On Saturday morning, the
white stone buildings on UC Berkeley’s campus radiated with unfiltered
sunshine. The sky was blue, the campanile was chiming. But instead of
enjoying the beautiful day, 200 adults had willingly sardined themselves
into a fluorescent-lit room in the bowels of Doe Library to rescue
federal climate data.
Like similar groups
across the country—in more than 20 cities—they believe that the Trump
administration might want to disappear this data down a memory hole. So
these hackers, scientists, and students are collecting it to save
outside government servers.
But now they’re going even further. Groups like DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which organized the Berkeley hackathon to collect data from NASA’s earth sciences programs
and the Department of Energy, are doing more than archiving. Diehard
coders are building robust systems to monitor ongoing changes to
government websites. And they’re keeping track of what’s already been
removed—because yes, the pruning has already begun.
