DigitalOcean Early Career Ocean Science (ECOS) Social Network
…with media added from Ocean Enthusiast Providers
This is the core Web 2.0 “face” for the DigitalOcean effort. DO provides new tools and services to enable a wide range of value-added content sharing, activity coordination, and research collaboration. At its core, its social network services remove the boundaries for collaboration among ocean scientists and between ocean scientists and ocean enthusiasts.
DigitalOcean helps early career ocean scientists build their careers. Ocean science is a highly multidisciplinary and international effort. Early career scientists need to know if others anywhere in the world are doing the same research they are planning. They need to discover if their proposed research method or idea has been tried but not proven significant. They want to find new collaborators and build relationships with their peers. They have to build reputations and show prospective employers that their work has weight.
As also described in the Project Technology and Content section the DO ECOS Social Network (ECOSnet.com) will provide a resource for a range of collaboration and communication activities. The user profile will be a homepage where the scientist can list her achievements and research goals. The preprint service will help push research results into the community for review long before these could have been published with the current system. As the community of scientists grows, DO expects them to demand new services and looks forward to emergent opportunities that users make of the capabilities it provides.
DigitalOcean fishes for new users where they already congregate.
In the past three years, the dynamic growth of Web 2.0 sites and social networks has proven that user-generated content and attention can be used to build massive media collections on nimble data-base driven sites. Flickr™ hold more than 2.5 billion photographs at multiple resolutions. More than 2.4 million of these are tagged as “fish.” A key strategy for DigitalOcean is to partner with existing Web 2.0 networks to add value (and new users) to their efforts while it pulls value-added content and users from them.

Flickr and Video Content
When Flickr™ photographers join the DO effort their contributed content will become available for scientific tagging, georeferencing, and licensing for reuse by the contributor, the science community, or other ocean groups. Content tagged as appropriate for education will be shared also with K-12 students. Georeferenced content deemed exemplary will be uploaded onto the DO layer in Google Ocean.

Flickr™ has very limited video handling capabilities. DO will augment these through a partnership with OuThink Media and the Internet Archive. This partnership will allow DO ECOS Network and DO Flickr™ Group members to upload video clips at resolutions as high as HD. These video assets will also be georeferenced, licensed for reuse, and tagged for their scientific content. For the first time, underwater enthusiast video content will be available for scientific, educational, and public use. This greatly extends their value as tools for ocean science, education, and policy decision support. DO video (and photo) providers will receive metrics on the use of their media, through user comments and quality rankings and other statistics.

DigitalOcean and its partners will turn a mountain (or an ocean) of digital media dross into scientific gold. For example, take a million underwater enthusiast-generated photographs/videos where the content is unlabeled (or tagged as “fish”). Add another half-million underwater photographs/videos from the personal collections of member scientists. Task DO expert communities of practice to tag these resources with their geolocation, and with the common and scientific names for the depicted species. And then license the resources for active reuse. The outcome will be a collection of scientifically value-added media linked to the outcomes of scientific research and critique. This will be a model for the future of scientific communication in the era of digital media production.
Immediately the best examples of these videos/photos (as rated by the community) might be posted up on Google Ocean, or sent to tens of thousands of classrooms worldwide through DO partners. As the DO content collection matures it will certainly be explored by ocean biologists looking to discover new findings for species populations.
DO will aggregate value-added media assets easily worth tens of millions of dollars over time. DO will not pay for this content. Rather, DO will invest in user/provider communities that will contribute content. There is a Web 2.0 truth here: if you build your own collection you will need new money every year to keep it current. If you build a strong community, it will improve its own collection over time.