Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration
I’m wrapping up a trip to D.C., where Ecotrust was presented with a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. It is always nice to be in good company, and Mellon awardees have included the Internet Archive and universities that contributed to the creation of the Moodle course management system. This is the first time that the award has been given for an application in ecosystem-based management or conservation.
Following are the remarks by Vint Cerf, presenting the award on behalf of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and of a selection committee that also included Tim Berners-Lee, Tim O’Reilly, and John Seely Brown.
“Some of the most essential data for modeling ecologies involving human behavior patterns are available primarily or only from nonscientists – for instance, fishermen’s records of catches and locations, or species inventories taken by environmental advocates or students and teachers in science classes. Ecotrust developed an open-source platform that accepts user-contributed data and aggregates it into a geospatial database that can be used for research or policy purposes. In selecting [Ecotrust’s] Open OceanMap, the committee noted that the project allows scientists and ordinary citizens to collaborate in conserving an ocean habitat that spans most of the West Coast and that the platform can be adapted to serve any geographic region, making it a potentially powerful tool for citizen science.”
I mentioned the OCEAN toolkit, which includes Open OceanMap, in a perspective on citizen science and social learning.
The full list of this year’s awardees is at Academic Commons.
Update: Amidst the other links in this post, I should have mentioned the Coalition for Networked Information, which hosts the Mellon Award ceremony at its fall meeting.
