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Making USGS information effective in the electronic age, USGS Open-File Report 03-240

Workshop Overview

The workshop took place during 3 days and was divided into three segments: the challenge of vision, the challenge of skill, and the challenge of strategy. The first two parts were presentation by leaders in their respective fields with audience questions and discussion; the final section was intended to be brainstorming and discussion, but this component was shortened during the meeting in order to accommodate three presentations showcasing information handling systems. Short summaries follow:

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Part 1: The Challenge of Vision

In this section two philosophers examined why the nation needs Earth scientists in the federal government by raising awareness on four basic issues: the relationship between citizens and government (J. Porter); the role of public scientists (J. Porter); a philosophical history of USGS (R. Frodeman); and the role of USGS scientific information (R. Frodeman).

Jene Porter (Appendix 2) developed both a political and historical context for understanding the role of science in public policy issues. He pointed out the general dearth of material exploring and defining the history of public science, the philosophy of public service, and the role of public science in western governments. This is in contrast to the abundant literature on the history of specific disciplines of science. In examining the last century, he noted an important shift in how western governments get legitimacy. Whereas much of the first two centuries of American government were based on legitimacy from consensus and education, he noted that the last half of the 20th century has posed complicated public policy issues that now require scientific input (e.g., atomic energy, environmental issues, health issues, and population explosion). The challenges posed by requiring scientific knowledge in addition to consensus to carry out public policy are formidable. A central tenet of his message is not whether science will play a role in government in the 21st century, but which scientists will play a role, and how they will be empowered by the government. Because public discourse is essential to developing public policy, scientists who engage in public discourse must embrace a set of strategies and rules that are very different from their traditional "peer-review" discourse. He challenged the participating USGS scientists to find opportunities to encourage public discourse in order to build credibility and trust in government science.

Bob Frodeman (Appendix 3) built on Porter's foundation but took a closer philosophical look at both Earth Science and USGS. His examination of the place of Earth sciences in western culture explored the dilemma of mixing science (looking for truth) with politics (looking for priorities). Some of the questions he posed were:

·What are the peculiar roles and responsibilities of a public science agency,?

· How do the roles and responsibilities differ from other scientific institutions and from public agencies?

· To what degree should a public science agency be focused on creating new science versus creating a context for understanding the science we already have?

· What types of skills are needed for creating "contexts for understanding?"

· What is the relevance of Earth science studies to Congress?

· What is unique about public science?

· What is the relationship between knowledge and democracy?

Some of the answers to these questions are complicated and controversial. Frodeman suggested there are two reasons why public science agencies are necessary: (1) some knowledge is too valuable to be in private hands (this becomes more important in a knowledge-driven, high-technology society); and (2) some knowledge will be marginalized or neglected if put in the market domain (which would probably be the case for some of the spatial/temporal scales of Earth science information). In support of this are three claims: that public science needs to be (more) responsive to socio-political-cultural issues, that the USGS (or some agency like it) must become a central organ of government, playing a vital role in societal decisions, and that cultural transformation (to embrace public science) can be accomplished through "wide interdisciplinarity" i.e., bringing the physical sciences into closer connection with the social sciences and humanities while also engaging stakeholders and community groups. He concluded by pointing out how the USGS is well suited to tackle some of the pressing public policy issues of the future, such as access to physical resources, environmental demands from burgeoning population, and the role of technology in solving these issues.

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Part 2: The Challenge of Skill

Two communications experts from USGS headquarters, Mike McDermott and Gail Wendt, led this second part of the workshop (Appendix 4), investigating audience analysis and communication tactics.

As part of a transition into this section, Cathy Norton, Chief Librarian of the WHOI/MBL library, facilitated a discussion about "To whom do we communicate, and for what purpose?" The ideas developed in this short brainstorming were:

· To understand limits and scarcity (e.g., metaphor of a life boat)

· To show USGS is a trusted and disinterested source of information

· To advance science and knowledge

· To increase comprehension of complicated issues

· To inform the decision making process (awareness, understanding, action)

· To provide information for responsible resource management

· To advocate for the planet (and the unique relationship between people and Earth)

· To recognize issues that are important for the future

· To plan for future generations

The audience analysis segment, presented by Mike McDermott, took an in-depth look at defining products, identifying audiences, and exploring the relationships between USGS and potential audiences (e.g., public, stakeholder, customer, cooperator, and partner). Part of understanding one's audience is to understand a market (i.e., a group of people, organizations, or both willing to change behavior based on either exchange of value or ability to do so). By thinking of the various audiences in segments or in layers, one can therefore begin to target them more specifically. Discussion points touched upon how one might do this to engender public discourse, i.e., two-way communication, and who the target audience of the CMGP knowledge bank might be. Because of limited time, the matrix analysis of the audience was curtailed, although the use of the matrix as a tool to explore an audience was described.

Using the tools and terminology developed in the audience analysis section, Gail Wendt followed with a communication analysis, and described the building blocks of effective communication. By effective communication, she meant getting the right message to the right audience at the right time. The basic building blocks of effective communication consist of six steps: articulating the objective to achieve, finding the right audience, delivering the right message, using the right format, distributing the message to have the broadest impact, and finally evaluating the success of the effort. Handouts of summaries of the Bureau strategies and messages were distributed at the workshop (Appendix 4).

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Part 3: The Challenge of Strategy

The final day of the workshop was intended to brainstorm issues related to the knowledge bank that would point the participants toward a unified vision and mission. Instead, four speakers started the day by showcasing potential applications of Web-based developments to aid in communications (M. Journeay, F. Marincioni, and T. Faust) and updating the workshop participants on the status of the regional synthesis workshop held in Reston in December, 2000 (S, Eittreim).

Murray Journeay (Geological Survey of Canada) described the CordLink project, a prototype digital library for the Canadian Cordillera, focused on the Georgia Basin of British Columbia. His presentation covered many issues that resonated with the CMGP audience (making geoscience knowledge more useful to geologists and more relevant to other parts of society, about governance and civic dialog, the Canadian Geoscience Knowledge Network, and the development of the CORDlink geolibrary project) (http://cordlink.gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/, Appendix 5)

This was followed with a presentation from Fausto Marincioni (USGS Woods Hole), on the prototype Marine Realms Information Bank (MRIB, a distributed geolibrary that provides organized access to information about CMGP oceanic and coastal environments. The MRIB project is part of a cooperative project with WHOI and utilizes a centralized metadata management scheme to organize and access widely distributed Web pages. The output of the classification and search can be either map view or a table of relevant information resources (http://mrib.usgs.gov, Appendix 6).

In the third presentation, Trent Faust (USGS St Petersburg) gave a short demonstration of the proposed redesign of the CMG Program home page, highlighting new elements, new links, and design considerations. (http://marine.usgs.gov, Appendix 7).

In the final presentation, Steve Eittreim (USGS, Menlo Park) updated the group on the Regional Synthesis project, based on the December, 2000, workshop. He discussed the consensus view of increasing the number of regions from 8 (recommended in the NRC review report) to 13. In doing regional assessments, a matrix of regions versus topics forms the blueprint for building data and interpretive layers in the GIS. The Regional Synthesis steering committee is looking to the knowledge bank project as a repository for the GIS layers and for developing data and map standards for the GIS.

The remainder of the third day was devoted to discussions and brainstorming led by Rex Sanders (USGS Menlo Park), on the strategic directions for the CMG "Knowledge Bank" project. With an eye toward developing a sense of priorities and vision, each participant had the opportunity to submit the single most important item that he/she felt the knowledge bank could achieve. These ideas are summarized in Table 1. Because many of the ideas describe characteristics of the knowledge bank, rather than outcomes or achievements, a second list of characteristics is included in this appendix.

Table 1: Brainstorming - Single Most Important Achievement for the National Knowledge Bank

Trusted information resource
Incremental modularity
Whole-program focus
On-going, living, never finished
Narratives plus story telling
Framework for interaction
A context of understanding
Shared information for public good
Multimedia
Serve all agencies and academia
Robust structure and ontology
Integrative in nature
Interesting, alluring, useful, relevant content
Connectivity and interoperability
What we know and what we don't know

The final discussions of the day brainstormed on the possible components of the Knowledge Bank. The ideas flowed vigorously, and resulted in nearly 100 subjects suggested for consideration before the discussion was shortened in order to end the meeting (Appendix 9). Subsequent ranking of these ideas forms the basis for both short-term and long-term actions that might be taken to build the National Knowledge Bank. Some of the actions that ranked high are designating a CMGP contact for every big issue or region, doing more metadata, building predictive models, identifying best practices for interacting with the public and with partners, developing feedback surveys for our work, utilizing external advisory groups for guidance, participating in public lecture series, and developing a seminar series to discuss the social context of CMGP science.


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Title Page / Summary / Introduction / Goals / Overview /  Outcome

Appendices:  I. Agenda /  II. Vision / III. Earth Science / IV. Communication / V. CORDlink
                       VI. MRIB /  VII. CMGP Homepage / VII. Brainstorming / IX. Participants

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