What is CoG?

CoG is a multi-institutional project that seeks to examine, within the Earth sciences, the organizational characteristics of community software projects and to create software infrastructure to support their efficient governance and operation.

The name CoG comes from the idea of many gears interlocking in order to make a system work.  CoG is also short for "Commodity Governance" - the idea that there are organizational and management elements that many projects share, and that exposing and linking information associated with these elements is a way to make a complicated "community of communities" run efficiently.

The CoG project created the CoG environment - this website - as a way of promoting good governance across numerous projects and organizations in the Earth system sciences.  Its structure encourages information sharing among projects, transparency and trust.

The CoG Collaboration Environment

The CoG environment is designed for teams that are developing complex Earth science products.

A CoG page is split into three areas:  Services, Project Metadata, and Custom Content.

• The yellow Services area on the right side of the page supports data search, metadata services, and visualization, creation of project networks and network views, and project communications.
• The dark teal Project Metadata at the top of the page offers structured views of project information.  Here users can create a profile of their project, and look at consolidated views of information across their project network.
• The light blue Custom Content area on the left of the page is an easy to use wiki environment that enables projects to create their own unique presence on CoG.

The administrative interfaces to CoG are simple for distributed groups to manage and offer different degrees of project and web page visibility and user privileges.

Learn more about CoG features ...