With team members in three continents and four U.S. states, we at SkyTruth make extensive use of Slack and video conferencing. This form of remote working saves many hours on commute time and has allowed us to build this great tool from our spots all over the world — but sometimes there’s just nothing like meeting in person. Two weeks ago a number of us working on Global Fishing Watch, including a few colleagues from Oceana and Google,  met in Shepherdstown, WV (SkyTruth’s World Headquarters), for a week-long workshop.

Global Fishing Watch is at an exciting point it its history. We just launched our public-facing website at the U.S. State Department’s Our Ocean’s Conference. Over the next year, we hope to roll out more features to the website, undertake a series of analyses to better understand fishing around the globe, and publish more of our datasets for outside researchers and advocates to use. Stay tuned for more updates. Below are some pictures from the week.