DigitalCrust
The DigitalCrust collaboration brings together geologists who build software to characterize the Earth's crust. We seek to increase coordination among workers 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 and technical capacity among early-career scientists who might lead future digital geology research
- Develop connectivity among an ecosystem of software and systems for digital crustal research
- Elevate the visibility of software-oriented work and collaboration alongside more established geoscience domains
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 lead to 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 increase community integration by encouraging code-level collaboration among organizations. This approach, which prioritizes lightweight, flexible collaboration towards cross-cutting technical goals, has become central to the open-source software community but is not yet well developed in academic geoscience.
Get involved
This collaboration will mostly seek to coordinate work within an ecosystem of related efforts, through virtual meetings, workshops, and training events. We're working on establishing how the organization will work – stay tuned for more details.