The SWADE team conducted several meetings for outreach to agencies to determine needs and interest. As a result, we planned and participated in a series of engagement workshops with project stakeholders. The purpose of the workshops is to solicit feedback on platform development and to develop connections with water agencies and other parties that are the targeted platform users. On August 3, 2021, the UCI SWADE Team held an initial virtual online workshop to solicit feedback on the creation of the SWADE water data sharing and analysis platform. The workshop consisted of three hours of presentations (including by the CA Data Consortium and CA Data Collaborative), question and answer sessions, and small break-out group sessions to better understand the needs and concerns of water agencies that will comprise the user base of the platform. The workshop was attended by representatives of the following agencies and organizations:
| Inland Empire Utilities Agency | Eastern Municipal Water District | Coachella Valley Water District |
| Orange County Public Works | Orange County Water District | Moulton Niguel Water District |
| Orange County Sanitation District | Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority | Metropolitan Water District |
| California Data Consortium | California Data Collaborative | Los Angeles County Sanitation District |
| City of Lakewood | Los Angeles Department of Water and Power |
Key Findings from stakeholder interactions: The workshop provided information to the SWADE team on the following topics:
- Platform tools that would be useful to water agencies
- Concerns and/or apprehensions with using a data sharing platform
- How our team could address these concerns
- Current data sharing activities of participating agencies
- Organizational as well as technical obstacles to data sharing
- Possible benefits/uses for water agency data sharing to agencies and the public.
Respondents indicated a need for an intuitive dashboard that is easy to upload and access data, with version control, and for which metadata and usage is well-documented. They also indicated a need for tools to help in decision making (e.g., water quality, management of pollution, assessing value of investments) and that the platform must be easy to operate for a non-data scientist. Agencies worry that data can be misused or misinterpreted by outsiders. QA/QC is also a concern as data must be checked and approved by employees before being shared, impacting real-time platform functionality. Privacy and security issues are a concern for some agencies. Others indicate that it is less a concern where data is aggregated to protect individual’s privacy. There is hesitation to share data when it may reflect poorly on an agency’s performance, although regular operational data sharing among agencies during emergencies is useful. The water industry is historically risk averse. Using new technologies such as water data sharing platforms is resisted even though access to other agencies’ data could allow learning from others’ experiences and tactics. Understanding the challenges facing other agencies is useful to spur collaboration. Agencies share compliance data, water supply, production, quality data with research organizations, partner agencies or other agencies. Because there are already many data sharing efforts via ESRI’s GIS-based platform, CEDEN (CA environmental data exchange network), dashboards, AWS CLI, uploads or emails, uploading to an FTP server, one drive, private cloud, thumb drives, NDAs or excel) respondents want to know how we can deepen our collaboration with these. Size of organization often dictates data usage and needs – this should be considered when designing a platform. Data sharing opportunities exist where jurisdictions overlap and when joint decisions must be made between agencies managing different components of a regional system.
The full SWADE Workshop Report can be downloaded below: