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description: What are we collecting? Why?
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# 🗃️ Collecting Scope

In an effort to continue advancing environmental protection and actions, the Data Rescues in Seattle will focus on Climate Data with the following data themes and types:

1. Geographic Parameters
   1. Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Antarctic regions
2. Timeframe
   1. 2020 - present day
3. Record Types
   1. Public Resources (example: PSA about cooling centers)
   2. Agency Reports and assessments (example: reports of pollutants in water systems) 
   3. Grant funded project datasets from researchers or consultants (grant reports, funding proposals, or publication samples)
4. Data types
   1. Image files(JPG, TIFF, etc.)
   2. Digital documents (DOCX, PDF)
   3. Web files (recordings of web content or WARC files)
5. Rights & Restrictions: 
   1. Only public records (information created or maintained by a government agency that is available to the public upon request) created via public funding
6. Languages
   1. English primary; other languages as volunteer skills are available

#### Rationale

We, the host of the 2025 Seattle Data Rescue, acknowledge the various threats many government data types face today and across time, but in order to keep the intention and scope manageable and relevant to our immediate communities, we selected the above criteria. In particular, many researchers, students, and educators in Washington place a heavy emphasis on environmental and climate data due to our local histories including agriculture, trade, cultural beliefs, and social activities. We attempt through our select scope to appeal to local volunteers as well as to utilize local knowledge to the best of our abilities. We aren’t exclusively focusing on topics like medical government records, but see clear connections across the topics of environmental conditions and public health, community wellbeing, and environmental and economic prosperity. We have also chosen to prioritize federal government data due to the highly vocal apprehension from federal officials. We also assume that given Washington State’s more supportive attitude towards environmental and climate science initiatives, there are fewer immediate threats compared to the federal government or other less supportive states. 

We encourage others to branch this effort to address data rescue efforts for other highly vulnerable and crucial topics including but not limited to gender affirming care, public health, etc. 

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