EOP

What is EOP?

The Environmental Outcomes Platform (EOP) is an end-to-end solution for acquiring, managing, and interacting with environmental information to empower council services both internally and externally.

The vision is to have an environment focused platform that has outcomes at heart.

Overview

EOP is an initiative led by Greater Wellington Regional Council to establish an end-to-end platform for capture, management and reporting of environmental information. The goal is to allow all regional councils to maximise the value they get from their environmental data efforts, and provide clear, consistent and user-centric information to end-users if this data. It’s built based on the experiences from the Environment Canterbury Water Data programme

Regional councils have many systems for collecting and managing environmental data. These systems are often siloed and based on legacy technology. Integrating this data can be a slow, manual and error prone process that is not consistent within or across councils. Resulting in limitations to the type of analysis that is feasible, meaning the value of the data is not fully realised.

Much work has been done in councils by people without a software or data engineering background on a best efforts' and as-needed basis. This has resulted in solutions that deliver lots of value but lack the maintainability, scalability and user-centric approach that would come from a dedicated software engineering team.

EOP aims to address these issues by building a solution which focuses on:

Outcomes

The unit of delivery in EOP is an outcome, information provided to a user in a way which is appropriate to their needs. For each outcome, the minimum technical architecture will be built to deliver that outcome. With future outcomes building and evolving the architecture to support the new outcomes.

Multi Tenanted

From the ground up EOP is being built to support multiple councils. This will enable the effort to deliver an outcome by one council to be delivered to all councils for an incremental cost. This means in general, EOP will be agnostic of council internal systems with each council providing data to EOP in a standardised format. However, for some common systems used by a majority of councils, EOP can provide standardised adapters to allow councils to integrate the data with minimal effort.

Modern Development Practices

The EOP platform will be developed using modern development and delivery practices to reduce the risk of the platform becoming legacy, and help ensure future development and operation and is sustainable. This includes test coverage, infrastructure automation and a devops approach, and selecting fit-for-purpose tools, infrastructure and standards.

Data Sets

This is a non-exhaustive list of the types data captured and housed by EOP. This will be driven by requirements to support the delivery of specific outcomes.

We anticipate this list to expand as the platform is established, and more complex questions and outcomes can be asked of the data.

While simplifying the access to the data that councils already collect is a primary goal, EOP will also be a of integration for third party systems.

Environmental Observations

Environmental observations are critical for assessing and documenting impacts on the natural environment. Councils capture these observations using a variety of methods and systems, including spreadsheets, databases and software systems. A goal of EOP is to allow these observations to be captured in a uniform manner, allowing better analysis across different data-sets. Observations Data Model 2 (ODM) is being explored as a potential uniform model for EOP.

Regional Plans and Consenting Limits

Plans are the primary mechanism for setting sustainable limits on natural resource use. Consents are the how these resources are allocated for use according to these planned limits.

Combining data on these Plans and Consents with environmental observations helps determine how effective a Plan is at delivering on sustainability goals, and provides evidence to improve future planning efforts.

Geospatial Context Data

Showing environmental observations and analysis in the context of relevant geospatial features helps improves usability and understanding of the data.

This information may include:

  • Council boundaries
  • District boundaries
  • Iwi significant areas

Geospatial Analysis Data

While similar to Geospatial context data, Geospatial Analysis Data can be combined with environmental observations to identify trends and in generate predictive models.

For a example, using a river network graph to model downstream flow, combined with observations at a river site would help determine the how water quality at the river site impacts downstream water quality.

This information may include:

  • River / Catchment network
  • Groundwater models
  • Climate Models
  • Land use

Governance

Being a sector wide initiative, there is a need for governance to support equity amongst the stakeholders. There are two groups for governing EOP. The first is a Steering Group on the strategic direction of EOP. The second is a Technical Working Group which will focus on the technical direction of EOP in terms of architecture, collaboration, development practices and technical priorities.

Steering Group

The steering group has a Terms of Reference formed which describes the responsibilities of the Steering Group as follows:

  • To set strategic level priorities and direction for the EOP Delivery Team around which outcomes to focus on. The EOP Delivery Team sets technical direction and operational priorities towards delivering on the strategic priorities and direction set by the Steering Group.
  • To facilitate the access and management of funds to invest in, develop and maintain EOP across the sector.
  • To facilitate the communication and progress of EOP to other areas that Steering Group Members are included in – such as DSG, EDSIG, etc. along with documenting feedback and providing back to other Steering Group Members and EOP Delivery Team.
  • To receive and consider regular updates/reports then make recommendations and/or endorsements as appropriate.
  • To identify where any strategic changes in the sector could impact delivery of EOP, and vice versa.
  • To provide guidance on issues or risks that are escalated from the EOP Delivery Team Members.
  • To resolve any dispute or disagreement that is raised through the governance structure.

Technical Working Group

A technical group is going to be setup in 2023 led by the EOP Delivery team. This will be the forum to share and collaborate on the technical solution across contributing councils and potential future contributors.

We imagine the activities of this group to be:

  • Discussion and feedback on major architectural concerns and decisions
  • Helping establish development practices for technical collaboration on EOP across councils
  • Feeding back on current technical priorities of the EOP Delivery Team
  • Bringing a cross-council perspective to technical development by sharing knowledge, challenges and opportunities from different councils

Open Source

EOP is being developed as Open Source Software (OSS License MIT) making it open and available for all New Zealand regional councils. The Regional Councils are expected to be the main contributors, whether via their own staff or employing a third party vendor to contribute on their behalf.

The main reason being open source in this sense is to be transparent about the work being done and lower the barrier to entry for other councils wishing to contribute.

There is a cost to host and maintain an instance of the platform. Under the guidance of the steering group the platform is being built to be multi-tenanted with a single instance run to support the councils of New Zealand. The EOP Delivery team will be responsible for hosting and maintaining the shared instance of EOP.

Last Revision April 2023