May Collaboration Meeting Report: FEWS NET Collaboration Meeting on Information Flow and Coordination

The EW-Hub team collaboration focused on data sprint activities, including the completion of Sprint 21.04, which involved replacing the staple food price data set on the FEWS NET Data Center with direct downloads to FDW, reducing manual work required to ensure data is up-to-date. The team also completed a prototype integration with MagPi to load market price data directly into FDW, focused on Haiti, with potential applicability to other countries in the future. The Hub is currently working on Sprint 21.05, with a demo meeting open to all FEWS NET partners on Friday, May 28. The Country Case Study (CCS) suggested improvements are being integrated into the Sprint process, including an interactive web-based visualization prototype built in Superset, allowing the EW team to build their own interactive analyses and visualizations drawing from data in the FEWS NET Data Warehouse (FDW). The Hub made further progress on the new FEWS NET Brand Identity activity, leveraging the Communications Working Group (CWG) as a communications vehicle to coordinate across implementing partners. The Hub recorded a brand approach presentation and sent it to CWG representations on May 11 to support the design of new visual identity concepts. The Hub will host a rolling review process for the new Brand Identity, with a workshop for USAID on May 27 and subsequent presentations to other implementing partners. The Stakeholder Survey and Outreach Strategy were also discussed, with the Hub presenting research findings and initial recommendations to USAID on May 4, and soliciting feedback on a draft of the full Strategy in June. The Science-Hub team collaboration focused on integrating EW team feedback on improved flood monitoring and seasonal forecasting, and providing NASA Harvest partners with access to the FDW. The USAID Data Governance team presented on data management planning (DMP), highlighting the benefits of DMP for both the data and FEWS NET's work and business processes. The team proposed several next steps for FEWS NET, including creating a Working Group to discuss the DMP components and convening two workshops. The USAID FEWS NET Management team presented on FEWS NET's joint annual work planning priorities related to DMPs, including the development of a permissions structure governing access to FDW data. USAID recommended starting the data inventory immediately, with the Hub designing a process to collaborate with the DMP Working Group, and identified the goal of a complete inventory by July 2021 and all data assigned appropriate permissions along with new user agreements and data sharing guidance, by September 2021. The discussion on data inventory scale for a project of FEWS NET's size and diversity highlighted the importance of considering the project's baseline organizational system, with FEWS NET having the FDW with broad data domains compiled from over 2,000 sources. The USAID Data Governance team emphasized the need for a uniform definition of DMP requirements and support for USAID-funded projects in instituting DMPs, with DMPs generally including six components: data inventory, privacy and security, data collection and management during award, documentation, data preservation and access, and data dissemination and terms of use.