September 18 is World Water Monitoring Day, which provides an opportunity to reflect on the importance of monitoring and protecting water resources. In recognition, we have selected New Mexico Water Data as September’s Ecosystem Catalog Site of the Month!
New Mexico Water Data was created in response to New Mexico’s 2019 Water Data Act, which required state agencies to identify, share, and integrate water data to support water management and planning. Their open data portal brings together water data held across state agencies and other organizations to support research, planning, and public access.
Research, planning, and public access are of course three generally distinct ends, with generally distinct audiences. Sharing policy-relevant data with the broader public in a manner that is meaningfully accessible often requires some dedicated translation work that is often characterized as the work of a “data intermediary.”
The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership’s Guide to Starting a Local Data Intermediary describes this role broadly as mediating between data and the people and institutions that use them - work that can include assembling and transforming data from different sources, making information accessible and useful, and helping people understand and apply it.
One thing I personally really appreciate about the New Mexico Water Data site is how explicitly it takes on this translation role. They offer the image of a braided stream to illustrate how water data move through a complex information landscape: different data providers are represented as tributaries, their individual systems and methods for sharing data as channels, and their integration as a common confluence. The visual metaphor makes a fairly complicated data infrastructure problem remarkably easy to grasp and, appropriately for World Water Monitoring Day, helps connect the work of collecting and monitoring water data to the infrastructure that is needed to make those observations useful.
Those of us who have played data intermediary roles know that what NMWD has done here makes a quite difficult challenge look easier than it often is. I’d love to ask, then, particularly for those managing data drawn from multiple sources, what methods have you found successful in communicating what happens between collecting data and making them genuinely useful and accessible to the broader public?