Capturing ESIP Stories

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

Exploratory Working Group Participants

Emily Law
Denise Hills
Bill Teng
LuAnn Dahlman
Christine White
Danie Kinkade
Soren Scott
Ken Keiser

Motivation

To better capture ESIP community stories and outcomes: lessons learned, papers published, collaborations, etc.

How do other communities track their outcomes?

Danie: The members of EarthCube's Leadership Council were charged with developing strategies for a number of governance tasks and roles. One of them was an 'EarthCube Success Story' program. I (charged with this task) leveraged a process and format that NOAA NOS used to capture NOAA success stories in short vignettes. The strategy development was put on indefinite hold until the EarthCube standing teams and committees were fully functional, I have no idea this specific strategy was picked up, but the Engagement Team is considering this type of activity again. My early materials (in an EC context) outline the program overall, not on the ground storage/access details. Initial draft strategy is available here: goo.gl/cT8V4E

Ken: I believe the ESIP Commons was in part developed for this purpose and could probably fairly easily be extended to capture these content types. For instance, the Commons has been used in the past to capture information about sessions at the meetings and information about posters being presented. Use of the Commons seems to be waning, and I expect to a large degree it is suffering the pains of other collaboration site in that navigation of the site quickly becomes difficult if someone is not facilitating keeping it fresh and providing links to areas of interest. We've had the same problem with the wiki in the past, and it is likely difficult to adequately maintain both sites. Not being a user interface expert, I'm not sure what the solution is, but from experience collaboration sites only seem to work when there is functionality there that members need and want to use, and can easily navigate to what they need. Danie mentioned EarthCube above, which is an example where (for me at least) has a main site that I know to use when looking for information about the various projects, and there is a pretty clear link on the front page leading me to that information. I use the ESIPFed site the same way for information on upcoming meetings. Maybe the ESIPfed site should be the entry point to information, with the Commons providing the mechanisms to capture the information. (Maybe Bruce would have some insights?)

Soren: Our group was talking about potential ways of moving content from the wiki, as informal information capture, up to the Commons as the "formal" publication space. Should try to avoid a document store of PDFs, though. It's not great for discoverability (RDA/DataONE are awkward that way).