Part I of our session featured leaders from Federal agencies, academic institutions, and industry to discuss lessons and challenges in formulating and facilitating PPPs that address pressing environment-security problems. Our panel members have served vital roles in MEDEA, the State Failure Task Force program, and current partnerships supported by programs such as the Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR). Past experience in addressing key tensions and issues such as secrecy vs. openness and use of proprietary vs. open technologies may help increase the success of current and future PPPs in this arena.
In Part II of our session we will introduce content and concepts of the Data ANalytics and Tools for Ecosecurity (DANTE) project, and conduct concurrent hands-on breakout sessions featuring hands-on experience with open-source tools for environment-security research. DANTE is a recent public-private-academic partnership between the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), CIESIN/Columbia University, ISciences, LLC, and CASE International. DANTE is working to develop a community platform with a suite of open-source tools and content that reduce common barriers to entry for interdisciplinary research in human geography, social and political science, and global environmental change. DANTE is implementing several open-source and open-community components: 1) a suite of R programming tools that ameliorate frustrating and redundant data processing and visualizing tasks; 2) accompanying vignettes and tutorials that walk users through common data processing and modeling tasks; 3) examples of reproducible, distributable, and open-access research through R packages; and 4) a catalog of supported datasets spanning human geography, political conflict, and global environmental change. In this workshop we will demonstrate initial versions of these components and how they can be applied to support open-access, reproducible environment-security analyses.
Concurrent Breakout Workshops:
- R package development for open, reproducible, and distributable research with FAIR Data practices. Joshua Brinks, Research Scientist, ISciences, LLC.
- Fast and accurate zonal statistics and raster processing with exactextract and exactextractr. Daniel Baston, Software Engineer, ISciences, LLC.
- Tools for evidence-based decision making and logistic planning at USACE. Elissa Yeates, US Army Corps of Engineers, ERDC.
- Open source tools for generating WSIM and the WSIM-GLDAS 2.0 hydrologic stress dataset. Cynthia Crowley, Research Scientist, ISciences, LLC.
- Employing Python and R for explorations of gridded demographic data using web services. Kytt McManus, Senior Systems Analyst , Center for International Earth Science Information Network, The Earth Institute.
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Takeaways
- Open source world has really helped public private partnerships and navigate the intelligence community by trying to keep products and deliverables open and available across stakeholder groups. Staying open aids public policy and builds trust and transparency.
- Defining the Environment-Security sector is often the first challenge. It’s a broad multidisciplinary field spanning the intelligence, political science, human geography, and environmental science communities.
- Intelligence community is a complex entity that can be structurally confusing. Despite these challenges and often protected information, the intelligence community likes open data, and likes data standardization; it makes their job easier.