Exchanges
An Exchange is a branded, curated catalog of dataset listings owned by a single organization. The owner organization controls which organizations can browse the catalog and which can publish to it, making exchanges the right tool for sharing data with a specific set of partner organizations, or between several organizations that belong to the same institution.
Every exchange has its own landing page at app.earthmover.io/{org}/exchange/{exchange-slug}, where {org} is the name of the owner organization and {exchange-slug} is the exchange's URL identifier, chosen when the exchange is created.
Finding an Exchange
Exchanges in the sidebar shows one card per exchange your organization can reach, badged Owned by this org, Can post, or Can view. Open a card to reach that exchange's landing page. Every member of the organization sees the row; it appears once the organization can reach an exchange other than the Earthmover Marketplace, which keeps its own Marketplace row.
Organization administrators get two more places. Being an administrator isn't enough on its own; each has a further condition:
- Publish → Exchanges creates exchanges and opens the settings page of one your organization owns. The page appears only once Earthmover enables exchanges for your organization — contact Earthmover to have your first exchange set up. See Managing Exchanges.
- Analytics → Exchanges charts your listings' metrics, one partner exchange at a time. It appears under the same condition as the Exchanges row above.
Browsing and Subscribing
An exchange's landing page shows its banner, logo, and description, a Featured Datasets carousel, and a searchable catalog of every published listing under All Datasets. Each provider on the exchange also gets a profile page collecting its listings.
Subscribing to a listing on an exchange works exactly like subscribing on the Marketplace: the dataset appears as a read-only repo in your organization. Because that means creating a repo, you need repo-write access in the organization you subscribe into. See the Data Users guide for the subscription walkthrough.
Exchanges and the Marketplace
The Earthmover Marketplace is itself an exchange, operated by Earthmover. Every exchange uses the same listings, browsing pages, and subscription machinery, so everything you know from the Marketplace carries over: providers publish listings, users subscribe, and each subscription appears as a read-only repo in the subscriber's organization.
The difference is visibility and control. The Marketplace is public and managed by Earthmover, which decides who can publish to it. On your own exchange, your organization decides both which organizations can see the catalog and which can publish to it.
Core Concepts
- Owner organization: The organization that created the exchange. The owner organization manages branding, membership, and featured listings, and can always publish listings to its own exchange.
- Member organization: An organization granted access to the exchange by the owner organization, with either a read or post role. See Membership and Roles below.
- Listings: Published dataset offerings. Each listing pairs a repo with a name, description, README, and license. Exchanges and the Marketplace share the same listing concept, and every listing belongs to exactly one exchange, chosen when the listing is created.
- Visibility: Controls who can discover the exchange and browse its listings. See Visibility Levels below.
Membership and Roles
Exchange membership is granted to organizations, not individual users. Every user in a member organization gets that organization's level of access, whatever their role inside the organization. There are two roles:
| Role | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Read | Browse the exchange's listings and subscribe to them. |
| Post | Publish and manage listings on the exchange. Includes everything in Read. |
The owner organization always has both roles. Membership is granted by the owner organization, by invitation: the owner creates an invitation for a role and sends you its code, you redeem the code on behalf of one of your organizations, and the owner approves that organization. Redeeming a code grants nothing by itself — the owner's approval is what creates the membership. See Inviting an Organization for the owner's side and Redeeming an Invitation You Received for the recipient's.
There is no way to request access unprompted, so if your organization needs access to an exchange and has no invitation, contact the exchange's owner organization.
Creating an exchange, configuring it, managing its members, and creating a listing all require user management permission. Browsing an exchange and subscribing to its listings need no administrator role.
Visibility Levels
An exchange you create has one of two visibility levels, chosen when you create it and editable at any time:
| Visibility | Landing page | Listings |
|---|---|---|
| Listed | Anyone who visits the exchange's URL sees its branding, name, and description | Visible to member organizations only; everyone else sees an empty catalog |
| Private | Hidden: non-members get a "not found" page | Visible to member organizations only |
Either way, the catalog's contents stay private: only member organizations ever see the listings on your exchange. The choice is about the exchange itself. Pick Listed to advertise that the catalog exists, or Private to keep the whole exchange invisible to non-members.
Exchange Customization
The owner organization can brand the exchange's landing page with a banner image, a logo, an accent color, and a Markdown welcome message. It can also curate featured listings, which lead the landing page in a carousel. See Managing Exchanges for how to configure both.
Next Steps
- Managing Exchanges: create and brand an exchange, manage member organizations, and curate featured listings.
- Publishing to an Exchange: publish your organization's listings to an exchange you've been invited to.