Purpose
The Data Sharing Working Group will focus on data sharing across federal agencies, and develop a set of well‐written and diverse use cases identified through Listening Sessions, Focus Groups, Environmental Scans, Systematic Web Searches, Document Reviews, and Literature Reviews. These annotated use cases will be available through a Use Case Resource Center.
- Document, and discuss the reasons for the agency‐to‐agency data sharing (i.e. Why do/should we share data?)
- Explore the legal, ethical, and policy challenges/constraints of data sharing between the federal agencies;
- Gather, evaluate, document, and share best or promising practices on legal approaches to facilitate data sharing across the agencies; and,
- Gather, evaluate, document, and share best or promising practices on technical approaches to facilitate data sharing across the agencies (i.e. How do we share the data?), including data linkage, privacy enhancing techniques, broad‐based sharing and tiered sharing practices, preserving semantics across boundaries, measurement challenges (e.g., standardization).
- The Data Sharing Working Group supports the goals of the CDO Council, by ensuring the CDO Council and Executive Committee understand the varied data sharing needs and challenges of all agencies across the Federal Government.
- The Data Sharing Working Group supports the implementation of the Evidence Act Phase 2: Open Data Access and Management, and the Federal Data Strategy Action 7.
- Provide leadership, learning, and partnership in implementing the data sharing provisions of the Federal Data Strategy Action Plan and the Foundations for Evidence‐Based Policymaking Act;
- Be a collaborative body to share, learn, and work together to address data sharing challenges faced by federal agencies.
- Use consensus‐based decision‐making within the Working Group, while actively communicating and, as necessary, documenting any dissent or range of views when providing recommendations to the CDO Council Executive Committee or Chair. The working group POC will be the designated voting member for their agency.
- Present to the CDO Council Executive Committee, strategies, solutions, and resources to address policies, procedures, methods and techniques in implementing the Foundations for Evidence‐Based Policymaking Act and Federal Data Strategy requirements regarding the efficient, effective, timely, and secure sharing of data.
Success Stories
Data Sharing Report
The Data Sharing Working Group examined data-sharing practices across federal agencies and developed a set of guidelines for improving the methods to access and share data inside of and across agencies. Their findings include four key procedural and logistical recommendations for federal agencies which can be found in the report.
Wildland Fire Management Pilot
In 2021, the CDOC conducted a pilot project to explore the use of knowledge graphs to achieve more consistent and reliable fuel management performance measures. The data was drawn from a variety of different agencies and their collaboration improved land manager insight and effectiveness while serving as a foundation for future collaboration in the wildland fire community.
