The Northbay Initiative
for an Environmental Information Commons

The Northbay Initiative 's Mission

The North Bay Initiative for an Environmental Information Commons is a regional multi-organizational partnership for sharing and expanding the use of environmental information of all types. This partnership works toward making environmental data openly accessible in order to facilitate informed community decision-making, environmental management, and education in the Northern San Francisco Bay region of California and beyond.

Goals

  • Develop a social framework for sharing information based on a collaborative approach to development and ownership of information resources and the technological advances used to manage them

  • Develop a technological framework for sharing information- this framework is based on a distributed architecture that enables information resources to be created, managed, and shared by the originator of the information, and

  • Train and support organizations and data owners to open their data for sharing

  • Foster the growth of the Information Commons, the identification of information gaps, and a collaborative process by which these gaps may be filled

Objectives

YEAR 1

  • Demonstrate the digital libary network focusing first on metadata describing org and project
  • Publish specifications for posting and harvesting libraries