This year marks 10 years since California passed the Open and Transparent Water Data Act (AB 1755, Dodd), a landmark commitment to making water and ecological data accessible, interoperable, and useful. A decade in, it’s worth asking: What have we built? And what still needs to happen?
This special panel edition of Data for Lunch brings together three practitioners who each sit at a different node of California’s open data ecosystem:
- California Open Data (data.ca.gov), the statewide open data portal designed to host data from across state agencies and serve as a single, searchable clearinghouse for California’s public data holdings — with a long-term vision of linking every state agency portal into one unified resource
- California Natural Resources Agency Open Data (data.cnra.ca.gov), a collaborative data environment built to make CNRA’s natural resources data accessible and usable by citizens, agencies, and partners in support of the agency’s conservation and management mission
- Healthy Rivers and Landscapes Science Program, a 20-agency interagency collaboration working to restore river health, floodplains, and natural landscapes for fish, farms, wildlife, and communities across California
Together, these three efforts represent the full stack: how data gets published, how it gets discovered, and how it gets used in practice.
This is a conversation about what it takes to build California’s open data ecosystem, from AI readiness and federated platform architecture to governance frameworks and schema design. Panelists will get into the hard stuff: standardization problems that lack clean solutions, architectural decisions that are difficult to undo, and workforce and platform gaps that are slowing progress.
Why This Matters
The platforms, standards, and governance frameworks being built right now will shape how California manages its water resources for the next decade. Whether you work in water management, policy, research, consulting, or data practice, these decisions will affect what you can do with data and what you can’t.
About the Panelists
Lucy Andrews, Senior Environmental Scientist, California Department of Water Resources
Lucy Andrews works to advance DWR’s practice of open science, including reproducible scientific analysis and open-source research software engineering. She co-leads development of a scientific data system for the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes Science Program, a 20-agency interagency collaboration focused on managing California’s rivers and landscapes for resilience. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from UC Berkeley, where she developed computational methods for planning stream network monitoring and river restoration.
Katie Regan, State Data Services Manager, California Department of Technology (CDT)
Katie Regan leads CDT’s Data Services team, which oversees geospatial services, data management standards, centers of excellence, and strategic data initiatives across state government. Before joining the state, she founded the Office of Performance and Data Analytics for the City of Stockton, where she focused on performance management, data governance, open data, and operationalizing analytics for equitable service delivery. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Puget Sound and a Master’s in Public Administration from the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law.
David Harris, Enterprise Data Manager, California Natural Resources Agency Data Center
David Harris supports cross-departmental teams across the California Natural Resources Agency in developing data management and decision-support systems. He provides consultation and systems development support to the team implementing AB 1755 and leads product management for the California Natural Resources Agency’s Open Data Platform. He brings decades of experience building data systems for the California state government, including the state’s first online public campaign finance disclosure system at the Secretary of State’s office.
Presentation Recording
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About Data for Lunch
Data for Lunch is a free and dynamic virtual event series for water professionals, researchers, policymakers, and other partners to explore and discuss the latest water-related datasets, technologies, and governance innovations.
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Funding for this project has been provided in full or in part from the Budget Act of 2022 and through an agreement with the State.