 So let's get started. We are Environmental Enforcement Watch and we are a project of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which is called EDGIE as many of you know. We document, analyze and advocate for the federal provision of environmental data and governance from policies and institutions to public access to information to environmental decision-making. And we seek to improve environmental information stewardship to promote environmental democracy, health and justice, and to better adapt these to the digital age. Now with Environmental Enforcement Watch, which we call EU, we monitor EPA enforcement of facilities as well as EPA inspections and violations. And this helps communities know which are the big polluters in their neighborhoods or in their areas. And however, as this open hour title shows, we often have challenges with getting sufficient environmental data and being able to work with it. So we wanted to facilitate a sort of networking event and conversations between groups about our challenges with environmental data and try out the EPA's Enforcement Compliance History Online, the ECHO tool to look at enforcement in our areas. So we are funded by Code for Science and Society, which is funded by Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. So thank you to our funders. And let's begin. Hello everybody, I'm Kelsey Braceman, also from edgy. And I would like to lead us in a land acknowledgement. And you should see a link on your screen right now, native-land.ca. If you don't already know which Indigenous land you're on, this is a really good resource for finding out. And I'd like to invite everyone to go ahead and go to that link and drop in the chat what land you're calling in from. I'm on unceded Duwamish territory. And one of the reasons we do this is because as we pay attention to the land that we're on and the practices that move forward with it, it's really important to remember that this land has a long history of people taking care of it, much in the way that you may currently be taking care of it, and much in the way that Indigenous people who are still here continue to take care of that land. I'll also introduce at this time our code of conduct. We actually just rewrote our code of conduct to be more comprehensive, so I definitely invite you to check it out. We will be dropping a link in the chat. And the purpose of the code of conduct is to make sure that as you participate here and in our digital spaces that we host, that everyone feels comfortable. And if you experience anything that you feel deserves some conversation, recognition, or something more egregious that needs, you know, further than that, please feel free to reach out to us at any of those levels. My email address will be dropped in the chat as well as I think Eric's email address, also from edgy. You're also welcome to send a direct message to any of us edgy organizers while you're still on Zoom. And we're happy to follow up with you, and we will also be releasing transparency reporting around anything that comes up just to make it known that we want to be accountable to this. So while I do encourage you to read it, the very brief introduction, or the very brief, thanks, latest, the very brief summary is that it's a good idea to be present physically and mentally in this space. We do actually have a breakout room for people who want to kind of step back when we do breakout sessions, and that'll be talked about more later. But if you are here, please try to be here with the people who are here and participate fully, participate respectfully, both for yourself and for others, and step up and step down. And this is the idea that if you're finding yourself talking a lot, maybe hold a silence a little longer than you than you normally would to make sure that there's room for folks to step up. And because all of the perspectives here are valuable and we would love to hear from everyone, please do maybe find your voice, even if you're often one of the quieter folks in the room. Thank you. So going over the structure of the event, we have introductions, which is happening right now until around 6.15. And then we will have breakout session one in shareback that will be about 20 minutes. And we will try out the echo tool and then share out about that shareback about that, and have our closing circle. And it seems like we're running ahead of time. So let's just get started. So going ahead and getting started, we're going to get started with the breakout session. And we're just going to have a conversation answering these three questions. What are some challenges you have faced in finding or analyzing information? What are some projects you would like to do that require environmental data collection analysis and communication? And are there any issues you have in common with people from other groups? And so here's a link that you can click. It should be dropped in a chat. And this is an EtherPAD document. It works similarly to Google Docs. It's just a little more accessible and organized. And in a few seconds or at an age, you should be able to choose your own breakout session and try to... Let's try to have an even number of people in these breakout sessions. I think session breakout room four will be the break room. So there's always that option as well. Let's say I'm just making them. So there are 18 participants and let's make four breakout rooms and you get to choose your own room. So and you can move between the rooms. Can you choose your own rooms? And if there's anyone lingering, I will sign you to a random room. Thank you. I couldn't figure things out. Kendra and Mary, do you want me to send you to... Yes, please. Okay. Yeah. For some reason, I'm not in a normal Zoom. I'm through a browser. Yeah. That same thing's happening to me. Okay. Let's see. Okay. I'm going to sign you to room two and one. We'll see if it works. All right, Steve. Where do you want to go? Yeah, I didn't get any choice. I don't know what. Throw me in the least populated room if you've got one. Okay. We're back mostly. So am I there? Hold up. We are coming back. Can everyone see my screen? I had to reshare it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Is everyone... It looks like everyone's back, right? Okay. So now it's time to share back anything interesting or anything you discussed in your breakout session. Would anyone like to share? We can start maybe with session one. So that would be my session. I can start with something. I think a lot of what came up in general, or most of us were being in accessibility of the data because technically the data is there and it's accessible to you and you can download it, but it really takes skill and it takes coding knowledge and it takes a lot of different forms of knowledge to figure out how to analyze this data and view this data. And so it's difficult to do this if you don't have that knowledge, which takes a lot. It takes time to learn. We also talked about some of the environment, I guess environmental enforcement in South Korea and how that... I guess how there's also some distrust from people there in terms of... I'm trying to explain this. Yeah. So I guess there's some distrust from the public with the government in regards to the enforcement and the way they they publish this data, the way they make this data on environmental enforcement accessible to people. And so that's what we talked about. And I don't know if anybody else would like to share. I just wanted to resonate from what Leslie shared. This is Ashley. We also just shared some points from my own personal community, but Leslie also echoed in regards to how getting to this data is really challenging from the students or the communities that I work with that are already facing a lot of systemic oppression and issues in the public school system or higher education or the workforce. So learning the different lexicons you need for environmental science, environmental health to data, to coding, it just becomes unbearable and it's really hard. It's not to say that one person has to carry it all, but a lot of times there are usually only a handful of us that get through the education system for this type of focus area. So you can kind of sometimes feel really alone in that space. All right, 635. So let's move on. And now we're going to shift to the second part of our open hour using a tool critically. We're talking about all of these data challenges that we have and accessibility. So what about the information that is supposed to be made accessible to us? And so if you wanted to find out which were the worst polluters in your neighborhood, where would you start to look? And this is where we come to the echo interface. And it shows data from the last three to five years, compliance data. And there is much data that's not a visible and that's not visible. Records going further back for decades. And we want to see how we can use it and learn how to use it, but we also want to think about what issues we're encountering as we use it. And what you do is you put in your location, city, state, or zip code, press search, and then explore. And I'm going to leave it up to the breakout rooms to figure it out because that's part of the process. And this is what you get when you look up an area and click on a facility. And you can see it's a lot of small font, a lot of numbers that might not make sense. So we want to look at the strengths and the weaknesses of this tool. So breakout session two, we're going to choose a zip code or area where enforcement matters to us and consider whether we find the data that we expected, talk about the challenges we encountered in interpreting this data, and then think about whether this information is useful or this tool is useful. So I'm going to put us back, let's go back into different breakout rooms and meet some new people. Does anyone have questions about this exercise before we all disappear off the main screen? And it is pretty open-ended. Like if you want to pick different places to look at, or if your group wants to pick one place, or if you want to drill down on a facility, that's all up to you. It's mostly about finding out whether you can figure out the thing you're trying to figure out. Everyone has their invitations to go into a breakout room. Does anybody here want me to assign them to a breakout room? Yeah, go ahead and assign me. Thanks. Eric, Megan. I was just waiting to see what was who's not in a, okay, I'm going to go three. Okay. Okay. I'm going to one. No, two. Wait, Eric, why don't you go, can you go to two? And I go, because, yeah. I think everyone is probably back by now. I was on mute and I started talking. Okay. So, does anyone want to share back on what their group, what challenges their group encountered? How this tool could be useful to you? Any of the prompts that were provided? I have an alternate prompt too, which is just, how was that? How'd that feel? No, it's great. I can just jump in for a brief bit. I can't speak to the experience of the entire group, but one thing that we did discuss was who is the intended audience from EPA's standpoint and how are they guarding against the misuse of this data given that the data is extremely partial? I work in neighborhoods in San Diego and I know there are many facilities that should be on here that are not here. So, how do we think about partial data and also reporting at different time scales? How is EPA guarding against the misuse of data? We noticed a couple of other kinds of gaps. So, we had struggled when we looked just by place names. Zip code was much better, but for municipalities, there might be dozens of zip codes, and so that makes it really difficult to get a geographically holistic view of a particular municipal region. Zip codes don't always follow geographic lines in logical ways, so you need to look more holistically in that regard. We also talked a little bit about rural pollute, like agricultural polluters and how since the database tracks largely point source pollutants, then there's not as much attention in these databases to agricultural runoff or agricultural exposure since they're governed differently. So, those were some of the things we thought about. And so, we wanted to have a more open discussion. I'm just talking in general about the entire session, both breakout sessions, the entire event, sorry. And we wanted to ask participants, what will you take away from this session? And if you are from an organization and you came here from your organization, what did you find useful from today's event? I can speak from an edgy perspective. I feel like there's a context that we didn't really put forward for a lot of this conversation, which is that the EU project is mostly about taking these data sources and saying, how could we do this better? And so, just for me, it was really validating to see a lot of you have the same kinds of challenges we run into and ones we haven't even thought about yet. So, the notes that you all took, I really appreciate it. And it's something that's going to continue to inform our work and we hope we can keep working with you. I thought it was a good forum to be able to connect with people across the country that have the same interests as far as collecting data. And also, I found it helpful. I wasn't really familiar with the ecosystem. So, it was a good introduction. I also saw something that Kate, I think her name is Kate Petzar about how I think she said, yeah, she worked at the EPA and she said that it might just be better to, I guess, do a basic form of analysis of this data beforehand. I guess on the back end of the EPA, just so people are able to download this data and then view this data without as many which I thought was an interesting perspective to think about because I hadn't really thought of that. I just thought this is going to be difficult and this is always going to be difficult too. It definitely be made easier. And do we have any thoughts more from our first conversations that we want to keep thinking about? I heard in my session a lot of educators talking to each other about resources and I'm hoping that you all saw the contact section at the top of the etherpad. The stuff that you might share and it would be really wonderful. And let me, was someone saying something? Yeah, I was just gonna, can we continue to do that after the session is over? Like, will it be accessible to us after the session? So that brings us to our close. Thank you very much. And you can reach us on Twitter at UNetwork. Email us at environmentalenforcementwatch.com. Oh, and Megan, if you want to drop in our website environmentalenforcementwatch.org. That would be great. And in the etherpad document at the end we have a survey. It would be amazing if you could all fill it out because it's required by our funders and it would really help to give us feedback. And stay tuned because we are going to release our Spanish report card about environmental enforcement on May 13th from six to seven. And we're going to talk about advocacy with environmental data. So thank you all for coming. And we'll see you another time. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for joining.