DigitalCrust
DigitalCrust is an initiative to bring together geologists who build software to characterize the Earth's crust. We seek to increase coordination among such geologists working in different organizations and subfields, towards a goal of producing an integrated, multi-system digital model of the crust. Among our broad goals are to
- Establish systems, datasets, and modeling approaches that collectively describe the Earth's crust across space, time, scale of analysis, and process domain
- Encorage code-level collaboration among geologists towards modular, adaptable, and interoperable software infrastructure for digital geological research
- Build software literacy among early-career scientists to develop technical capacity and leadership for digital geology
- Develop connectivity among the ecosystem of software and systems for digital crustal research
- Elevate the status of software-oriented work and modes of collaboration alongside more established technical areas
People
DigitalCrust was created by geologists who are building software infrastructure for the future of the field. We seek to build a culture of close technical communication and resource sharing that will accelerate, align, and improve all of our work.
Motivation
Current collaborative and funding practices for geoinformatics research result in development silos, low community adoption rates, competing platforms, and duplication of effort between organizations. We seek to extend current emphasis on software systems and infrastructure with a focus on improving the collaborative model for software-based work in geology.
Approach
DigitalCrust seeks to establish community integration through concrete, code-level collaboration. These lightweight collaborative practices are established in the open-source software community and have proved productive for distributed computational work. This approach will be developed at virtual meetings, workshops, and training events. We will also seek to coordinate contributions with other geoscience informatics and software efforts in our community Ecosystem.
Get involved
We're working on establishing how this organization will work – stay tuned for more details.