Building Resilient Data Infrastructure

Next month, we will host the first in-person conference for the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum (CNG), our initiative to support the communities working to make geospatial data easier to access and use. We’ll be meeting from April 30th to May 2nd at Snowbird in Utah with students, entrepreneurs, and leaders from governments and enterprises all under one roof.

Most of the conference is dedicated to technical talks and hands-on learning workshops, but we have an entire track titled Building Resilient Data Infrastructure where we’re going to discuss how we move forward given recent changes to science policy in the US.

At the beginning of last year, I wrote “it is clear that 20th century institutions are not able to create, manage, or share the data needed to cooperate on the global challenges we face in the 21st century.” Today, many U.S. scientific institutions are being actively diminished, defunded, or eliminated. It’s no longer worth arguing whether or not we should be able to rely on US federal funding to create global data infrastructure. The truth is stark: we can’t – at least not to the extent that we’re used to.

I don’t believe this is any reason to lose hope.

America remains a uniquely dynamic, optimistic, and enterprising country, and Americans today can build institutions just as we have before. While we face challenges unique to our time, we have many advantages that our predecessors lacked. Advances in technology are continually driving down the costs of creating and distributing scientific data. And in its short history, the Internet has successfully made science a global enterprise, giving us an opportunity to design new institutions from the ground up that enable cooperation across borders.

We know it’s possible to build new data infrastructure, but we urgently need to figure out how to do so sustainably and ethically. We cannot afford to allow science to be vulnerable to political shocks from just one country. So, given the incredible tools at our disposal, how do we fund what we need? What kind of organizations should we build? Who do we hire and what do they do?

These are the questions we’ll be asking in the Building Resilient Data Infrastructure track at CNG Conference next month. Sessions we’re currently planning include:

• The Where of It All: Where will scientific data and resources live in the future? Given shifts in research funding, what organizations will house open-source projects and other resources needed by the global scientific community? How could we fund these organizations? Featuring:
  • Jen Marcus, Executive Director of Taylor Geospatial Engine
  • Katie Baynes, Earth Data Officer at NASA
  • Lena Trudeau, CEO of Inclined Analytics and first Executive Director of 18F
• Beyond Open Data: How do we create data products that can be relied upon by both the research and commercial sectors. Discussion points include licensing, provenance, data ownership, ongoing maintenance, and the ability to determine the value of data that serves the public interest but might not be of business value. Featuring:
  • Marc Prioleau, Executive Director of Overture Maps Foundation
  • Tom Lee, Head of Policy at Mapbox
• Disaster Response: How can good faith actors from the public and private sectors collaborate to ensure access to data needed for disaster response?
• Workforce Development: How do we grow our community on purpose, particularly helping people from marginalized communities get paying jobs in the new data economy?
• The Builders Panel: A panel of executives sharing their visions for the future of the geospatial sector. Featuring
  • Amy Rose, CTO of Overture Maps Foundation
  • Mo Sarwat, CEO of Wherobots
  • Sean Gorman, CEO of Zephr.xyz
  • Lucas Joppa, Chief Sustainability Officer at Haveli and first Chief Environmental Officer at Microsoft.

More details to these sessions will be added as we add participants.

If you agree that these are urgent questions and you want to help us find solutions, I hope you will join us.

Learn more about the conference and register at https://cloudnativegeo.org/utah.

Also, If you can’t make it to Utah, but will be at Fed Geo Day, I will be having a similar discussion in the Open Data for Resilience on April 22nd along with Maggie Cawley from OpenStreetMap US, John Crowley from MapAction, Angelina Calderon from Meta, and Derald Dudley from the US Department of Transportation.