Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) is an open, networked community that brings together science, data and information technology practitioners. ESIP is supported by NASA, NOAA, USGS and 110+ member organizations all working together to collaboratively share research, funding opportunities, and to network with one another. According to ESIP their mission is to foster connection between “the functional sectors of observation, research, application, education and use of Earth science.”
In fact, NASA was one of the founding members of ESIP, because they wanted to invite others to experiment with Earth data for research and commercial purposes. This wasn’t terribly surprising to me, because NASA is one of the government organizations that IdeaScale has written about repeatedly, because of their commitment to collaboration.
But now research is emerging that shows that the more connected an idea is, the more likely it is to be transformative or disruptive to an industry. This is because the amount of information we each contain in our own brain is inherently limited and the more diversity of opinion, insight, and information that you can bring to an idea, the more likely it is to improve. It will serve more people, have deeper relevance, and change from its original idea.
ESIP’s mission naturally aligns to this collaboration best practice as their key goal for all of their members is connection. Say you have a researcher who’s gathered a great deal of data for one of their experiments, they can then connect them to a government agency who can use that data to inform policy.
But all that connection takes time and before using IdeaScale, humans were acting as matchmakers between data, researchers, and projects. Now, with IdeaScale, it is possible to bring those people and projects together in the same place and they’ve made it part of their ongoing process.
This blog post was originally published on the IdeaScale blog here.
