My Nonprofit Reviews

While originally seeded by NASA Earth Science, the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) organization has been an amazing success story of a grass-roots organization and continues to provide huge benefit to a growing cross-section of the Earth science community. No one if funded to participate in ESIP, so all the members and participants are there because they are truly interested in the topics and are willing to share information on their experiences and projects. Since ESIP is independent of any one government agency's control, the information and idea exchange within the group is much more open and free flowing, leading to extremely productive discussions and projects. The free-form nature of pop-up special interest clusters has been a successful way to openly nurture the advancement of technology ideas and discussions - something not typically seen in these types of organizations.

While not solely funded by any one government agency, several of the agencies are beginning to take cues from ESIP activities to decide on the direction of future research opportunities, and the opportunity to network with like-minded researchers at ESIP have led to many successful collaborations - funded and otherwise.

Bottom line is that ESIP has been a great success and has been very instrumental in the advancement of Earth science information technologies and research - making data matter.