Building the Relationship between Data Managers and the End User

Abstract:

Within the realm of climate and environmental sciences, stakeholder engagement has traditionally been given a relatively low priority in favor of generating tools, products, and services following the longstanding practice of pushing out information in the hopes users will pull it into their decision toolkits. This can lead to a mismatch in goals as stakeholders have requirements for ease of archiving and data managers to safely archive and grant access to data; both sets of requirements can be opaque to outsiders.

However, the landscape is shifting away from that paradigm of “build it and they will come” towards where the stakeholder community is more directly involved in the development of products and services with the scientific organization. This mutual learning arrangement has been highlighted as a key priority within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

To address this emerging theme, NCEI has applied the agile workflow process to two different kinds of projects aimed at gathering requirements, establishing new processes to assure the adherence to the FAIR principles and engaging with stakeholders throughout the entire process. The first project focuses on the planning and execution for migrating an operational dataset (100s of terabytes) from the node in Boulder to the Asheville, NC location with minimum disruption to the key stakeholders. The second focuses on using the agile process to address long-term planning for archiving and accessing restoration data from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill incident. Both efforts require the fostering, nurturing, and building of trust of the team and stakeholders through established iterative user engagement tools. The focus of this presentation is to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach towards building trust and effective communications - between the user community, project sponsors and the agile team and to showcase how the FAIR principles are being incorporated and addressed during each agile sprint and demonstration.