Cal Open Data Portal demonstrates that it is able to bring together different datasets from various government agencies. It also allows for open data to be linked across different existing datasets.
Cal Open Data Portal draws data from state agencies. Census tracts can be searched for, for example, searching for Census Tract Disadvantaged Communities 2018, opens a synopsis and map showing each tract and its attributes. However, some of these data sets are linked to GIS programs, meaning they could be layers that are created to add to a map, making it difficult for non-GIS users to navigate and understand. In an attempt to provide assistance with this measure, the website provides a guidebook and a public open data training video for a user to learn how to find data and produce data visualizations.
California Open Data Portal is designed to host open data from more than one state agency and aims to link all existing state portals in order for California's open data sets to be easily searched for from https://data.ca.gov. Open data or public data is collected through the state's routine business activities and is published in a way that is simple to search for, download, and combine with other data. Open data does not include private or confidential information on individuals.
Government Operations Agency aims to create a statewide open data portal intended to improve collaboration, expand transparency and lead to increased effectiveness. Despite the already existing open data portals hosted by several state agencies, this resource is made to host data from more than one agency.
Thinking through this article and Vermeylen's, something we might consider in ATX is how we conceptualize community itself. It is so easy in EJ-contexts to make communities our object of study and analysis, which can erase identities and exclusions within them...
How is ecological harm and gentrification experienced by LGBTQ people in Austin? Women? Etcetera?
What is the energy sector's relationship to racial capitalism? How is its current configuration shaped by legacies of settler colonialism, state bureaucracy, and corporate investment?
Environmental justice narratives in the U.S. often fall into "sacrifice zone" narratives that universalize experiences on the community-level, reproducing specifically bounded narratives about American lives and livelihoods, relationships to nature and capital, and the kinds of knowledge and authority that matter. Vermeylen's article disrupts this idea, rightfully arguing that environmental justice requires a more upfront confrontation with the socio-historical causes of oppression brought about by coloniality, as well as the fact that we need to question the righteousness of EJ discourses that rely on white settler logics.
For the Austin Field Campus, how can we bring attention to Anglo-American settler colonialism in our approaches to EJ and gentrification? And thinking back to the NOLA Field Campus, what Texas histories should we be drawing from to understand energy transitions in the city?
Providing a historical overview of EJ-related issues and organzing in Austin, Walsh's piece gestures to the need for deep engagement with those already doing what we might consider 'quotidian anthropocenic' work in our field campus locations. What are our ethical relationships and obligations to those we collaborate with during our time physically in the city? What should they be after? How can our analytical contributions help organizations like PODER and other local activists fighting gentrification and biased zoning laws?