Southern Ocean ecosystem scientists are participating in a number of innovative initiatives that are assembling information, data and ideas to progress their work as a community (within institutions, nationally and multinationally). Much of this information is useful to the community as a whole, long before it achieves a standard for publication in the peer-reviewed literature. Some of this work may never be suitable for the usual scientific publications. This wiki provides a more formal repository for organising and sharing this material, thereby making it searchable and readily available. It also provides a forum for those that wish to share their ideas without the time to pursue those ideas to full publication in more conventional media.
As a moderated wiki, it is designed to have recognised standards that will be equivalent to peer-review publications and therefore allow it to be citable, even though some work may be no more than an opinion piece on a page. Combined with these standards, the governance structure is intended to provide assurance to the users of the wiki that the information is from a reputable source.
The ability to have different security and participation in each page means that the wiki can be used at different levels of development by the community. The intention is that all pages are developed with the intention of eventually being placed in the public domain.
The attached child pages briefly review a number of approaches to the development of scientific discussion groups/community work.