Last night's event had 5 of us in person, small but really great, with organizer @lprashad (Lela Prashad of http://nijel.com/) explaining from the point of view of her work experience at USGS, NASA, and from JD's experience at EPA, what it takes to collect and maintain a robust archive of planetary data. Mozilla Science lead Stephanie Wright hosted us and provided a high-level & long term view of data provenance issues in open science. Dan Allen, a physicist at Department of Energy's Office of Science Brookhaven National Lab was there along with Brendan O'Brian of open data startup QRI (pronounced "query"). Both Dan and Brendan are part of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative and Data Refuge and are building tools that thousands of people are using to track the metadata/provenance of DIY downloaded gov data.

Together, we discussed how existing community-based research and data collection for advocacy has previously related to government environmental data in recent memory (often communities have challenged that gov't has accurately characterized or regulated for acute exposures on fencelines), and how that relationship is changing (perhaps temporarily?) now that government environmental data needs our protection.

Then we clicked into a national video conference known as the "dev standup" about coordinating tool-building for the protection of government environmental data with ~ 20 people.