Air Quality Data Summit Breakout Session Instructions

Breakout Session Instructions Word doc
Rules of the road - Guidance for Session leaders

Draft Instruction Sheet for Breakout Sessions A1 – D1

First, the group should do quick introductions and identify their connections to business users. This gives a sense of the balance of the group. It’s OK that we have more tech “providers” than customers; we just want to know that.

Context: This discussion is about more effective utilization of the data currently collected. There are many known gaps in our monitoring or observational networks, where these are relevant they can be noted, but the focus of these discussion on improving utilization of existing data. Some of us believe there are significant data resources that could be used now, but which, for various reasons, are NOT being utilized.

Here are the questions, in order:

Who are example important business users and what do they want to DO with the data and why? If they were here, what three things would they tell us to focus on now?
What trends/needs do you see, or do your users tell you about for future business uses? Where is/could this go, even if all your users are not thinking about it/asking yet?
What are the broad data related needs and capabilities required to support these uses? What are the gaps and opportunities? What do these needs and capabilities require of US as a community of providers?
What are key non-IT requirements and challenges to delivering those needs/capabilities? What do WE need to do as individual resources and as a community?
1. Examples of what we mean by non-IT:
  1. Security: that agency policy around access is unclear, or there is no incentive to work through the process for approval to get access. Don’t want a discussion of gaps in joint authentication mechanisms
  2. Discovery: that we lack a common way to describe data resources and an incentive to register them. Don’t’ want a discussion of UDDI vs. FDGC.
What have we missed in this discussion? (its ok if this is just a list for parking lot lists)

Note: Report Out Templates are being developed for Breakout Sessions A1 – D1.

Draft Instruction Sheet for Breakout Sessions A2 – C2

We’ll refine this with the facilitators at the end of day 1.

1. Which Groups Should Talk About Which Issues?

A few issues have been identified in the pre-conference discussions. This list just identifies those and establishes which group should focus on them. This is NOT the agenda for those groups

A2: Data Access: Connections between primary or n-ary data or applications and and subsequent stages.

Issues include:
Data Discovery
Security
- Asset (e.g. server, and site) protection
- Information security
- Does Note include:
  - Direct user access to applications (that is in Visualization and Analysis)

B2: Data Processing and Integration: Everything between primary data storage and end-user visualization

Issues include:
- Maintaining data lineage/pedigree as it is distributed and integrated with other sources.
- Data update/refresh notification and process (this is probably just an example of a larger set of “integration operations”.
- Modeling capabilities and model results storage.

C2: (End User) Visualization/Analysis: Applications which serve end users with analysis, visualization, reporting, decision support or other end-user oriented functions.

Issues include:
- Decision support systems capabilities
- Does Note include:
  - Applications for pure data access or data processing/integration (those are in their respective areas).

2. Guiding Questions for A2-C2 Breakout Groups:

Breakout sessions and follow up group discussion have a common purpose:

to identify high level attributes and principles of a “system” that would achieve the goals identified on Day 1
build/assess support among attendees for continued specification and development of that "system"

Questions are:

What are broad information capabilities are needed to achieve the aspirations identified for this area on day 1?
What attributes, or over-arching principles should shape the system?
For each attribute or principle, give an example of this would be applied to an existing system;
How would this attribute or principle influence your organization’s view of, and participation in such a system?
What could we do in the near term to demonstrate/validate these attributes and principles?
What specific functions do we need from coordination/governance to make this work?

3. Report Out Template for A2-C2 Breakout Groups

TBD by Session Leads