Greenversations

About the author: Molly O’Neill is EPA’s Assistant Administrator for the Office of Environmental Information and Chief Information Officer

Recently, I attended a government leadership summit that focused on collaboration. It was represented by state, local and federal leaders. I was there not just to speak but also to learn. I am always looking for ideas outside of EPA that we might take advantage of in our business. Sometimes, you see something special and it opens your eyes to future benefits.

At an evening session, I saw a demonstration of something called “Virtual Alabama”. I had been hearing the buzz around this for several weeks and it didn’t disappoint. Now, from a technology perspective this wasn’t a big deal to me. It is simply a well orchestrated Google Earth implementation from a statewide perspective. The impressive part was the incredible collaboration that occurred to bring almost all the government related information together visually. And it was at the state and local levels! In one application, the user could view environmental information, crime information, land use information, etc. all at once.

Alabama has effectively engaged a small team of people whose job it is to harvest this data and make it available to decision-makers. They are constantly consuming more data and adding new functionality. For example, universities and colleges are now sketching on the maps to show what the insides of their buildings look like. Another cool example involves historical aerial photography. After a recent tornado, officials could look at pictures of towns before and after the tornado to respond to emergencies and also to help insurance companies estimate damage. I also saw how they incorporated a tool EPA uses called “Aloha” into their application to look at toxicity dispersion modeling with just a few lines of code!

At EPA, I talk about how owning data is passé, but using it is not. There are data sources outside of EPA that are very important to our Mission and we need to access them. That’s why building partnerships to share information is so important. If one agency collects the data, technology today allows it to be shared pretty easily. Federal government needs to shift the paradigm from data owners to data collaborators and to embrace technology as the enabler.

Virtual Alabama started as a Homeland Security project that has been adopted by the entire state. I believe its success lies on the fact that there is an organization in place well adapted to constantly harvest data – a data fusion center. This is my take away from another insightful leadership summit in seeing Virtual Alabama as a best practice… something we at EPA can certainly learn from.

Since March, EPA has been reaching out to the public and specific stakeholder groups during our National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information, and the comment session is now over. I would like to thank those who contributed their ideas during this time. I learned about great examples of information sharing, including Virtual Alabama. Check out the National Dialogue website for summaries of the stakeholder sessions and more on the upcoming strategy document that compiles what we’ve learned.

About the author: Cory Wagner joined EPA’s Office of Environmental Information in 2005. He is currently the project manager for the development of the Toxics Release Inventory-Made Easy (TRI-ME) and TRI-MEweb reporting assistance software.

Individual rights have certainly been in the news lately. From the Olympic Torch being doused in France in protest of suspected human rights abuses in China, to the Supreme Court reviewing the DC gun ban in light of the Second Amendment, to the continuing struggle to balance an individual’s right to privacy against the safety of the general public in a post-911 world, one can hardly read a newspaper these days without seeing an article about rights. This makes sense as we are a nation built on rights. The rights of the individual are crucial to our way of life and the backbone of democracy.

About the author: Molly O’Neill is EPA’s Assistant Administrator for the Office of Environmental Information and Chief Information Officer.

I just made that up… is it catchy? My friends and family are always catching me making up new words. Last week, my blog entry described the National Dialogue for Access to Environmental Information and I have been busy listening to several groups of stakeholders. We had a media related focus group who described both their frustrations working with EPA on tight deadlines, as well as what types of information they look for on a frequent basis. To this group, one of the most important access vehicles is finding the right expert at EPA quickly. We need to work on this and this group gave suggestions on how we might address this issue. Thanks!

I also attended the Exchange Network National Meeting and invited these participants to not only join in the Dialogue, but also to listen and learn with us. The National Environmental Information Exchange Network (Exchange Network) is a partnership between states, tribes, and EPA that exchanges environmental data securely over the Internet using web services. I like to think of it as an environmental information superhighway where these partners can exchange data more easily and more often because they are not bound by format. Not surprisingly, this partnership came together because of information access and sharing challenges. Building this Exchange Network is important because it is putting information in the hands of federal, state, and tribal regulators more quickly than ever. While the Exchange Network is still growing and maturing, this community is finding great uses of available data.

One of my favorite examples of this is where the Washington Department of Ecology is exchanging their data with not only other state environmental agencies, but also with the Washington Department of Health. Health scientists and officials can more easily determine if metals found in fish tissue samples might relate to health issues reported in specific areas of the state.

I look forward to hearing more thoughts on the future applications of the Exchange Network to improve access to broader audiences. For those reading this blog, I invite you to submit your comments on how we might enhance access to environmental information on our National Dialogue web site.

About the author: Molly O’Neill is EPA’s Assistant Administrator for the Office of Environmental Information and Chief Information Officer.

As the Agency’s CIO, people ask me questions all the time. And some of the time they are questions that any good steward of the environment should know the answer to. Or at least, know how to find the answer.

Recently a friend of mine asks, “Molly, I wanted to support Earth Day, so I got some of those energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs. What happens if it breaks? It’s got mercury in there!”

Off hand I didn’t know the answer, but figured a quick search on epa.gov would get me the answer. After I popped in the search field “flourescent light bulb” my results started with the question, “Did you mean: fluorescent light bulb?” Why yes, I did… thanks for catching that typo! I clicked on the link epa.gov/mercury/spills and pretty quickly found the info my friend was looking for.

The good news is there’s a lot of information out there. Navigating through that information is the challenge. Thanks to some new search capabilities on epa.gov, finding information has become easier. But we can do more.

And what if the “how do I” question isn’t so straightforward? I had a recent inquiry from a Shenandoah Valley community group leader asking how to find comprehensive environmental information to better assess their ecosystem. That question is a bit tougher and you’re not going to find the answer with a simple search engine inquiry.

I pointed my colleague to EPA’s Window to My Environment, Envirofacts, and the Toxic Release Inventory web sites; all great tools to help them get started with assessing the Shenandoah Valley. Also, I mentioned that states are important partners in our mission to protect human health and the environment.

Providing the resources to answer these complex questions is something I’m striving to do better with the Office of Environmental Information. For several weeks now, we have led a campaign called the National Dialogue for Access to Environmental Information to hear from stakeholders and our own employees about ways we can improve. Through this effort - and I’m inviting all readers of this blog to participate - we will be addressing ways to make information more readily available.

Also, come chat with me this afternoon from 2-3, where I’ll be taking your questions live in Ask EPA, our online forum where you can talk to senior officials.

I look forward to hearing your ideas!