Strategic partnership with SOIL

Data stewardship at a non-profit organisation in Haiti

openwashdata and SOIL have formed a strategic partnership to collaborate on data stewardship. Together, we will assess existing data management practices, formulate a preliminary data management strategy, and pinpoint datasets ready for open publication.

partnership
open data
data stewardship
Author
Affiliation

Lars Schöbitz

Global Health Engineering, ETH Zurich

Published

April 2, 2024

SOIL

SOIL is a non-profit research and development organization working in Haiti to design, test, and implement sustainable and equitable solutions to the sanitation crisis. Their mission is to ensure safe, dignified, and sustainable sanitation in urban Haiti, creating a model for urban sanitation which is replicable in Haiti and globally.

Data stewardship

Data stewardship is managing and overseeing an organization’s data assets to help provide management, business users, funders, and the public with high-quality data communication products (e.g., Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboards). While many organizations have established sufficient data collection and storage infrastructure, they often need more resources to analyze data and communicate information effectively beyond the organization.

Data stewardship for openwashdata

Our approach within openwashdata is on developing data management practices that follow FAIR data sharing principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016). We recently submitted a proposal for phase 2 of the openwashdata community to the Open Research Data Program of the ETH Board1. Building on our success in training 100 WASH professionals in data science2,we will develop a 12-module “data stewardship for openwashdata” training programme. This training will be offered to a data stewardship network comprised of graduates from our data science course, official partners funded by the phase 2 proposal, and organizations like SOIL, with whom we have a long-standing trustful relationship; SOIL is one of the few organizations in the WASH sector that is actively sharing their data openly. Together, we will assess existing data management practices, formulate a preliminary data management strategy, and pinpoint datasets ready for open publication.

Are you interested, too?

If you or your organization works in WASH and would like to join the data stewardship network, email us. We look forward to hearing from you!

References

Wilkinson, Mark D., Michel Dumontier, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Gabrielle Appleton, Myles Axton, Arie Baak, Niklas Blomberg, et al. 2016. “The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship.” Scientific Data 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.

Footnotes

  1. Submitted proposal: https://github.com/openwashdata-dev/prop-eth-ord-explore-02-openwashdata/blob/master/proposal.md↩︎

  2. course website https://ds4owd-001.github.io/website/↩︎