online, subject to
Freedom of Information Act request and
drawn into court proceedings that lasted
many years.
There are more examples, but in the
interest of time, I'll have to skip them.
But I think maybe the other most visible
one would be the 2009 Climategate
email leaks.
My sense is that before 2017,
this form of Tarou targeting would have
been identified as the most likely public
risk to climate science sort of way
to introduce doubt around climate change
in public opinion through concerted
efforts to discredit results or
scientists.
Just want to say one more time.
Shout out to Paul Edwards.
His discussion on environmental data
systems is under siege is really
instructive.
In his book, A Vast Machine, as well as
my recent research, he kind of unpacks
the history of climate data.
And I think his
his work and kind of these previous
examples kind of raise important
questions about access to climate data.
What man's opponents and climate change
skeptics said they wanted in many cases
was the raw data or like a full
record.
And so and in one case in particular,
Project sought to actually audit the
siting of surface temperature
instruments.
However, I think it's important to to
note and something that scientists like
at the time was how necessary context is
to interpreting data.
And I think we need to better understand
that was working with complex data,
including climate and environmental data.
This moment in particular.
On November 8th, 2016, Donald Trump
was elected
for many people, there was an immediate
sense that we have to be ready, we have
to do something.
Scientists, environmentalists and
environmental justice organizers saw
statements made during the campaign is
indicating that climate and environmental
data infrastructures could be at risk
and actively targeted.
But this isn't the same as the above
and said this is the
risk is how do you ensure continued
access to data about climate and the
environment when the supporting
institutions may no longer be able
or desire to?
However, many from an environmental
justice background have long recognized
existing environmental data
structures as imperfect.
For example, in cases where it's relying
upon industry reported data or
non or is non representative of
communities embodied experiment,
experience of pollution
and toxics.
This put people into a position
of concern for the preservation of
imperfect data to avoid an alternative
of no data.
But wait, you may have been thinking this
whole time, are you from Toronto and
isn't Toronto and Canada?
It is I am.
However, Canadians experienced
kind of our own mobilizing
moment under our previous prime minister,
Stephen Harper.
And and I think this highlighted
the new form of a threat to climate
environmental data infrastructure.
Stephen Harper was able to really quickly
and successfully implement an agenda
of systematically undercutting
environmental and climate research
budgets, closing labs including
and at an Arctic research station,
weakening government environmental
regulations, and then shutting down
libraries and reducing historical
periodical and record collections.
The speed and immediate impact, I think,
served as a rallying moment and
highlighted facets of vulnerability that
many had not been considering.
So do something
for edgy members that something
quickly became preserving existing
and federal environmental data through
helping facilitate grassroots archiving
efforts, monitoring changes to federal
websites, and documenting the political
transition through interviews and timely
academic analysis.
Between December 2016 and June
2017, local organizers
hosted 49 data rescue events
in cities across the U.S.
and Canada with support from hedgy and
the data refuge project at the University
of Pennsylvania.
At events ranging in size from a couple
dozen to over two hundred people gathered
to nominate key federal environmental
data sets for archiving is part of the
Internet archives preexisting
end of term Kraul.
In addition, attendees strategically
organized how to deal with links and data
sets that could not be preserved through
automated methods.
At these events, attendees nominated over
63000 Web pages as seeds
for subsequent calling.
However, and it's hard not to go into
like a really extended conversation about
crawler software here, which I'm probably
not the best person to do.
Crullers software is not actually easily
able to fully archive and discover links
to data sets and Web pages on all sites,
partially because of underlying
Web development practices and Internet
infrastructure and partially because of
resource and storage constraints.
So in addition, more than 22000
data sets whereas identified, were
identified as candidates for non
automated preservation, deemed that
we deemed them as not able to be
successfully crawled, several hundred of
which went through a workflow of
developing custom solutions to scrape
links and data sets and upload them to
a data refuge repository using an open
source toolkit.
I'm going to use the benefit of hindsight
now to sort of avoid falling into
a narrative that portrays us as underdogs
or kind of what alone accomplished this
project of a massive scale.
As people in many cases, without the
expertize of a digital
preservation and archiving or a long
track record in it, we didn't
fully appreciate the scale and along
the way, rediscovered, rediscovered.
I want to stress that longstanding issues
with archiving and digital preservation
that many groups are already navigating.
So rather than forging ahead alone, we
quickly found affinities with existing
advocates, projects and institutions,
many of which who have been operating in
this space for a long time.
So in addition to US and data refuge
climate near Project Azimuth and the
archive team who had existed for years
prior, also became rallying projects
for people who wanted to quickly organize
around preserving data.
I'm just going to mention three projects.
There's way too many, but one
to untangle just some things that I think
are interesting around access, coverage
and risk. So first, Internet Archive,
Internet Archive is an unparalleled
resource for web archiving.
In this particular case, with just end of
term crawl, they managed to get over
200 terabytes of the government web.
And because of the additional focus, they
have got sections of websites that might
have been missed based on the
way they can figure that crawl.
And so while it may not include an
archive copy of all the data sets for the
reasons mentioned earlier, it provides an
important snapshot of how that data was
presented on websites at the end of the
previous administration and further
provides the ability to browse previous
versions of those sites in a way that
extends how the content was initially
presented.
So I think that kind of opens the
question about what what we think about
when we think about access.
The next one is Code for Science
spearheaded project Svalbard named
after the Sea Bolt, a collection of
over thirty eight gigabytes of metadata
to try and create a single catalog of
research data files.
And while data has a
catalog, not all data that could be there
is there without a comprehensive
view. Assessing where data is
and how much data is preserved is
difficult, as you can imagine.
And then finally, as existing
data center practitioners, the Earth
Science and Information Partnership made
a case for a collaborative effort to
understand risk.
Stressing existing preservation and
backup methods may not be visible,
particularly for climate data.
They surface different understandings of
risk from a from from public ones.
Coming from a data practitioner
perspective, I think it's
really important if that
was a bad, bad slide job there.
Sorry to
to to pull up this quote that they say.
So they frame these as long standing
factors of risk.
But but I would say there's a new
dimension under certain administrations
and that is of obsolete technology or
data formats, lack of metadata, lack
of expertize, lack of funding to
maintain the data.
And I think in addition, you know,
lack of funding for additional
or extended collection in the future.
So a year later, what happened?
This is kind of a weird transition, just
noticing that we haven't seen a mass
removal of data sets.
There have been a few, a few that
have been taken down
for reasons that are not clearly linkable
to sort of
the goal of removing them from public
access as a sort of politically
motivated executive orders.
And Scott Pruett's appointment to the EPA
has led to a reverse of a ban on the
neurotoxic on a neurotoxic
pesticide.
A proposal to rescind Obama's clean power
plan is in the works and cuts to
important environmental programs, notably
those that protect marginalized and
vulnerable populations, are underway.
Further budget proposals
aimed at severely cutting funding to key
federal agencies
involved with environmental data
collection. In terms of data, we've
actually seen a shift
in how it's presented on federal
websites. The screenshot on the slide is
actually from a recent hedgy website
monitoring report documenting
the removals and changes in access to
resources on the EPA's climate and energy
resources for state, local and
tribal government.
So since January,
a website monitoring team has released
over twenty five reports like this
documenting changes to how
environmental and climate data is
presented.
So what next?
I think the biggest opportunity I see is
in the public conversation and attention
toward the continued access to this data,
the fact that people who weren't
librarians, web archivists or research
scientists showed up and stayed involved
attests to this as the Edges
website monitoring work as a way to
attempt to mobilize that that continued
public conversation.
But there could be more in the wake
of recent FCC decision on net neutrality.
I think we're seeing another wave of
public conversation around
infrastructure, but kind of operating at
a lower level.
Since the summer, Hedgy has been working
with Protocol Labs, the creator of IP FSR
Interplanetary File System and query
a data science company developing data,
set research tools on the distributed web
on a project called Data Together, which
aims to convene a conversation around
building our own and better data
infrastructures.
We want to explore how decentralized web
patterns can support community data
stewardship in part
through content, address web archiving
and are having those conversations out
in the open where people can join in.
That could be a whole talk in itself and
I would prefer that somewhat to give it.
And I have more questions and answers.
So I think it's probably something that
works better as a conversation and one
I'm hoping at least some of you will want
to participate in.
And maybe just to kind of
suggest as well, I think many in hacker
free software, open hardware, open
science communities have have recognized
the ways that technology is not neutral,
that it can come with embedded bias
and predispositions to be used in certain
ways.
And I think if that recognition can be
coupled with the recognition from
environmental justice advocates and
academics into the ways that data is not
neutral and then also,
you know, with an attention to the vital
data about climate and environment that
is critical to navigating our changing
relationship to the environment, I really
think we have a chance to build better
data together.
So maybe just in conclusion, I
want to say, you know, Edge is always
looking for people interested in
volunteering.
Our projects range
for people from a variety of backgrounds.
In particular, if you are like a dev ops,
which come find me, we need like a
serious dev ops help.
And please check out our website, GitHub.
You can sign up to our mailing list.
You can help us created it together as a
mailing list or maybe just have some
conversations about this somewhere
online.
I think it's.
Well, a big, big
sense, because this is an important
work, we as
we like the best information
we have to achieve.
So let's now come to the
Q&A.
Please go to the microphones.
And if there's a question
from the Internet, I get informed
from the video Angell's.
Is there any question
are there is somebody coming
microphone one for
you?
I you often hear that
the scientific data sets are very
fragmented or not very easily
accessible. I can imagine that's
certainly something you run into while
trying to rescue it. And, Carol, it's
what is your experience?
Been there and did you see any
opportunity to, for example, improved us
in your efforts?
Yeah, so
absolutely. I think we did run aground
off of that fragmentation.
And I think maybe if we could
offer one thing to other people with the
experience of like this not being
something we were familiar with and kind
of stumbling through it and making like
all the mistakes possible, I mean, like,
where is this? How can we find it?
So in terms of kind
of what we found or sort of like a way
for it actually went to flag
that I think there are already processes
to try and like address fragmentation.
And I think data governance is becoming
this open data portal.
I think the way that certain countries
have kind of like a
one stop portal to try and find
data sets as well as, you know,
coordination between the
IPS. I had the screenshot of the IPCC
data distribution center, like I think
those projects are a good
are one attempt at that.
I mean, I think there's still this
problem of access in the sense that
I don't it's unclear to me how
people who aren't within a certain
community of practice would kind of even
know to get there to get that data.
And, you know, one thing we've heard in
conversation with others,
including the US Climate Alliance,
I had their logo up,
you know, is that I think there's a
certain set of people who care a lot and,
you know, their decisions and how they
work is going to be really heavily
impacted by climate data.
But they're not going to look at the
data. They're going to look at those
reports. And like getting access
to those is extremely important.
I mean, I think portals are a
big help. I think the the library
repository programs, those things that
already exist are really important.
And I don't want to see them go away.
But I still think there's like
something slightly missing about
usability. And I'm not I'm not entirely
sure how to address that.
But I think
these Onestop things and work around
opening the data sets is like a really
good first steps.
And thanks for your efforts on this, OK,
we have ten minutes and
three questions from from the Internet
to in the room.
So Internet start first, please.
OK, so one person
from Iasi asks, is
the bar for putting data into
the World Data Center for Climate
too high in terms of providing a number
of metadata, which is
a lot of work, but.
So
my understanding is that operates
a bit similar to the govt in the sense
that it's like opt in so
and it's opt in from a data publisher
level.
And if I'm incorrect there, I'm
sorry, but working with that assumption,
I think the barrier we found is that not
everyone has opted in.
So if you're a person who
cares about the data, but you're not the
person who made the data, you're
kind of stuck if if that the publisher
has not included it in in these
repositories.
And so, I mean, I think an
interesting approach could be
to figure out ways to incentivize more
people to get it in there.
And I don't know what those hooks could
be, but if there's a way that, like you
request, they push it there
and there's a way to motivate that
behavior.
Like, I think that would be awesome.
Microphone five, please.
Have I have questions regarding
creation of new that it means that one of
the concerns is to protect that and
preserve that from the old scientific
research. But what will happen if, for
example, there will be lack of funding
for the next research and for example,
our long time serious for climate
research will be lost for that?
Are there or, for example, in this
community, are there people who try
to reach
a broader audience and tell them that we
need to find funding for preserving data
and for creating the new data and
for measuring still all of these
climate sphynx?
I mean, I agree, I think that's really
critical
and that's something where I think there
are in the United States and in Canada,
a lot of people mobilized around this
issue of thinking about
how the sort
of the knock on effects of limiting
budgets now and then sort of a continued
constraining of budgets and a lack of
funding and a lack of, you know, in
cutting jobs instead of growing jobs.
The group that I'm most familiar with,
who I think is doing really strong
advocacy around that in the states is the
Union for Concerned Scientists.
So I think there are definitely groups
who are flagging
what those like,
what the outcomes of the budget proposals
would work or the impact of those.
And so there are
groups who are advocating for it,
I think may
not also being an expert in
government policy
or how budgets are implemented.
I think there are constraints in how
advocacy is a tool to affect change in
what a budget is that gets adopted
means that maybe that that alone is is a
strategy is not going to
prevent it from happening.
OK, microphone one, please.
So is the distributed
data digitally signed, I could
imagine that there are
some groups of people who might be
interested in fiddling around with
it.
Yeah, so the
through the data rescue
process, we worked really closely
and did a refuge project
is many of them are librarians.
So there was a strong concern with
maintaining stability of data and also
thinking about integrity and
verification.
I think actually it raised a lot of
really interesting questions for me, at
least in in, uh,
how you would imagine, like a very, uh,
volunteer and human intensive process
of doing that verification.
So there was a workflow management
tool that was developed where you
would we would have like a log of who had
touched each data.
I didn't have data at an event or a data
set or a page.
And then we used existing
librarian and Library of Congress tools
to kind of generate a
checksum and to ensure that what was
uploaded was what people thought was
uploaded. When you download it, you can
verify that.
And so it was trying to do a parallel
like sort of social and technical
implementation to do that in the in
the move towards some of the data
together where we actually have a
reference implementation of,
you know, generating works, which is a
web archiving format, and
writing them directly and adding them to
epiphytes. And so with with IP address
and content address protocols, there
are additional ways to do
verification and to ensure that what
you only retrieve is the data you think
you're retrieving.
So I think that those are important
questions. Really interesting.
And I think we we tried I don't
I mean, I'm I'm not a
librarian by practice.
So I think there are a lot of tradeoffs
there that I'm probably not as sensitive
to.
Well, that sounds very trustworthy.
Thank you so much.
Yeah. Them please give a big applause
for Don Walker,
for the WHO
talk about these
public data.
What is necessary for us all because
the is not allowed to be.