Crossing the chasm together - notes from ESIP July 2025 meeting

My biggest takeaway from ESIP (Earth Science Information Partners) is the power of small, interconnected open communities that can build and innovate through trust and deep expertise. Our work will continue to be a connector and supporter of people as we build. “Find people whose life paths didn’t look like yours to cross chasms together with” was a slide from Yuvi (2i2c)’s talk during our Crossing the Chasm session, and it really encapsulates so much of the vibe at the ESIP July 2025 meeting. Here is an incomplete account of what happened.

Quicklinks:

• ESIP July 2025 sched page
• Crossing the chasm slides
• Archive your first or second data set slides
• earthaccess Dec 15 Hackday — Details & registration
• ESIP’s FUNding Friday blog post

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Julie came home from the ESIP summer meeting feeling proud of the building we’re doing with partners in the open source science ecosystem. This ecosystem continues to expand and I continue to learn from these communities and recharge. It was an emotional and fast-paced week, full of absolute highs of learning with dear colleagues and really crushing lows from the absence of so many federal and federally funded colleagues who were denied attendance. I came home with absolute appreciation for my colleagues – the Openscapes team, mentors, and community — many of whom were not physically at ESIP but who were enagaged, collaborating, and supporting each other remotely.

Openscapes’ main message at ESIP was that we’re still here, and we’re supporting the work. We are supporting NASA Earthdata, NOAA Fisheries, and California Water Boards teams most directly, and many other groups indirectly through making all our work open source, and prioritizing storytelling, and connecting ideas and people across ecosystems. At the same time, we are checking in and adapting as we need to to support this work.

There was a lot going on the whole week. One of the reasons we were able to step up to co-lead several sessions (below) was because our team’s and community’s social infrastructure of trust and kindness is mapped on to our systems of Google docs and meetings and GitHub, and these really supported folks with cascading effects in ways we will never know. You’ll see that in the earthaccess hackday FUNding Friday timeline below.

You also see it in Eli Holmes’ Crossing the Chasm talk (slides in Quicklinks above). She and I have been iterating this talk all year with NOAA leadership audiences and I still learn something new every time Eli reflects, and I love it. She talks about social and operational chasms that prevent ideas from spreading through a population. When she participates in working groups across NOAA about Data Modernization, she hears what the policies are, what the goals are, and she says: “Ah, this is what the skill-building needs to be. This is the behavior change we need” and then turns around to do it. Using the Diffusion of Innovation theory: she thought deeply about the 13.5% of early adopters needed to cross the chasm – in 2021 we weren’t there yet. She also thought deeply about Early Adopters, who are a personality type. They do not have a shared not a skill set. They hear something and turn around and do it and then teach others. They are rare, and often shackled. Supporting them brightens them and they can contribute to real change, and that’s how we’ve Crossed the Chasm at NOAA Fisheries. Hearing Yuvi then talk about finding chasms to cross, that “A group somewhere may be missing exactly just your skillset to cross a chasm” was incredibly inspiring, as was Jen Schopf’s story of stepping up when people ask for help crossing chasms.

Openscapes “Crossing the Chasm” session with Eli Holmes, Yuvi, Julie Lowndes, Jen Schopf, with Yuvi’s slide on the screen

A peek at the sessions Openscapes co-led:

• Consistent, reproducible workflows for geospatial stewardship, with Rich Signell, Julia Lowndes, Brianna Pagán, Kate Wing, Carl Boettiger, Jed Sundwall. This session aimed to create consistent, reproducible workflows for others to learn and use.

• Crossing the chasm: amplifying success stories about co-creating across institutions, with Julie Lowndes, Eli Holmes, Jennifer Schopf, Yuvi. (slides). This session shared four stories of the Diffusion of Innovation theory in practice: at NOAA Fisheries, at NASA Earthdata 2021-2022, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center by saving 50 years of astronomy data with Arecibo, and Finding Chasms to Cross: JupyterHubs at Scale from Wikimedia to UC Berkeley to your Research Institution.

  • Note: since NASA Mentors were denied attendance, we prepared a whole Community Call for them to share the following week: earthaccess — helping users leverage the awesomeness of NASA Earthdata

• Archive your first or second data set, with Julie Lowndes, Joseph Gum, Eli Holmes, Kate Wing, Rachael Blake. (slides) This was a hands-on companion session to “Case Studies of Transitioning Datasets from Specialist to Generalist Repositories”. The vision here was be to help people figure out where and how to archive their first or second data set, using Zenodo as an explicit example.

• Unconf to prepare for the NASEM’s Future Directions for Earth Observations and Data Stewardship conference in December (details & registration), with Steve Diggs, Kate Wing, Rachael Blake.

• FUNding Friday pitch for an earthaccess hackday - this was successful!

earthaccess hackday on Dec 15!

We are hosting an earthaccess hackday on Dec 15! The goal is to build a prototype and roadmap for “Growing the Family” by integrating earthaccess with non-NASA Earth science data (NOAA, USGS, Copernicus, and more!). This is supported through the ESIP’s FUNding Friday initiative, and is co-hosted by Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum (CNG) and Openscapes. Please join us! Details & registration.

ESIP’s FUNding Friday is a way to pitch an idea and win $5K for an idea. Participants from the conference make posters the evening before at a social hour. You can read about this in ESIP’s FUNding Friday blog post. In Seattle 2025, we won! We pitched an idea through song; lyrics below, along with a 1.5 min (video), and then summarized:

earthaccess is a Python library that enables authentication, search, and access for NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code. We see great potential for growing the family to include data from NOAA, USGS, and Copernicus in Europe. We would use FUNding Friday funds for a hackday, virtual and in person, at AGU in December. We expect a workable prototype and roadmap in an afternoon. Thank you.

What follows in the timeline is a way to document what we did, and to credit non-traditional contributors and contributions. Putting our pitch together was a joyful collaboration with contributors from NASA, NOAA, Intertidal Agency, Development Seed, OPeNDAP, 2i2c, Openscapes, and passers-by. This would absolutely not have happened without hours and years of prior connections, collaborations, trust- and community-building, and technical and social interactions among the four presenters and our collective web of smart, caring humans.

Timeline to developing our FUNding Friday pitch song

Showing the power of the social infrastructure and open community collaboration, with folks contributing asyncronously and synchronously, remotely and in person at a conference as they are available, and contributing different skills and handoffs to deliver on a short deadline.

July 23: Scoping ideas

• Aaron Friesz reminds Julie Lowndes of FUNding Friday, Julie thinks of earthaccess. Wonders a low-key way to get input about what is a good scope to pitch for earthaccess from the NASA Openscapes Mentors. Ah, they are meeting in 5 minutes at a regular Mentors Call, Julie writes a note in the agenda doc.
• Stef Butland (Openscapes), Danny Kaufman (ASDC), Amy Steiker (NSIDC DAAC), Liz Neeley (Openscapes), Mikala Beig (NSIDC DAAC), Michele Thornton (ORNL DAAC) meet during the regular NASA Openscapes Mentors Call and see Julie’s note:

“What’s a small something/Earthaccess feature to pitch at ESIP :)” - Julie Lowndes

• They scope ideas publicly in https://github.com/nsidc/earthaccess/discussions/1054; other contributors including Matt Fisher (UC Berkeley) and Eli Holmes (NOAA Fisheries) weigh in.

July 24: Poster-making

• Eli Holmes arrives first, grabs some pens, starts drawing earthaccess logo as a first step. Others join, decide minimal text. Max Jones suggests “Growing the Family”, helps with taping the word “access” with Kate Wing’s white tape. Thumbs up from from Brianna Pagán, Miguel Jimenez-Urias.
• Eli Holmes has to leave. Before she does, suggests we sing a song. “We’ve got the whole world in our hands”
• User testing: what does the poster say? “access”. Ah, we need to redo “earth” so it reads “earthaccess”
• Joe Kennedy and Julie Lowndes start writing lyrics. Steve Young (retired EPA) comes by, asks questions that establish what we’ll use the funding for, timeline, and outcomes. Joe Kennedy is an excellent songwriter.

Poster making with ESIP friends

July 25: The pitch

• Julie Lowndes shows Kate Wing the lyrics at breakfast, with 15 mins to go. Kate, who actually sings, notices immediately we’re missing a line in verse 1. Suggest an addition, and rewrites in larger font for the group
• Joe Kennedy, Julie Lowndes, Kate Wing, Eli Holmes sing. Kate Wing hums the note to get us started, and is a pro at helping us read the actual lines we are supposed to read, and hiding papers shaking from nervousness.
• The votes are in, we have won $5K!
• v0.3 refined live by Kate Wing

Singing about earthaccess

Lyrics

v0.3 (best to sing if the opportunity rises again)

Hello. We are earthaccess. We are growing the family.

We’ve got NASA CMR in our hands
We’ve got an open contributor community in our hands
We’re seeing the whole world in separate catalogs
We want the whole world in our hands

We want NOAA CMR in our hands
We want USGS STAC in our hands
We want Copernicus STAC in our hands
We want the whole world in our hands

We want a hackday at AGU in our plans
We want a prototype in an afternoon in our plans
We want a roadmap in an afternoon in our plans
We want the whole world in our hands