On Wednesday, February 12th the Alliance participated in a Design-o-thon for data analysis in partnership with Booz Allen Hamilton’s 901 Green Office Team and Women in Data Science. The Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative (CMC) is a group of leading organizations that provide technical, programmatic, and outreach support in order to integrate volunteer-based water quality and macroinvertebrate monitoring data into the Chesapeake Bay Program partnership. The CMC team has been working with the Booz Allen team to identify 4 key challenges that relate data collected through the Chesapeake Data Explorer to other geospatial, temporal, environmental and demographic data, in order to add context to water quality measurements that might further empower decision-making and inspire action.

A wide variety of data scientists, developers, designers, problem-solvers and storytellers were invited to the Design-o-thon to explore CMC’s data and create solutions to address some of their core challenges. The goal of this Design-o-thon was to prepare for a data dive Hack-the-Bay event through a structured ideation session with the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative team.

There were over 40 people who attended this event and are enthusiastic about creating solutions to showcase the unique power of the data collected through the CMC partnerships. This process is part of the Booz Allen’s Earth Day 2020 celebration and will consist of a series of data focused events throughout the coming months. The CMC team will host a water quality workshop on March 14th in Gaithersburg, MD and then will attend the Hack-the-Bay event on April 18th in Washington, DC.

Visit Booz Allen Hamilton’s website to read more about their commitment to the environment and click here to learn about the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative.