Technology in Water and Agriculture

Knowledge Sharing - Technology in Water and Agriculture

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

Okay, the second part of the question was, given the investment in technology level, developing countries need to benefit from those technologies developed in the United States. How can we achieve knowledge sharing? How can we achieve knowledge sharing and information dissemination? That's similar to the gentleman from the World Bank's question. Do you have some specific ideas? For example, Google Earth is a great platform for knowledge sharing. How can your data be more widely shared in open source types of way, beyond the data itself?

Right. In fact, some of the websites I had on my first slide are ways that we share our modeling technologies. We not only develop the data -- all the data is online, you can download it anywhere in the world, at any time -- but we also share our source code, we share our algorithms. And we work with agencies to bring the data to you. So we know that you've got your own systems, you've got your own needs. And so our objective is to customize our products in science for your individual needs. And we've done that already with -- I mentioned the Air Force Weather Agency, they're working with our code right now. It's going to become operational -- or it has become operational. So those are examples where we sort-of give back. And those sorts of things could be repeated by working with us to accelerate transitioning the technology, and the science.