The Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in collaboration with NEON/Batelle, Unidata/UCAR, LiKEN, and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), will host a workshop from Feb. 13-15, 2024, “Exploring Data Sovereignty and the Sovereign Data Network.” 

Discussions will center around Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Data Governance and how they enter into your Earth System Science research. This event is focused to bring together scientists and faculty from Tribal Colleges and Universities towards building a network that can be sustained beyond this workshop, and discussion on how your Tribal College or University can take part, or become a node, of the Sovereign Data Network.

The Sovereign Data Network provides rich services for data management, collaboration and convergent science, incorporating FAIR and CARE data principles on a data agnostic platform. This platform fosters a variety of new science, with an emphasis on Earth System Science, by sharing data and solutions among Tribal Colleges and Universities and other Indigenous groups for promoting holistic views of the Earth System. The Sovereign Data Network currently has nodes at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute and Navajo Technical University.

The topics covered will include: 

• Conversation and demonstration of the SIPI, Navajo Technical University (NTU), Unidata/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Sovereign Data Network
• Discussions about how to access and be a part of the Sovereign Data Network and possibly partner on the expansion proposal to the National Science Foundation
• Data workshop with demonstration and training of repository storage systems, such as Unidata’s RAMADDA and SDN. 

Participants, please bring samples of your data to work with, and share these data with the workshop team in advance of the workshop to allow for solutions to be available. Additionally, we ask participants to bring their own laptop for active participation through this session. 

If you have received an invitation to participate, please fill out the application form for consideration to attend this workshop. Travel support will be provided as needed. Once we have received your application form, a representative of NCAR and the organizing committee will be in contact with you to share next steps.