By Kelsey Breseman
EDGI is proud to announce that we are now officially a partner of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). The partnership was announced at the ESIP Winter Meeting in Bethesda, Maryland, where data managers, data scientists, and other data-related professionals gathered to discuss better futures for data in the earth sciences space.
Partner organizations, according to ESIP’s page:
- Embrace the ideal of collaborative exchange to further the understanding of the environmental health of our planet.
- Are looking to network with diverse organizations, and show up at meetings.
- Help researchers and decision-makers deal with critical environmental issues.
- Connect with data providers, researchers and tool developers.
The full list of ESIP partners is long, and includes NASA, USGS, AGU, Anaconda (Python), the libraries of many universities, and various data infrastructure companies
ESIP works through a handful of official Committees, and many more informal “clusters”, which typically gather around a topic area on a monthly online teleconference. Clusters and committees produce papers, recommendations, and connections across the diverse parties that work with earth science information, from government agencies, to libraries, to citizen science project leaders.
EDGI’s Archiving program lead has been working with ESIP over the fall as the ESIP Data Stewardship Committee’s vice-chair. Through this community, EDGI is co-authoring a paper (currently submitted for publication) outlining a proposed Data Risk Matrix and highlighting some recent EDGI data rescue work as a use case.
With EDGI now an ESIP partner, hopefully the two organizations can share information and projects across the many shared interests of both groups: citizen science, usability, sustainable data management, energy and climate, community resilience, and many of the other topics listed on ESIP’s Collaborate page. All EDGI members are now also eligible, through the partnership, for ESIP Lab funding– $10k maximum 6-months grants– for EDGI projects but also for their own work.
As two organizations working hard for better data management of environmental data, we can only be stronger together.