State water boards are staffing two volunteer groups from within, with the overall goal of taking a new look at data management, data science and innovation.
The groups, the Data Management Innovation Team (DMIT) and the Data Science Advisory Panel (DSAP), are being filled simultaneously with volunteer applicants from the state water boards’ more than 2,100 employees — but both should be small. As of Thursday, one day before today's application deadline, Greg Gearhart, deputy director of the office of information management and analysis at the State Water Resources Control Board, said he hoped to fill six seats on the DMIT, with the possibility of another four “player-manager-coach” positions, for a total of around 10. At that time, the DSAP had attracted four applicants among the staff of one state-level and nine regional water boards.
• The DMIT is designed to “stabilize and expand the feedback and the stakeholder input,” Gearhart said, and has sought staff with data science expertise or water data knowledge — “aspiring or self-trained data scientists” — in comparison to the DSAP, which has sought applicants who are more “full-on data scientists.” Both groups will center their efforts on water data, but their work could also inform the water boards’ core business functions.
• The DMIT and the DSAP will convene for their first joint meeting in late March, on a date not yet set but likely around the March meeting of CalData, which is the Government Operations Agency’s (GovOps) professional network for “data curious government individuals and partners” to discuss best practices and share information.
• The effort is driven by California State Water Resources Control Board Resolution 2018-0032, “Adopting Principles of Open Data as a Core Value and Directing Programs and Activities to Implement Strategic Actions to Improve Data Accessibility and Associated Innovation,” approved in July. The board, Gearhart said, has directed his office and others to do “an evaluation and an inventory of data readiness,” for internal business needs, data readiness for open data, and for publication.
• The DMIT and the DSAP will gather intelligence for their work from an ongoing series of more than 110 interviews officials are conducting with “key personnel” at the water boards, Gearhart said: “And the goal is to talk to enough people to say that we have a pretty good understanding of the total data ecosystem at the water boards.” The interviews, he said, serve as a “data literacy moment,” assessing interviewees’ data literacy and helping improve it by engaging with them around data. The “prize,” he said, is forging a data management strategy “that’s basically a lean, strategic action-oriented strategic plan,” and which can highlight five or six high-impact projects to be done during the next two years or so.
“I would argue that data literacy is also like a human need in the greater context of the world right now. All these issues that people are afraid of, with privacy or fake news or whatever you want to call it at their core, there is probably a component of data literacy that everyone needs to sort of step up and improve their game on, so to speak,” Gearhart said.
