Code-level collaboration

We seek to integrate some of the approaches used for software development with geoscience research culture. Collaboration on code is a relatively recent, highly successful mode of collaborative production of digital infrastructure. It has resulted in important systems like Linux and most open-source software, produced by a global and loosely-connected collaborative enterprise. While not everything produced by the technology industry is good, it has broken new ground on how to collaborate widely and quickly.

To make code-level collaboration feasible, we need to break work down into small constituent parts, for which collaborative work is less unwieldy. Jointly maintained Software libraries provide one recipe for this.