Background
A few months ago, I made a pitch about Open Infrastructure for the UN Ocean Decade.
OpenOceanCloud is a vision for a distributed, open-source cyberinfrastructure for data-intensive oceanography research. Basically the idea builds on the sort of open, distributed cloud architecture we have already prototyped within Pangeo. OpenOceanCloud fills a critical need for the Ocean Decade by putting cost-effective, powerful computing power and ocean data access in the hands of anyone. This will accelerate science while radically broadening participation in ocean data science.
We are now seeking broad support from ocean-focused universities, labs, companies, NGOs, etc. to operationalize this way of working. Here is a video with the keynote I gave at the Ocean Decade US Launch Meeting.
We have launched a website at https://openocean.cloud/:
Ocean Decade Laboratories - Sept 16-17
Together with @cgentemann, @lsmith, Erin Robinson, and Andrea McCurdy, we are continuing to push this idea forward. The next step is to take part in the Ocean Decade Laboratories.
The Ocean Decade Laboratories are a creative, interactive platform to support action for the Ocean Decade around the globe.
They are a virtual catalyst of action for the Ocean Decade.
For our “satellite activity”, there will be no meeting. Instead, we are organizing an asynchronous global sprint, leveraging technology to bring together a distributed international community. We will work together to identify the organizational, technical and community activities needed to advance OpenOceanCloud. The outcome of this brainstorming session will be published as a community whitepaper. The sprint will take place from 15 Sepember, 00:00 pm CEST to 17 September, 08:00 pm CEST, with continuous participation from folks around the world in whatever timezone happens to be awake. More details about the whitepaper process can be found at https://openocean.cloud/whitepaper/.
Where we need help!
We plan to use GatherTown to set up a virtual meeting place for sprint partipants. We need volunteer moderators to virtually greet new participants and help them explain the contribution process. We are looking for folks to commit 3 hours to staying online some time during this window. Since the organizing committee is stacked with Americans, we particularly need folks from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania to get good timezone coverage! It’s also very important for us to have a diverse group of moderators. Moderators should ideally have some basic familiarity with oceanography and Pangeo in the cloud, as this is the core concept we are seeking to advance, but beyond that, no particular background or qualifications are needed.
Please 
this message if you are potentially interested in volunteering as a moderator! We will follow up with you via email. Sorry of the details are a bit vague–we will be refining a lot over the next few weeks. Feel free to ask any questions or clarification below, very happy to answer them.
