The Beyond Compliance Network facilitates the (re-)design of environmental data systems to strengthen data’s application in environmental governance, acting collectively to make our data and infrastructure more open, accessible, and interoperable. Our goals are to open up regulatory data and processes that integrate this data to enable its broader use in answering environmental health questions, and to facilitate the integration of community-level and other kinds of research data in this process.

This network comprises environmental data stewards, researchers, and policy professionals from across the US. We work to address the fragmented ways in which environmental monitoring and compliance data have been collected, aggregated, stored, managed, and shared by government agencies. This fragmentation prevents researchers—both within and beyond government—from accessing and using this data, and ultimately, exploring critical environmental questions. 

We convene virtually as a large group every other month to share information and project updates. Between these meetings, members also work in sub-committees to advance specific projects. To read more about our initial findings, see our 2022 Synthesis Report.

Initial and ongoing funding to support this network is generously provided by the Shuttleworth Foundation and Drexel University’s Environmental Collaboratory via grants to Open Environmental Data Project and the Fair Tech Collective.