IV. How the community works.

As mentioned above, the Earthworm effort was created to be a cooperative effort amongst regional networks, with the USGS acting as a 'focal point', given its long term stability. Initially, the Northern California Seismic Network at Menlo Park was the center of development and support, and was able to provide support to other Earthworm installations as needed.

However, the Earthworm community has long since outgrown this mode of operations. With over thirty installed sites it has become an international community effort. The role of USGS personnel has shifted from being the sole authors and supporters, toward being "Earthworm Central": a clearing house offering coordination of development and support efforts, control over global technical issues, and point of first contact for new installations, as well as software development. "Earthworm Central" is located at the USGS in Golden Colorado, and is being operated by Barbara Bogaert (bogaert@usgs.gov) and Alex Bittenbinder (alex@usgs.gov).

That is, it has become less of a 'free lunch', and more of a 'pot-luck dinner'. The common pattern is that a new installation will initially be a net consumer of software and support, supplied by various other installations, and usually coordinated by "Earthworm Central". The expectation is that as the site gains experience with the system, it offer resources to support others.

Such 'resources' include:

- Seismology support to assist with tuning network-specific algorithms (picker, associator, locator).
- Programmer time to generate new modules and fix bugs.
- Software engineering support to assist new installations and help analyze malfunctions.
- Hardware designs and products for data acquisition and remote installations.
  - Documentation.
  - Pre-release Q/A testing.