Help us push the frontiers of democratic participation in environmental governance by joining this design workshop on a new data portal that enables members of
environmental advocacy groups to ask
geography-based questions about
environmental enforcement!
Background: Vital data about federal enforcement actions against facilities that pollute the soil, air, and water is currently available but largely inaccessible in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database. We have been working for 1.5 years with data analysts, nonprofits, and community groups—and now with ESIP Lab funding—to develop well-documented and open source cloud-based Jupyter Notebooks that make ECHO data readily accessible and reportable by zip code, hydrologic unit code (to assess watersheds), state, and congressional district. However, we now have so many tools and reports that they can be hard to navigate and access!
What we’re making: We are now building a web portal to share our tools and reports. Our vision is an intuitive map-centric interface for three types of public interaction:
- Accessing already-generated reports
- Accessing our Jupyter Notebooks to generate custom reports (e.g. Clean Water Act violations in the Niagara River watershed)
- Sharing these custom reports and some context about why the findings are important or how they are surprising.
Where you come in: Are there best practices we should know about for displaying these kinds of reports and tools? What are similar projects we should look at during the design process? For example, EPA’s How’s My Waterway tool, justicemap.org, and DataONE (possible integration potential?)
This workshop will take place in two parts:
- Part 1 is an introduction to the reports and tools. We will familiarize participants with the project through both a presentation and hands-on use of a Notebook.
- Part 2 is a design workshop exploring ideas for the web portal: a structured, facilitated discussion focused on developing user scenarios to inform web development.
View Notes
