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Municipal governments in the USA are often divided between a legislative (city council) and executive (mayoral) branch. These two branches not only differ in their power to govern a municipality, but also in the way their governing activities are organized: executive activities are periodic and random in occurrence, legislative activities are regularly occurring and organized around key events (e.g. committee and subcommittee meetings, expert testimony, public comment, introduction and debate of new legislation, and voting). Further, legislative events are subject to Open Meetings laws at both the State and Federal level - so that citizens can have a transparent record of how officials are performing their elected duties [1]. This openness mandate further requires that the events of any municipal legislature are recorded and published to the web in an openly accessible format. However, many municipal governments lack the time, money, and expertise to provide citizens with well described data beyond a simple audio or video file of a legislative event. [2] The Council Data Project (CDP) is our attempt to provide a platform for adding needed context to event based legislative data. In particular we provide open-source tools for transcribing, indexing, modeling, and publishing legislative event data to the web. Our on-going research is focused on how to package a bundle of event-based digital objects (audio-files, videos, transcripts, votes, etc) along with relevant metadata parameters to facilitate meaningful reuse by researchers.

How do researchers in fieldwork-intensive disciplines protect sensitive data in the field, how do they assess their own practices, and how do they arrive at them? This article reports the results of a qualitative study with 36 semi-structured interviews with qualitative and multi-method researchers in political science and humanitarian aid/migration studies. We find that researchers frequently feel ill-prepared to handle the management of sensitive data in the field and find that formal institutions provide little support. Instead, they use a patchwork of sources to devise strategies for protecting their informants and their data. We argue that this carries substantial risks for the security of the data as well as their potential for later sharing and re-use. We conclude with some suggestions for effectively supporting data management in fieldwork-intensive research without unduly adding to the burden on researchers conducting it.

Since its momentous democratic elections in 2010, Myanmar has continued to transition from a society of heavy censorship to one inundated with information and data from across the globe. The changes in the information ecosystem have forced a shift in how the country's government and civil society organizations approach data and use them for evidence-based decision making. This poster will present 1.) The findings of a locally conducted needs assessment of the data environments of Myanmar's government and CSOs and 2.) A curriculum developed to support Myanmar's organizations in more effective use of data for decision making.