With almost 180,000 phds awarded in the US each year, and ten times that number of graduate students (in all disciplines), the number of posters presented at academic professional meetings is astounding: perhaps 250,000. A single large academic meeting might have 5-10,000 posters. Every poster is a snapshot of the most current work in progress. Each poster takes about a week of work to design and show. That means more than 4000 person years of effort goes into the production of these posters every year: and most are simply thrown away (a few adorn lab and dorm room walls)

Your contributions to DigitalOcean help make this exciting new opportunity happen. DigitalOcean is building technology and community to help motivated organizations and individuals add content and value to its growing collection of media and science content. Our goal is the help the world's ocean scientists save the ocean for the planet's population and its children and their children.

DigitalOcean is a project of the New Media Studio, Inc. a California 501 (c) 3 public benefit corporation, in collaboration with other partners (UC Santa Barbara, Outhink Media, Inc., and a growing list of core partners who make this possible).

All donations to DigitalOcean are tax deductible under IRS and California State law. Please consult your own tax experts to determine the tax consequences for your situation.

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.