The latest October 2008 Newsletter is now released. Click here to read it. If you have any comments or feedback you’d like to leave, feel free to email us or, likewise, post a comment below!.

The Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) has indicated on multiple occasions that the current CBP suite of models is going to be phased out after 2010-2011. This means that now it may be about the right time to start a community wide discussion about what the next Chesapeake Modeling and Decision Support System (CMDSS) may look like. The CCMP has proposed to organize a community effort to decide on the goals, functions, architecture and structure of the future system.

We would like to invite you to engage in an open discussion on this issue. We should include researchers that do modeling, monitoring, and data processing, as well as users that can help to identify the particular problems and goals that this system should serve. We think that Open Community Research is the ultimate level of collaborative thinking and modeling, when the project goals are decided in an open environment including researchers and users. Projects are open-ended and ongoing, while research and modeling goals can be adjusted to the changing needs of the users.

We hope that if we can build a joint vision of the future CMDSS during the next few years and start designing its components and overall architecture, we will be in a better position to make a smooth transition from the existing CBP suite of models to the new and expanded framework.