1. Puget Sound Information Challenge Experiences and Lessons Learned

2. The Puget Sound Partnership Formation of the Puget Sound Partnership  Created by 2007 Washington Legislature  Led by Bill Ruckelshaus Goals  A Healthy Puget Sound by 2020

3. Action Plan and Guiding Principles Some Guiding Principles  Include the public in the process  Facilitate and take advantage of collaboration and cooperation across sectors  Strong science to develop action plan Protect HabitatRestore Habitat Reduce toxic pollution Reduce human and animal waste Better manage stormwater Assure adequate water supplies Protect ecosystem biodiversity Increase capacity for action Goals of the Puget Sound Partnership

4. The Challenge Can the Internet be used as a collaborative tool for helping restore the Puget Sound?

5. First Steps Determine what information would be useful for people to contribute  Spoke with Mary Ruckelshaus, Martha Neuman, Tom Eaton, Jon Schweiss They Suggested:  Science issues, science data, indicators, performance measures, best practices, maps So we designed a website that people could add their knowledge and data to…

7. Getting The Word Out On 11/14, the Bill Ruckelshaus keynote video was shown to an audience of over 600 people  Asked them to contribute their data and knowledge and to contact people in their networks to collaborate

8. Making It Easy to Contribute Allowing for people to contribute knowledge, data and tools in several different ways  Editing the wiki directly  Filling and submitting a web form  By Email  By Phone  Through “Social Tagging” on sites like del.icio.us and Flickr Build a small set of “stub” articles and a working application to illustrate the type of content needed and the possibilities Clear definition of information categories for coding contributions to the wiki

10. The Challenge! Only open for 36 hours to participate… Updates at regular intervals throughout the OEI Symposium The number and quality of contributions was remarkable… some highlights follow

11. Automatically Grabbing Information from the Web Extracting information tagged as “Puget Sound” from the web Using the keyword “PugetSoundInformationChallenge”, users were asked to identify and tag relevant resources in blogs, on YouTube, at Flickr and del.icio.us

12. This method yielded many interesting results, and recently identified a highly relevant initiative that may be of use to the PSP

14. Real Time Access to Data Users can interactively add multiple layers of geographic data on top of base maps, and to query individual points to receive data. “Mashups” constructed in the wiki can be saved as individual contributions, so users can share their interactive maps with others

16. New Ways to Search the Web Multiple groups submitted customized search applications These examples show:  Spatial search of documents that are not in a GIS (i.e.: show me all of the documents on epa.gov about salmon that are near TRI sites)  Customized Google search focused on environmental web content, categorized as “data,” “indicators,” “maps,” etc.

19. Data Contributions NASA contribution to help use and understand air quality data as measured from space Historic monitoring of precipitation, soil moisture and other key water cycle parameters for the Puget Sound region

21. This is an animation showing latent heat flux for the Puget Sound region throughout 2006 and early 2007 All data used in generating these and other water cycle parameters were contributed to the wiki

22. Ideas and Applications for Using Environmental Data Members from the U.S. Global Earth Observation Community submitted an Indicators approach using remote sensing data EPA's Science Community partnered with DOT and an Estuary program and have a idea for "Integrated Monitoring for Sound Science" using Ferryboats as monitoring vessels.

25. Lessons Learned People want to contribute and don’t want technology to get in the way  Contributors want to see their thoughts in context  People want to see their contributions immediately  People want to comment on the contributions of others Learned about data access  We can do it quickly, there is a lot of data out there as services already  Identify sources that could have been integrated if they were available as services  Documents and data should all be accessible within the context of a particular place We can use the Internet to facilitate collaboration  Diversity of contribution  Bringing in lots of people