openwashdata

openwashdata: Empower WASH professionals to engage with tools and workflows for open data and code

• Project start: 2023-01-03
• Project duration: 18 months
• Project lead: Global Health Engineering
• Project partnership: KOF Swiss Economic Institute
• Supported by: Open Research Data Program of the ETH Board
• Funding: 150,000 CHF

Background

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Sector needs a paradigm shift for data practice.
Researchers, educators, consultants, practitioners, and other WASH professionals spend tremendous time to collect and produce valuable data. The ever-growing and diverse data, such as geodata, household data, and experimental data, largely remain unpublished, lost, and therefore wasted. The potential of re-using data for new insights, better monitoring, and more collaboration is largely impeded. Towards achieving SDG Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation, a more up-to-date open data practice is a must-done step. By integrating open science tools, we improve data cleaning, archiving and sharing to advance WASH to a more open, competent, and sustainable data ecosystem.

Vision

We initiate the openwashdata community to build an active global community that applies FAIR principles (external page Wilkinson et al. 2016) to data generated in the great water, sanitation, and hygiene sector. Instead of being another data platform, the goal of openwashdata is to connect people that care about data and code being open and reusable, which creates to build and connect a community for a thriving sustainable WASH data ecosystem.

Mission and Objectives

openwashdata aims to empower WASH professionals and enthusiasts to engage with tools and workflows for open data and code. To achieve this, an annual objective is set up as the following, by the end of March 2024,
 

1. Publish and release 20 open-sourced R data packages and increase the number of datasets that are donated for publication to 50.
2. Increase the number of contributors that have donated, cleaned, and published data independently with support of the development team to 5.
   
3. Engage unique website visitors to 10 visitors/day and expand the global coverage of visitors to 50% of countries.
   
4. Gain new subscribers to the monthly newsletter to 250 subscribers 
5. Teach a 14-week online academy to global participants to which at least 25 people register and 10 complete the program with a capstone project.

Methods

Strategy

• Build open-sourced, user-directed and analysis-ready R data packages 
• Develop exemplary data analysis with open, reproducible code scripts
• Foster an open science community (Matrix chatroom, Newsletter Subscription)
• Host educational events to improve data competency (Academy, Hackathon)

Tactics (Current state)

From March to September 2023, openwashdata established infrastructure and communication channels. We use GitHub as the codespace which is completely open-sourced and easy to access. Multiple strategies are defined to develop the community including a monthly newsletter, a multi-functional blog, and a workflow on datasets package development. Initial collaboration with data sharers and contributors.

From September onwards, openwashdata continues to design more events for mobilizing the community such as tutorial webinars and an online academy with a 14-week data science programme. The newsletter, blog and chatroom system will further initiate discussions on challenges and resolutions for open data in WASH. On the technical part, the datasets packages will be released regularly and updated with user-directed data cleaning.

External Links

Subscribe to openwashdata newsletter: external page https://buttondown.email/openwashdata
openwashdata website: external page https://openwashdata.org/
openwashdata GitHub organization: external page https://github.com/openwashdata
openwashdata Matrix chat: https://matrix.to/#/%23openwashdata-lobby:staffchat.ethz.ch