Creating Technical Communication Tools

How do you get a complex geoscience idea out of someone's head and transfer it to someone else? Furthermore, how do you do that efficiently, effectively, and in such a way that it is scalable and open to interrogation?

For the last decade, I have been building tools and communities that have targeted aspects of technical geoscience communication. I wanted to share my reflections and learnings on the commonalities between three projects: Visible Geology, SimPEG, and OMF.


These projects range from educational visualization apps to geophysical research frameworks to industry data standards, I have summarized three principles that I see as important to the success of these projects:

As the components are iteratively defined, the users of your tool can move from static interaction to creative contribution. See my 2015 reflections for more on this.

All three of these principles are interrelated and reinforce each other. For example, the focus on components allows for documentation and testing of those components; this improves accessibility, allowing the community to grow. Furthermore, the necessary combinable components are often revealed through the process of refactoring ideas to support new case-studies that have come in through community contribution or application.

I believe that the technical communication of ideas, be it through prose, conversation or software, is foundational to making progress in our geoscience discipline. As such, the tools that we build to further geocomputing should endeavour to foster accessible, interoperable, combinable communities.

This article was written for 52 Things You Should Know About Geocomputing an initiative by Agile Scientific.