This year at csv,conf,v8 in Puebla, Mexico I gave a talk on our experience as a democratic worker cooperative creating digital public goods, and why we think co-ops are potentially a good fit for creating public-interest technology. You can watch the recorded talk on YouTube, or read on for a bloggified version of the talk below.
We’ve come across a few allied projects looking at environmental justice data specifically, and thought it would be nice to share!
In May, Christina and I gave a talk at CSV,Conf,v6 about things we’ve learned liberating US energy system data. We focused a lot on the challenge of making data accessible to advocates. The following talk was analogous, but focused on environmental justice data. The speaker was Kelsey Breseman (@ifoundtheme) from the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) and their project Environmental Enforcement Watch (EEW). EEW is trying to hold polluters accountable using federally reported data, by making that data more accessible to and understandable by the people who are affected. They’re scraping the data from the web and creating a database that folks can query using Google CoLab notebooks. At the same time they’re trying to get EPA the full underlying database accessible to the public.
You can watch her excellent talk here:
I was struck by how many parallels there were between our work. We’re both trying to mitigate the poor curation of government data, and make it more accessible way to the public. EDGI also seems very open and GitHub centered and is trying to operate as a horizontal organization. They support themselves through foundation grants and volunteer labor. Nobody works on EDGI full time. They have a fiscal sponsorship agreement through Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP).
If you’re interested in public data and environmental justice they seem like a great organization! Maybe we can collaborate at some point.