DigitalOcean

One does not need to be an ocean scientist to observe the crisis in the ocean environment today. Fisheries are overfished, coral reefs are dying, temperatures are rising, dead zones are growing. Our global ocean is in trouble.

These signs of trouble are visible to all who track the news or spend time on the sea. The challenge is to understand what is happening and figure out how fix it. Universities are training scientists to investigate the causes and consequences of human interaction with the ocean ecology. Dozens of NGO organizations are focusing on various issues of this planetary crisis. Governments are beginning to realize their role in this effort. Hundreds of projects have been funded to look at the situation. Mainly they are focused on one aspect or location. They track a single species or they monitor a certain reef. They try to make a local impact. Collectively, they add to our global understanding.

DigitalOcean is not just another project like these. DO asks the question: what do all of these other ocean projects need to succeed? What are the problems they share? One common problem plaguing the entire ocean sustainability effort is the amount of time required for new scientific information to influence ocean resource management decisions. Another problem is the general lack of media content to support public education and awareness. The proposed DigitalOcean effort addresses these two basic problems. In this way DigitalOcean adds value to every ocean sustainability and education effort.

DigitalOcean injects Web 2.0 collaboration environments into the global ocean science enterprise. DO software-based services are designed to transform the way ocean scientists communicate, coordinate, and collaborate. The proposed ECOS Social Network (the DO Early Career Ocean Scientist Social Network) will greatly accelerate the pace of research communication among scientists and to the public. This network is designed to be an open tab on the Internet browsers of thousands of ocean scientists, alerting them to the latest science findings, helping them manage their citation libraries, providing them spaces for research group collaboration, introducing them to colleagues across the planet, and tasking them to add their knowledge to an ever-expanding library of ocean media assets.

DigitalOcean (DO) will build a reusable collection of high-value ocean media (photographs, videos, data displays) and ocean science (research preprints, reviews, citations, critiques, comments, tags, and quality ratings). Over time this DO collection should emerge as the single best source for freely reusable ocean science/media on the planet. DO will be built from user-provided content, with community-add value, and licensed for free to the public.
Together, the social network and media collection form the core system for DigitalOcean. Any number of scientific, educational, or resource management projects can be built to leverage the capabilities of this system. Below, three such projects are presented as early examples.

The bottom line for DigitalOcean is this: faster science communication and value-added ocean media supports the entire ocean science and sustainable ocean management effort. A wide range of future science and sustainability projects will be built upon this platform once the community is up and growing. Early projects are described below, but these represent only a few of the many that can be envisioned.

DigitalOcean is remarkably efficient. It leverages a new tide of opensource technology, and builds strategic alliances with leading Web 2.0 concerns, from Google and Yahoo! to the Internet Archive and Creative Commons. The initial design and development costs are followed by more modest maintenance and community support costs. And like a vibrantly growing reef, the DO community adds content value over time. A one-time seed investment in the future of ocean science and media delivery can pay off soon and keep growing for decades.