At the Surface Ocean CO2 Variability and Vulnerability workshop at UNESCO, Paris in April 2007, participants agreed to assemble a global surface CO2 data set of all publicly available ocean surface fCO2 data in a common format. This is an activity that has been called for by several international groups for many years, and has now become a priority activity for the marine carbon community. This data set will serve as a foundation upon which the community will continue to build in the future, based on agreed data and metadata formats and standard 1st level quality-control procedures, building on earlier agreements established at the 2004 Tsukuba workshop on Ocean Surface pCO2 Data Integration and Database Development.