Mark Haggerty of Headwaters mentioned the need for the FS to produce information.. which reminded me of an earlier concept of “the People’s Database” in which an Admin could bring people together to prioritize information to be publicly available and develop formats, etc. So that IT and other folks wouldn’t have to guess. Could be a FACA committee (although establishing those is painful and long). As far as I can tell, transparency is an idea generally favored by both kinds of Admins, and yet our simple world with our few relatively simple requests seems to be overlooked.
Anyway, I’m reposting The People’s Database post below. For the previous comments, you can go here. Also there’s a category for People’s Database which has several posts from 2012 on.
When I think about this now, I think perhaps we don’t need the Chief to get a FACA committee, some organization (Headwaters?) could organize a group to develop recommendations for what data should be public and in what format, similar to how AF&PA organized the Blue Ribbon Panels for FIA.
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Needed: Coalition for Public Access to Information on National Forests (AKA The People’s Database)
(originally posted
Recently, SAF signed on to an effort to get funding for FIA- forest inventory and analysis- which collects information about forests across the US. A couple of times I served on two “Blue Ribbon Panel” of users of the information who (excerpted from this):
The American Forest and Paper Association has organized two Blue Ribbon Panels (1991 and 1997) to review the national FIA program and provide recommendations to the Forest Service on needed changes to the content and capabilities of the program. The most recent panel recommended that the Forest Service should 1) elevate the priority of FIA in the Forest Service program, 2) convert the FIA program from a periodic inventory to an annual inventory, 3) fulfill the congressional mandate of reporting on all lands regardless of ownership, 4) concentrate on the core ecological and timber data, and 5) develop a strategic plan to implement the full FIA program.
FIA also has regular meetings with user groups to help guide their activities and generate support.
It seems to me that we are missing a group (Coalition) that can reach across different interest groups and ask for information that we might agree that we all need about National Forests. We don’t have an AF&PA to speak for us and get things started, so perhaps we have to organize ourselves.
We could ask the Chief to convene a panel of citizens representing different groups to ask 1) what information is important to be collected in a standard format across forests and regions? and 2) how best do we make that accessible to the public? For example, PALS has searches that internal folks can do but not external.. should it remain that way?
Stakeholders outside of the FS could lobby strongly for this information the same way that they lobby for FIA.
Some topics we’ve mentioned here are budgets and outputs, costs of environmental document developments, number of acres treated, etc., as in the “vegetation management” thread here and here. it seems to me that we could take advantage of having an Administration who promotes transparency to set such a framework of an advisory committee.
At first, I was thinking volunteers could find and enter the data, but then I thought “if the public wants this information, why doesn’t the agency just provide it?”. I’m sure that the agency could save some bucks by stopping collecting information on a variety of things that someone used to be interested in, and focus on things the public is currently interested in. The public could actually help the Forest Service prioritize information across silos, something that is problematic internally.
But we can’t ask poor Region 1 to do more work on their own.. when these are national forests, and data should be captured and made available consistently across regions. Besides, they appear to already be doing more work than some other regions, based on the GAO reports and Derek’s observations.
What do you think?