Dear All, Recently, though their multidisciplinary funding programs such as the NSF EarthCube and Software Infrastructure for Sustainable Innovation, federal agencies have started emphasizing investments in data and software related research. This may be a good chance for our community to identify and address any critical needs and the most important opportunities in terms of development of scientific software for mineral and environmental sciences. To enable exploration of these new cyberinfrastructure-focused funding opportunities we would like to propose two initiatives: We would like to invite you to take part in an online survey about custom software needs in your research. The survey can be accessed by following this link: http://freeonlinesurveys.com/s.asp?sid=jjgtjeekvxd4yp8426895 The purpose of this survey is to analyze the level of interest and need for federally funded development of software for data processing and analysis in mineral and environmental sciences, with particular emphasis on experimental science at National User Facilities. We created a new interest group, called Software for Mineral Sciences within the EarthCube Workspace. You can access the webpage of this interest group by following this link: http://workspace.earthcube.org/software-mineral-sciences All members are free to post new content, so if you have any comments, needs, dreams or wishes, please, feel free to express them. If you have interest in development and customization of scientific software, and would either like to participate in collaborative activities, bring attention to your own projects, or just stay informed about new projects and initiatives, please register with EarthCube and subscribe to our special interest group. We plan to make the results of the survey publicly available and hope that they will be useful to strengthen the case of any software-focused proposal submitted from our community. With best regards, Przemek Dera, Lars Ehm, Bin Chen and Aaron Wolf