I find all aspects of my work enlightening: working in large and small collaborations, interacting with diverse groups of people, building tools to address the needs of different communities, engaging with researchers, and trying to understand the similarities and differences in data practices across epistemic cultures.

I value the diversity of opportunities that my work gives me. At the same time, it is hard to act on different opportunities and go outside of academic circles. So far I have been working mostly with researchers, other data curators, and managers at research institutions. I am looking forward to engaging more with the second group of data users that I mentioned above—those who benefit from data availability but do not necessarily collect or disseminate data. I am interested in such projects as citizen science or participatory data stewardship, but I recently realized that such projects may take more planning, time, energy, and so on.

I had only a few preliminary encounters with non-academic data users, but as I try to get more information about possible ways of engagement, it is very interesting to see how channels and modes of communication as well as perspectives on data may differ. For example, I recently had a conversation with an executive director of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners ESIP (http://www.esipfed.org/) about the importance of sharing earth science data with users such as police offices, disaster management forces, and so on. She had a great idea of organizing an event within the ESIP annual meeting, where such users would come and work together on a shared set of data, using scenarios or something else. Possible outcomes could be a framework, a set of requirements, or even infrastructure modules that would help to use earth science data in non-research contexts. As we discussed this possible project, I realized that most of the existing recommendations of how to engage users in data stewardship are for working with researchers and addressing their needs. We need to address the needs of other user groups so that they become agents in data stewardship as well. One interesting example of that sort of project is a recent data management guide for citizen scientists ((DataONE Public Participation in Scientific Research Working Group, “Data Management Guide for Citizen Scientists,” February, 2013, http://www.dataone.org/sites/all/documents/DataONE-PPSR-DataManagementGuide.pdf.)).