Globally, governments and civic organizations are making data about our communities – or “civic data” – available as open data. Goals of government transparency, accountability, civic participation, and research have motivated this opening of data, but meeting these goals has been constrained by data fluency barriers and lack of awareness of data. To support use and advance democratization of open civic data, the Civic Switchboard project works to build capacity in libraries to serve as local data intermediaries, connectors between communities and data about communities.
This presentation will introduce concepts underlying the Civic Switchboard project’s work - data intermediaries and local data ecosystems - and the guiding premise of our work: that cultivating a healthy local civic data ecosystem depends upon the coordinated efforts of a variety of data intermediaries and that libraries are well-positioned to serve in intermediary roles. The presentation will share examples of data intermediary roles that involve open civic data, strategies for developing local civic data partnerships, and the opportunity to approach open civic data work through a data justice lens.
This presentation will also highlight adjacent work focused on expanding adoption of and community around the open source technology CKAN, a software program that supports open civic data initiatives internationally.
Nora Mattern is a faculty member at the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. She has 9 years of experience working with civic data as a librarian and, now, as an instructor in Library and Information Sciences. She is PI of the Civic Switchboard project, an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project that builds capacity in libraries for civic data work, and Co-PI of a NSF-funded project focused on the sustainability of CKAN, an open source data data management system. She teaches a course in Open Government Data and Information for the Masters of Library and Information Science and designed a community-oriented course on Responsible Data Science for the University of Pittsburgh’s Masters of Data Science. She holds leadership roles in responsible data initiatives at the University, including as past chair of the Year of Data and Society at Pitt (2021-2022) and as a current steering committee member for Responsible Data Science@Pitt in the Office of the Provost.
