Azavea Staff Volunteer for Data Refuge Project

February 14th, 2017

Azavea Staff Volunteer for Data Refuge Project

The University of Pennsylvania Program in the Environmental Humanities, along with many partners, coordinated an effort that identifies, assesses, prioritizes, secures, and distributes reliable copies of federal climate and environmental data so that it remains available to researchers. This collection of events and efforts, called Data Refuge, stores data in multiple, trusted locations to ensure that this data remains accessible.

Data Refugue

How Azaveans Helped

Azavea was involved with Data Refuge throughout the life of the project, to-date. Our staff helped as a consultant during the planning stages of the project, in promotion of the project and events, and as a technical resource during the planning stages and during the event.

One of our staff members, Robin Schaufler, was a Guide during the Saturday event, who attended the guide training session on Friday, 1/13 afternoon.

Robert Cheetham, President & CEO of Azavea, participated as a panelist during the Roundtable on DataRefuge Value and Vulnerability.

Some of our technical staff, including Sharp Hall and Andrew Fink, helped set up the CKAN instance for datarefuge.org, which is the data repository for the Data Refuge events.

Other Azavea staff, including Dan Ford, Kathryn Killebrew, Robert Cheetham, Terence Tuhinanshu, Jenny Fung, Rob Emanuele, and Robin Schaufler participated during the Data Refuge event on Saturday.

Dan Ford helped to coordinate marketing efforts and storytelling about the events.

“Overall, my experience was that Laurie Allen and the Penn library staff, and Bethany Wiggin and the PPEH fellows (along with the help of many others) created an organized and productive event on a very tight timeline – the quality of which will carry the success of this event to the other cities that have already agreed to participate,” Dan recalled about the January event.

Dan also commented that “[his] hope is that the contributions from Azavea staff helped to facilitate a smooth experience for participants and that vulnerable data will be preserved for future open use by researchers and the public, alike.”

How Can You Help?

These efforts are on-going!

What you can do:

  • Read more about the Data Refuge project here.
  • Learn about upcoming events in your area.
  • Don’t see an event in your area? The Data Refuge Team documented details about ‘How to Host an Event‘.