Hello! We’re using this thread to discuss planning for NDoCH in California and how we can focus on the California Water Data Challenge as a backbone for activities, or as an element of your NDoCH. We will be coordinating with GovOps and documenting OpenOakland’s plans here to be shared with all brigades so that they may be easily adopted by captains/leads
1 Like
IDEA from John Kobara COO of California Community Foundation and super cool guy that is behind LACounts.org. Why not tie in water quality data to rank water districts similar to how Great Schools ranks school districts? Goal would be to create an index and ideally tie that into Zillow and other home sites 
The datasets involved are a bit tricky to navigate though lots of potential. My sense is this is the most relevant: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinkingwater/EDTlibrary.html
See here for the full list of recommended datasets from the state: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NhC1WyYVj2K4N-JpoYQk_7W0ZAbDInjmiYirHUkBaOE/edit#gid=0
1 Like
Question for other brigades: Is NDoCH an event targeted towards the usual suspects, aka brigade members, or do you invite the greater community to NDoCH?
Asking because, while I like the Water Challenge theme, I’m thinking it would be a good idea for OpenOakland’s NDoCH to be something along the lines of a design-a-thon, some sort of event that takes in community input.
1 Like
Yotam and I from Open Oakland attended the Water Challenge kickoff in SF and started working with a volunteer from https://www.communitywatercenter.org/ to help them get cleaner data to analyze what is going on in specific water basins. We have done some processing on data from Human Right to Water(This is more recent than the dataset linked in the Water Challenge spreadsheet). They want to focus on a specific large water source that feeds many wells several of which are out of compliance and see if the contaminants and exceedance levels on the violating wells sharing the same water basin source are similar. Then they will use this data to get state funding for cleanup.
We are also toying with displaying exceedance levels as 3D elements on a map because the value measurements exceed the acceptable levels varies widely and maybe displaying historic violations because the set of current unique violations ~300 in CA according to Human Right to Water’s July data is much smaller than the full dataset which has over 5K violation records with older measurement dates.
1 Like
Agreed, and the Water Challenge should be more than just crunching the data, so we are planning to deal with more of the awareness aspect of the challenge as well
1 Like
@aaronhans Does the code for this project live somewhere publicly available? Curious to learn more
@ramymik how many folks are you anticipating on Saturday out of curiosity?
And @jjia25 great idea!
29 people RSVP’d but we might get walk-ins. Demand is always impossible to predict: https://www.meetup.com/OpenOakland/events/252957402/
Congrats to Open Oakland and Code4Sac for winning awards at this years challenge!
1 Like