Capturing ESIP Stories

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 to other communities track their outcomes?

Danie: EarthCube?

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?)