It's been more than four months since our last newsletter. We've been developing our strategy for the final 12 months of funding from the ETH Board Open Research Data programme. Our team has grown with three new members, we've launched new data packages and we're preparing the sign-up forms for the next iteration of our "data science for openwashdata" course.

Highlights

📊 New Data Releases

Our latest data packages continue to expand the open WASH data collection:

• ds4owdanalytics - https://openwashdata.github.io/ds4owdanalytics: DS4OWD Analytics
• undpcomposite - https://openwashdata.github.io/undpcomposite: UNDP Composite Indicators Timeseries
• boreholeforensicspumpingtest - https://openwashdata.github.io/boreholeforensicspumpingtest: Borehole Forensics 4 - Pumping Test Data 2018-2024
• washmalawi - https://openwashdata.github.io/washmalawi: WASH Household Level Survey Data 2018 - 2023

🌱 New faces

Three new team members have joined openwashdata this year:

Nicolò Massari joined us in February as an intern. A self-described "hitchhiker of the cosmos," Nicolò brings a strong background in computational methods and programming to our team. His technical expertise has been instrumental in developing new data packages and improving our data processing workflows. He is also actively supporting us in the development of ghe_transcribe, a package for transcribing audio files into text with a focus on data privacy and local processing.

Adriana Clavijo joined us in June as a Scientific Assistant for 12 months. As a data scientist and statistician with diverse experience across industry, government, and consulting sectors, Adriana is passionate about data visualization and improving data communication. Her skills are helping us make WASH data more accessible and understandable to a broader audience.

Emmanuel Mhango leads WASH data quality and publication efforts, supporting open data workflows in the global WASH sector. Currently attached to ETH Zurich's openwashdata project through BASEFlow Malawi. He has successfully published two high-quality WASH datasets, ensuring they meet standards of completeness, accessibility, and reusability. We are actively working on many more.

📅 Upcoming Events

2nd iteration of data science for openwashdata

Note the date! The next iteration of ds4owd will start on 11th September. We will share the sign-up form on Monday, 11th July, but you can already familiarize yourself with the course content and structure on the course website: https://ds4owd-002.github.io/website/

openwashdata conference

We'll be hosting the first openwashdata conference on 15-17 July 2025. This internal event for the Global Health Engineering group at ETH Zurich will bring our team together to:

• Showcase data steward Emmanuel's work over the past 6 months
• Plan for the future of openwashdata
• Host a Claude Code hackathon with Global Health Engineering colleagues
• Go on a summer excursion in Zurich

The conference will explore new AI tools like Claude Code to transform workflows at Global Health Engineering. We will explore this from the lense of working with software and data, but also the more research focused tasks of literature review, article and proposal writing. We will share the best use cases and lessons learned in our next newsletter issues and through blog posts.

Contributor of the Month

This month, we recognize Emmanuel Mhango as our contributor of the month. Emmanuel has expanded the openwashdata collection through his data quality and publication efforts. He has published 5 WASH datasets that meet standards of completeness, accessibility, and reusability. Emmanuel currently has another 6 data packages in the review pipeline. His work through BASEFlow Malawi has strengthened our WASH data coverage for the African region. Thank you, Emmanuel, for your contributions to open WASH data.

Get Involved

We believe the openwashdata project prospers when we have YOU work together and promote open science and data practice! No matter what background you are from, we come up with some ways for you to get involved:

• Join our chatroom to meet people!
• Share your WASH data with us
• Spread the word. Forward this email.
• Got more ideas? Leave us a message on Matrix to collaborate!