In initiating the Unidata Program, scientists hoped to meet common needs for accessing and using atmospheric data in education and research using state-of-the-art technology. As communications technologies have advanced, Unidata has increasingly become a “virtual community” in which participants cooperate, collaborate, and share a variety of resources, including data. The Unidata experience—how it resembles and differs from other concepts of location-independent collaborations—may serve as a model for building and supporting communities of researchers and educators with common needs for data and the tools to use them.
* Unidata Program Center, Boulder, Colorado. The Unidata Program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
+National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia.
