Heritage

The name, initial idea, and GitHub organization came out of this collaborative project to understand crustal permeability at scale, which in turn draws on a long history of 3D crustal modeling.

The original article describing DigitalCrust in Geofluids describes the motivation and envisioned structure of a community database for understanding the crust.

The current iteration of DigitalCrust came out of this EarthCube Geochronology Sparrow workshop at GSA 2022. It de-emphasizes some of the database design aspects of the original project, recognizing that an infrastructure that spans the field to this degree must be decentralized.

The focus on building software literacy and "low-level" community stems in part from the legacy of the EarthCube program. While EarthCube funded good projects, the practice of making developers responsive to a single set of needs meant that their work often remained siloed. Efforts to prevent this (e.g., compelling attendance to EarthCube-specific conferences; funding workshops) often have been somewhat less effective than desired.

We lean on a broad community infrastructure for open-science software, formed from many organizations within the informatics Ecosystem.