Hello MADE Community,
Happy Spring! I hope you all are doing well and finding some joy as the city starts to bloom again. I am reaching out to give you some exciting MADE project updates from the CCC team.
New Name, Same Project:
As we briefly previewed at our last MADE All Teams meeting, we have officially named our data ecosystem! Moving forward, we will be the Collective Environmental Datahub for Action and Resilience (CEDAR). You can see the new name in action, in addition to our MADE Year 2 video, here on our recently launched CEDAR webpage.
Change to the Datahub Release Process:
To ensure the system grows in a way that’s responsive to the environmental justice (EJ) policy, advocacy, and organizational landscape – and in a way that doesn’t expose the system to unexpected vulnerabilities (i.e., legal, ethical, security, cost) – we have agreed that a staggered release of features to the system is necessary.
We are still working towards an overarching goal of creating a data system that will:
honor the value of community data
store a diversity of community data sources from across EJ organizations in the region
support EJ organization members with coding their own community data
output analyses of aggregated community data sources with the goal of supporting EJ advocacy and policy
allow EJ organizations to retain control of their data, while providing resources on creating more just data sharing agreements, consent practices, and security protocols
With this in mind, we have determined that the first release (Release 1) of the datahub will focus on:
Allowing datahub submitters to record metadata about the community data sources their organization has collected and is currently storing
Producing visualizations from the metadata submitted to allow datahub users to better understand, for example, what kinds of community data EJ organizations have collected, what EJ topics are included in their community data sources, and what geographies are captured in community data sources.
We hope that this Release 1, while limited in function, will immediately begin to facilitate better coordination of EJ organizations by generating awareness about what kinds of community data are housed in different organizations and how these data are being used for policy and advocacy. As we work to add additional functions and capacity to the datahub, we hope that EJ organizations will use the datahub to increase their own connectivity, and as a resource to grow their capacity for organizing community data sources for EJ policy and advocacy efforts.
We will continue to communicate each update with CEDAR community members, and have more time to discuss this staggered release approach at our next All Teams Meeting this summer. If you have any questions beforehand, please feel free to reach out to our Data Ecosystem Manager, dallas haley at dallas@coalitioncommunitiescolor.org.