Case Summary
EPA Chief Information Officer Molly O'Neill launched the National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information in November 2007. The Dialogue is an initiative to solicit ideas from agency employees, stakeholders, and citizens that will improve access to EPA's environmental information as well as enhance its utility. Jam Sessions and a Partnership Blog have both been deployed to spark discussion, and the EPA plans to draft a Strategic Plan built upon the results of these efforts by the end of Summer 2008.
Business Challenge
In November 2007 Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) Chief Information Officer (CIO) Molly O'Neill launched a new initiative entitled the National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information.1 The goal of the National Dialogue is to solicit ideas that will improve access to environmental information and make EPA data more useful to stakeholders and citizens. O'Neill's effort is powered by the belief that environmental information is a strategic resource critical for accomplishing EPA's mission of protecting human health and the environment. If the agency is to continue issuing sound policy decisions, it is vital that the public, academic researchers and students, non-governmental organizations, media outlets and the regulated community all have easy access to high quality environmental information. O'Neill believes that understanding what people want from their government and how they want to access it, should serve as the foundation for her agency's development of a strategy to improve the environmental information apparatus.2
Approach Taken
While the National Dialogue includes offline events such as listening sessions held with Federal, State, and Local Environment and Public Health Agencies (March 20th,) News Media (April 23rd,) and Educators, Researchers, Librarians and Students (May 8th,) a core component of the initiative is two online Jam Sessions and related Partner Blog.
The first Jam was an online forum held for EPA Office of Environmental Information (OEI) employees from April 2nd to 4th, while the second Jam incorporated a larger community of EPA employees and was held from May 6th to 8th. Qualitative analysis of these sessions indicated several critical discussion topics attracting the most user comments, such as how to make EPA information more user-friendly and strategies to deliver environmental data to non-tech savvy citizens.3 These findings would later be utilized to build topic areas for the subsequent large-scale discussion open to the public.
This large-scale effort was conducted on the Partner Blog site and was open to public comment from June 9th to 13th.4 Users were instructed to submit their contributions into one of the following topic categories:
1. Understanding Information-Putting environmental information into context for our customers.
2. Finding Information-Making environmental information easier to find or access
3. What Works-What is working for your organization?
4. Building to Share-How do we leverage our collective strengths and capabilities?
5. Going Beyond the Web-Reaching people who don't have Internet access.
The information gathered through the Partner Blog will be synthesized with input collected from the Jam Sessions and Listening Sessions and ultimately leveraged to develop a multi-year strategic plan for improving access to environmental information.5
Results Achieved
Jam 1 collected over 300 comments from EPA OEI employees.6 Analysis of the event has led to the following conclusions:
1. The public wants information in a context that fits their needs.
2. EPA's customer have difficulty accessing our information
3. There is a lack of coordination and knowledge transfer between EPA offices.
While Jam 2 was open to a larger community, the usage was actually lower than the first effort, with approximately 100 comments collected.7 The OEI's summary of this discussion found users focused around five topics:
1. Finding Information: How can we make EPA's information easier to find or access?
2. EPA Internal Coordination: How can we work together and share our knowledge?
3. Understanding Information: How can we put EPA's information into context for our customers?
4. Leveraging Technology: How can we make the most of technology?
5. Going Beyond the Web: How can we reach people who don't have Internet access?
As mentioned above, the results from Jam 2 were harnessed to build the comment categories for the Partnership Blog.
Of course, since this large-scale public discussion recently concluded on June 13th, 2008, it is not yet possible to assess the results of the Partnership Blog or the National Dialogue as a whole.
Lessons Learned
On June 20th, 2008 the EPA's OEI will issue key findings from the Partnership Blog experiment. The agency will then compile these results along with conclusions from the Jam Sessions and Listening Sessions to develop a strategic plan for improving access to environmental information. A preliminary draft of the plan along with preliminary lessons learned from the National Dialogue will be available at the end of the summer.8
References
1. EPA, National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information Fact Sheet
2. EPA Partner Blog: Main Page
3. National Dialogue-Jam Summaries
4. Wade-Hahn Chan, 'EPA uses blog to seek ideas on info sharing,' FCW.com, June 10th, 2008.
5. EPA Partner Blog: Main Page
6. National Dialogue-Jam Summaries
7. National Dialogue-Jam Summaries
8. EPA, National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information Fact Sheet
