The Earth System CoG Collaboration EnvironmentSylvia Murphy and Cecelia DeLuca (NOAA/CIRES), and Luca Cinquini (NASA/JPL)

AGU Ocean SciencesFebruary 20, 2012

Outline

•CoG Defined•Motivation•CoG Layout

–Services–Templated Content–Freeform Content

•How CoG facilitates governance

CoG Defined

• The name CoG comes from the idea of many gears interlocking in order to make a system work.

• CoG is also short for "Commodity Governance" - the idea that there are organizational and management characteristics that many projects share, and that exposing those characteristics and linking them is a way to make a complicated "community of communities" run effectively.

Motivation

• CoG seeks to examine the organizational characteristics of community science and infrastructure projects and to recommend structures and processes for their efficient governance and operation.

• The CoG team is developing a web-based collaborative environment as a way to put some of these findings into practice.

• This environment targets projects that are involved with the generation, management, access, and analysis of scientific data.

Community Information

Collective Decision Making

Transparency

Trust

The Value of Trust

User: “I know my needs will be met.”

Funder: “I know my money will not be wasted.”

Developer: “I know contributions are valued.”

Trust is the foundation of teamwork!

The Value of Trust

User: “I know my needs will be met.”

Funder: “I know my money will not be wasted.”

Developer: “I know contributions are valued.”

Trust is the foundation of teamwork!

CoG Layout

Right side: ServicesCentral navigation: Templated content

Central Section: Freeform content

Left side: Auto generated

navigation of project

freeform content

The CoG workspace environment can:

• Host projects (e.g. be a primary web presence).

• Index projects (e.g. provide links to critical project information scattered across the Internet).

Services: Data Search

• CoG is connected to an Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) Peer to Peer (P2P) data node.

• Projects can search the entire resident node, any external ESGF node, or just selected datasets on the resident node.

• Search values can be saved to project bookmarks or sent to the Live Access Server (LAS) visualization service.

Search facets are configurable by project administrators Search results

can be saved to bookmarks

Services: Live Access Server (LAS)

• LAS is a visualization interface developed by NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL).

• This service will be linked to CoG directly so that data node datasets or bookmarked datasets can be sent to the service and the images saved back to the project workspace.

Services: Project Connections

• Projects exist within hierarchies of parents, peers, and children.

• These relationships are used to communicate across projects and present views of consolidated information.

• The project widget contains three views, “This Project”, “All Projects”, and “My Projects”.

“This Project” View: NESII has 3 children (CoG), Curator, and GIP, which are peers.

“All Projects” View: Lists all projects on the system.

“My Projects” View:Lists all the projects the user is a member of.

Services: News

Pop up window for entering news

News appears to users in the news widget on the services side of the workspace. • The user can determine which projects to send

news to (e.g. this project, all child projects, or selected projects).

• Other communications options like RSS feed, email, and social networking are under consideration.

Templated Content

• Templated content is project metadata that will be searchable and gatherable (e.g. parents can consolidate and display peer and child-level project information) [planned]

• This structure assists users in developing best practices by setting expectations about type and availability of critical information [planned].

Which tabs are visible in the upper nav bar can be selected by project administrators

Projects can add their own logos and make them linkable to external sites

Bookmarks

• Pointers to data, documents, and URLs can be saved to bookmarks.

• Area will include links to data analysis and visualization services [in progress].

Freeform content

• Only project members can create and modify pages.

• Pages contain labels that become links in the left navigation bar.

• Users can create headings in the left navigation bar.

• Pages can be made private so that only project members can view them.

Central section is a wiki that allows HTML and WYSIWYG editing. Images can be uploaded.

How CoG facilitates governance…

• Management of information is a major problem in projects that involve many sub-projects, partners, multiple leads, and many resources.

• CoG acts as an index into project information (templated content) that is necessary for coordination and collaboration.

• CoG enables projects to retain their own identities, websites, repositories, and trackers but also participate in an organized community environment.

• It enables people responsible for overall coordination to quickly get consolidated views of information.

• Exposing project information and processes results in transparency. Transparency generates trust. Trust is the foundation of teamwork!

Summary

Questions: cog_support@list.woc.noaa.govRegister as user on CoG: http://esrl.noaa.gov/cog/user/add/

Register a project on CoG: http://esrl.noaa.gov/cog/project/add/Learn more about CoG: http://esrl.noaa.gov/cog/cog/

• CoG is a place to host and index projects.

• CoG is a place to learn about and develop good project governance.

• CoG is a place to get work done (e.g. collaborate, visualize data, serve customers etc.)

• CoG is at a beta release stage. It currently has 24 projects and is growing and changing rapidly.

• You are welcome to explore its capabilities. Your feedback is invaluable to us!

CoG is sponsored by the National Science Foundation