This working session will continue the efforts initiated at the Tempe Workshop in November, 2015 and continued at the ESIP 2016 Winter Meeting. For background information, please see below. All are invited. This effort seeks to develop a framework to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of a data repository, providing help in determining the value of data and services around them to stakeholders of varying perspectives. Our agenda for this working session is to: 1) BRIEFLY recap the summaries of our discussions of the references provided on this page: http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Return_on_Investment_ROI_References. This is only a recap as we expect to more thoroughly discuss these references via telecons leading up to this session. We request that participants in the session either participate in those telecons or peruse the references beforehand in order to arrive up to speed at the session. The summaries are very short reviews of the references with respect to these issues and questions: ? How is value (to stakeholders) defined / discussed? ? What are the definitions / explanations / categories of repository stakeholders? ? How were similarities among data repositories defined / discussed? ? How were differences among data repositories defined / discussed? ? What, if any, were the metrics used to measure the value(s) returned to repository stakeholders? ? What do the references say about the reason(s) for caring about this topic? b) Discuss potential funding possibilities for a planning grant to develop this idea and scope some work. We will lay groundwork for this part of the discussion beforehand by investigating possible funding opportunities and their requirements and goals, also via our telecons. c) Target one of these possibilities and develop an outline for a proposal that takes into account their requirements, schedule, project scope, etc. Background In November 2015 representatives from various data repositories, data service providers, and others participated in a two and one half day workshop in Tempe, AZ, sponsored and funded by NSF, to discuss collaborative strategies for sustained environmental data management. As an introduction, see the following quote from a briefing document participants received before the workshop: "Many environmental data repositories were initiated to fulfill specific needs or objectives, i.e. archiving and disseminating data from a project, network of research sites, institution, funding source, to accompany paper publications, or more recently, as data papers. This initiative was funded with the goal of exploring how we might develop this network of repositories in a way that will produce new collaboration and curation strategies that also cater to the currently underserved single investigators and move environmental data from 'available' to 'usable', in order to accelerate scientific inquiry. With this goal in mind we are bringing together data curators from a range of environmental research fields, data aggregators, tool developers, computer scientists and environmental scientists (both data providers and users) for an informed dialog which draws on our collective experience managing data and repositories." Several of the topics that surfaced during the workshop garnered enough interest from participants to request that discussions continue under the auspices of a new ESIP cluster Those topics have coalesced to be: ? Defining a Return on Investment (ROI) of Data Repositories for Society ? Conducting a Landscape Analysis and Gaps for Environmental Data Repositories and Describing a Common Technical Vision The ESIP cluster, Sustainable Data Management, was recently formed. The wiki page is http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Sustainable_Data_Management. The ROI working group exists under this cluster. Notes from the ROI session at the ESIP Winter Meeting and other information are available at http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Return_on_Investment_Subgroup_%28ESIP_....
