Nations to share Earth data

"Forty-nine countries have agreed to participate in a 10-year project to collect and share thousands of measurements of the Earth," reports the Associated Press (8/18/2004), "ranging from weather to streamflow to ground tremors to air pollution....'The Earth needs a full-body scan,' says Conrad Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"The new system could help pinpoint coastal areas affected by erosion, report changes in ocean currents that affect the movement of fish, provide real-time updates on the potential loss in earthquake zones, monitor pollution threats to local water resources and track the change from vegetation to developed land to study the impact of urban growth. Michael Leavitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, says the 'benefits are limited only by our own imaginations.'

"Much of the data to be shared is already collected and the new effort will be to combine the collections systems so that the information can be easily shared among the participants and used to both understand current conditions and forecast the future. 'We have been able to make computers work together. The challenge of the 21st century is to get people to work together,' says Leavitt. 'It will not be the technology that limits is, it will be the sociology,' he adds, noting the problem will be overcoming bureaucracy, politics, and turf."

Comment: It's easy to imagine how to pull this off technically. But putting it into practice requires the same types of changes in workflow and organizational practice, not to mention buy-in by all parties, that we face in public broadcasting. I'm posting this item as an interesting parallel.