EarthCube is a joint venture between the Directorate of Geosciences and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation. It is a community-driven effort to design and implement an effective data and knowledge management system for the geosciences that will integrates disparate data sets and web services and serves all members of the geoscience community. This planning and assesment project collects and synthesizes the prodigious amount of geoscience and cyberinfrastrucutre community input on possible governance structures for EarthCube that were generated in the run up to the June 2012 EarthCube meeting and actities that have happened during the post meeting timeframe. The project focuses on broadening grass roots geoscience engagement in the process, deepening the input and collecting science-drivers from geoscience communities, and organizing and summarinzing all information so it can be used effectively by the initial EarthCube governance body that will be selected in early 2013. The PI and his outreach team will hold face-to-face and virtual meetings as well as attend and run Town Hall meeings at professional society meetings to engage stakeholders. An important aspect of the project will be to identify community needs and incorporate their suggestions into the final summaries. Project goals also include building stakeholder alignment around shared goals in terms of producing ways to establish standardization of data practices and aspects of its management as well as create a community consensus structure for the evaluation of new tools and utilities. Broader impacts of the work are focused primarily on building infrastructure for science in terms of informing the development of an effective and well received community governance structure.
EarthCube, launched by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2011, is envisioned to transform the conduct of research through the development of community-guided cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences. It has the potential to make scientific data, models, visualization tools and components of cyberinfrastructure available to educators, policy-makers, citizen scientists and others. In addition, EarthCube is anticipated to enable integration of data from various sub-fields within the geosciences, which will allow scientists to more comprehensively address the 'grand challenge' scientific questions of the 21st century, such as severe weather and natural hazards prediction, climate change impacts, and other environmental change issues. While the technological challenges facing EarthCube are great, historical infrastructure research suggests that social and organizational challenges may be even greater. Hence, the long-term success of EarthCube rests on the development of a robust, flexible, responsive, adaptable and sustainable EarthCube governance structure that can help determine how stakeholders (geo, cyber, information and social scientists, educators, geographers, data managers, policy makers and others) give input, how decisions are made, how decision-makers are held accountable, how competing interests are managed, how leaders are selected, and how participants’ roles and responsibilities are determined. The EarthCube Governance Working Group, formed in March 2012 and composed of leaders in the Earth, ocean, atmospheric, computer, information and social sciences, conducted eight months of research on governance theory and models, historical infrastructures, and virtual and in-person engagement of EarthCube stakeholders, culminating in two 200-page documents: the EarthCube Governance Roadmap: Documentation, Research, and Recommendations (June 2012) and the EarthCube Governance Framework: A Proposal to the Community (September 2012). The Governance Roadmap presented a four-step plan with an aggressive timetable to define and implement an initial governance framework for EarthCube. The Governance Framework (the focus of this award) represented an implementation of the first two steps outlined in the Governance Roadmap: 1) Determine the appropriate governance framework to meet community needs and NSF goals for successful cyberinfrastructure; and 2) Determine and engage the stakeholder community for input on the governance framework. Goals of the Governance Framework were to provide a foundation that an eventual EarthCube governing entity, or entities, could use to govern EarthCube, and to gather input on governance to reduce the risk that stakeholders will not adopt EarthCube during development or final status. The Governance Framework outlined four high-level governance functions from a list of 143 functions compiled from published governance research and community input. These high-level functions include: 1) Identify and Implement an EarthCube Vision, Mission and Goals; 2) Engage and Coordinate Across the EarthCube Community; 3) Management: Create and Implement EarthCube By-Laws and Charter; and 4) Develop and Maintain a Viable Architecture and Concept of Operations that Enable the Realization of the Goals and Objectives of the EarthCube Vision. The Governance Framework also outlined a series of guiding principles and long-term governance recommendations. Virtual and in-person engagement of more than 2,500 EarthCube stakeholders generated additional information on user data needs, web requirements, governance input, and more. Virtual community engagement was conducted through EarthCube social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), the EarthCube website (www.earthcube.ning.com) and through a series of virtual workshops. In-person community engagement was conducted through workshops, presentations and poster sessions at additional professional geosciences conferences and EarthCube events, including End-User Workshops. An EarthCube exhibit booth at professional geosciences conferences (the Geological Society of America 2012 Annual Meeting, the American Geophysical Union 2012 Fall Meeting, the American Meteorological Society 2013 Annual Meeting, and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography 2013 Aquatic Sciences Meeting) engaged participants in discussions on EarthCube and EarthCube governance, distributed informational materials, and conducted an EarthCube Personal Data Survey, in which 334 individuals representing more than 60 subfields across the geosciences, cyber-sciences, biology, science policy, and other fields, answered questions about how they access and use data as part of their scientific workflows. This survey supplemented the Governance Framework by providing insights into stakeholders’ perceptions on data access, use, re-use, sharing, and curation—key governance issues for EarthCube. The work begun by the Governance Framework Project Team is being continued by an EarthCube Test Governance Project Team, currently in the process of carrying out the final two steps called for in the Governance Roadmap. The Test Governance Team is conducting a more complete exploration and community vetting of potential governance models for EarthCube, culminating in a charter, by-laws and terms of reference (Step 3), that will be used to guide the implementation of a prototype governance framework (Step 4); in addition to the community engagement and outreach activities initially undertaken by the Governance Framework Project Team. As the first of its kind, EarthCube can be viewed as not only a scenario for cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences, but for all domain sciences. If successful, the governance framework that EarthCube eventually adopts should be replicable and scalable for other scientific domains.
