Bruce Caron has been contracted as the Project Manager for the planning phase of DigitalOcean. This effort is funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation through a grant and a gift to UC Santa Barbara.

DigitalOcean will be a web 2.0 ocean science education social networking infrastructure. This effort marks a bold step toward the next generation of science digital libraries, where science education content flows from researchers and media providers through a nimble infrastructure (that adds real value through semantic coding, commenting, quality marking, and licensing) into dozens of existing outlets where students and the general public can use, reuse, comment, and return their own content to this system.

NMRI and the New Media Studio is looking forward to helping DigitalOcean build a resource that sends ocean science media and information to students around the planet.