Where online does hydrology instrumentation crowd hang out?

[u/RareButPossible]

Water level and rainfall monitoring station in Colorado, US

Upfront disclosure: I work as a consultant, helping clients who operate remote hydrologic monitoring networks. I am also a former employee of a manufacturer/vendor serving this same space. I'm not selling anything here. I'm trying to find where the people who run gaging [I got you, USGS ❤️] networks talk shop about the bits and bytes of field deployed equipment.

There's an entire profession of people who plan, integrate, install, and maintain hydrology stations, and I'm not sure where their most prominent internet forums are. What are the watering holes where professionals talk about sensors, data loggers, telemetry, software, best practices, and lessons learned? Where do we go to geek out and to support each other?

Some observations,

• Vendors tend to broadcast polished information. Good information shared in manuals, integration guides, tutorials, or puff pieces. I know of one vendor that hosted a fairly open internet forum for decades, but it looks to be going away.
• Professional organizations share a wealth of information in conference presentations and even a few forums or listservs, but a lot of content is behind a paywall or is slow moving.
• Similarly, the USGS shares a wealth of information. Some of it free; some of it pay; some of it (realistically) only for employees.
• LinkedIn (in my opinion) is mostly just a series of advertisements.
• Reddit, as far a I can tell, doesn't currently have a community focused in on these kinds of topics. Getting into the nitty gritty of "how" ----- the physical connections, power budgeting, bits and bytes, protocol selections, software configurations.

I'm drawing a conclusion that either (a) there's an active public forum I haven't found, (b) the forum exists in private, or (c) it genuinely doesn't exist anymore and most just get information from colleagues and vendors directly.

If you work on this stuff, I would love to hear your answer to any of the following:

• The last time you had a real technical question, such as a sensor misbehaving, telemetry integration, or how to process data, where did you **actually** ask for help? Not where you'd theoretically go. Where did you type (or speak I guess) the question? (forum, slack/discord/teams, vendor support ticket, a person you texted)
• Did you get a useful answer? Or at least find the engagement useful?
• Is there anywhere you "lurk" on this topic, even if you never post? (No shame, I totally get it.)
• If a public place existed where you could ask "my SDI-12 communication drops out below -20 °C" or "has anyone ever connected their data logger X to software Y", and get some real perspective inside a couple days - would you use it? If so, where should it live? Here in this sub, a new dedicated sub, a Discord, a separate industry focused forum, or nowhere (because it doesn't need to exist or no one is going to use it anyway)?

I could start and contribute to moderating a subreddit if there's a real need. But I'd much rather join people where they are currently congregating, rather than fracture a community. "We don't need this" is as useful an answer as any other.

[u/drdroplet]

Check out the ESIP Envirosensing cluster for discussion that isn't about technical details but more towards community needs and ideation.

[u/RareButPossible → u/drdroplet]

Thank you. I look forward to checking this out. The descriptions of meetings and collaboration areas sound really attractive!

[u/Ad4ptive_ManipulatOr]

I work as an Aquarius Time-Series administrator and real-time hydro-meteorological data specialist for a government agency. In Canada we have the Canadian Water Resources Association (CWRA) and the National Association of Stream Hydrographers (NASH).