Most of our working groups are now up and running and have started work on the activities defined in their action plans. Thanks to all of the technical chairs for their hard work in getting the groups started and getting their wiki pages set up in the Earthdata Collaboration Environment (ECE). If you have not yet joined one of the working groups, please to contact the relevant technical chair directly (contact details in the ECE) to let them know of your interest or let me know if you have any problem contacting the right person.

Standards Interest Area

The Standards Interest Area groups (Datacasting, Preservation Content, OpenSearch, GeoTIFF, and KML standard RFCs) are a little different to the other working groups. These groups are drafting or reviewing Requests for Comment (RFCs) for the relevant standards. David Cuddy and Saurabh Channan are currently working on the KML and GeoTIFF RFCs. When these RFCs get to an appropriate state, we will be inviting members of ESDSWG to provide additional input before submitting the RFCs for review. When the RFCs are ready to be formally submitted to the standards review process, ESDSWG will be working with the ESDIS Standards Office to identify members of the technical working group (TWG) for the review.

Earthdata Collaboration Environment (ECE)

The ECE is be the center of our communications strategy for the working groups. I am encouraging all of the working groups to make use of the ECE to post activity plans, draft/final documents, and regular updates on their activities (however brief) to the ECE. If you want to find out about one of the working groups then the ECE is the first place to go. If your working group is making use of external collaboration resources (e.g. Google Docs) as part of your activities then please post a link to the relevant item in the ECE so that ESDSWG members can find it.

I encourage the technical chairs to post their working groups events (e.g. telecons) to the ESDSWG calendar on the ECE so that everyone has visibility of what is going on and we can avoid scheduling conflicts. You can subscribe to the calendar (read only) from Outlook, Google Calendar, Thunderbird etc. using iCal links – details at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/TEAMCAL/Subscribing+to+Team+Calendars

Members of the ESDSWG groups have edit permissions to all of the ESDSWG pages. Feel free to use the commenting, liking, survey, etc. capabilities of Confluence are part of your working group activities. Ross and Minnie can help advise us if there is something that you want to do in the ECE but are not sure how.

Be aware that, by default, all ESDSWG pages are visible to other ECE uses. This will eventually include a number of non-NASA users with URS profiles. Please be careful about posting information that you may not want to be public (e.g. telecon numbers and passcodes or personal phone numbers) to unrestricted pages. If necessary, you can change the restrictions on individual pages so that they are only visible to members of the ESDSWG group. Let me know if you need help with this.

If you don’t yet have an ECE account then please contact me and I can help you get set up.

ACCESS and MEaSUREs Projects

Many of you are contributing to ESDSWG as part of your ACCESS or MEaSUREs project commitments. Please let me know if you are contributing to one of the working groups as part of your ACCESS/MEaSUREs commitment so that I can make sure that your project gets appropriate credit for your participation.

 

Please let me know if you need any help getting set up with the working groups or if you have any suggestions for how we can improve the operation of the working groups.

Thanks.

--Steve