Ali Whitmer, Ben Halpern, Ahrash Bissell, Nicole Starosielski, Joel Fry

We ended up focusing on a few key points about what would help 'save the oceans'. DO needs to build community. This in theory will happen organically, but a key to this is including strong information filtering so that people can quickly and easily find the information they want (thus building communities). A key to doing this, then, is creating a strong incentive for groups and organizations that do this kind of filtering (e.g., National Geographic, CNN, NYTimes, etc.) to participate and post information in DO. So what creates these incentives? Branding somehow within DO content is a strong possibility.

We also talked about the potential (or need to avoid) for DO to get into advocacy. In general we felt this should be avoided -- let other groups do this within the DO platform. But do we filter any information and keep it out of DO (or flag it) if we think it is 'bad'. Or what if neutral information gets used for bad purposes? We decided that such a filter is bad -- we need full transparency and openness. But we do need quality checks that filter out egregiously wrong information that could cause harm. And perhaps we can be more pro-active about facilitating content that will serve ocean conservation.

We also need to ensure that information can be distributed to the 'lowest common denominator' (i.e. getting input and output in developing countries). A key for this is allowing content to be distributed in other formats (other downstream distribution).