An interview with Maeva Tesan, Information, Communication and Knowledge Management Officer, Pacific Data Hub and Pacific Community Centre for Ocean Science, originally published on Link Digital website.
Every data portal faces unique challenges in fulfilling its mission. This is certainly the case with the Pacific Data Hub, an open data portal that serves as a gateway to the most comprehensive data collection relevant to the 22 Pacific Island nations and seeks to make it easily available to as wide an audience as possible, including government decision-makers, Pacific civil society and business organisations, and researchers.
Who oversees the Pacific Data Hub
The Hub is overseen by the Pacific Community (SPC), the principal scientific and technical organisation supporting development in the Pacific region. SPC is the custodian of over seven decades of Pacific-related data, including population census, household survey, and geospatial data. In addition to the Pacific states, the Hub also harvests data from the SPC’s metropolitan members and multilateral organisations. The Hub, which began with the assistance of Link Digital in February 2018, is a crucial data management tool that now hosts close to 800 datasets from across the region. It is also the centre of a growing ecosystem of data products, websites and interactive dashboards, some of which Link Digital has worked on.
Those working on the Hub must deal with complex questions around data stewardship and differing levels of data literacy across a geographically and culturally complex region. One is Information, Communication and Knowledge Management Officer, Maeva Tesan. She is responsible for two websites that are connected to – but not directly integrated within – the Pacific Data Hub: the Climate Change Flagship and the Pacific Community Centre for Ocean Science (PCCOS). While each serves a different purpose, they are linked through shared goals of improving access to reliable data. In the first two-part series on the Hub’s work, Tesan discussed some of the data management issues and challenges related to her work.