The Intertidal Update - December 2024
It’s the turn of the year - the longest or shortest day, depending on where you are. If you’re a long time subscriber, you may recall me writing words like this before and I certainly have because, no matter what our day to day tasks and trials, the earth keeps up its orbiting and the year’s end brings reflective nights over warm mugs of [beverage of your choice].
If you are doing data work, or environment and climate work, or (like us lucky folks) both at the same time, you are always thinking fast and slow. What’s urgent and pressing, what immediate problems need addressing, or bottlenecks need clearing so the datastreams can flow. And, also, making time to imagine and collaborate on solutions. Where will you store your bat monitoring code and data over the 30 year life of a wind farm? How do you avoid putting it on the Jaz Drive of the future? Can data centers support biodiversity and run on renewable power, so that people are here and healthy to keep doing the work in 2085?
We happen to like the stretch of connecting the short and long terms, the atmospheric and the microbiotic, and we’re grateful to have built a community of other similarly minded folks, as well as people who would like to focus on only one end of those axes and bring us in to stitch things together. We’re all creating this culture of ocean data stewardship together. Know that even if you haven’t seen your name in our monthly thank you sections, you’re in our ecosystem and we are glad you’re here.
Here are some other reflections we’re admiring like baubles on our indoor conifers:
It’s DrivenData’s 10 year anniversary! 🎉 Congrats to the whole team. One of our favorite findings from their retrospective: One thing we have seen is the importance of making data accessible, not just available. For example, datasets in a machine-readable format that come with clear documentation and a demonstration of use are much better at getting attention and engagement. … Too often organizations make substantial investments in collecting data and stop short of the incremental investments that support its use, ultimately limiting the value it delivers to themselves and others.
The Nature Tech Collective (of which we are members) wrangled the entire world of nature tech terms and concepts into a taxonomy to help people with ideas and solutions and people who want to support/fund them find their way to constructive conversations around what, why, and how. It’s a big swing at sensemaking from a swamp of jargon and metrics so test it out and let NTC know what you think.
In Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s “What if We Get it Right?” she talks with AI pioneer Mustafa Suleyman about the importance of training AI on good ocean and climate data if we want AI to generate good results. They end on a discussion of working across labels and perspectives, with a call for “better vibes, more collaboration.” Here, here. 👏
We wish you a merry close of 2024 and a bright start to 2025.
-Kate & Rachael