[Environmental] A Round of Introductions?

[David Siedband]

I'd like to invite everyone who wants to, to introduce themselves and  
their work.  I'm willing to go first to break the ice.

I've been working with environmental groups here in California since  
2001.  My business partner, Kevin Wolf, started thinking about these  
tools a bit earlier.  In 1994 he participated in a project called  
WaterOnLine, which was a think tank created by the State of  
California to visualize ways that technology could be applied to  
decision support around water issues.  This group envisioned a  
science-fiction future where all water-related materials were  
catalogued online using standards that allowed interoperability, and  
environmental decisions were made transparent through online  
archiving of (listserv/forum) discussions referenced against their  
supporting materials.

It took a few years for the open source tools to become sufficeintly  
advanced to make this a cost-effective possibility.  In 2001 I  
started building Watershed Portals, a web library for environmental  
content such as projects, documents, data, images, events, people,  
organizations, etc.  We developed this initially in Zope+MySQL/ 
PostgreSQL.  Eventually we realized that a web library is just one  
flavor of CMS and that many of the things we were building were  
either already built, or much easier to build in Plone.

Today we work with a wide range of groups, primarily NGOs and  
government entities. These groups all share the common thread of  
needing tools to support their planning and decision making  
processes. In the process of supporting these individual efforts, we  
have made an effort to build a common set of tools that many of our  
projects use.  In Plone-speak, a big part of this toolkit is a set of  
Archetypes Content-Types that serve as base classes which are then  
sub-classed to create custom software adapted to the needs of our  
clients.  As an example, we have a resource base class which we have  
sub classes into a k12-Education resource-type and a Pollinator  
Research resource-type.  We also have a collection of templates and  
macros which we re-use as much as possible when building new sites.   
We're also developing standards help our web libraries exchange and  
aggregate metadata and content, though Deanne is a better person to  
introduce that work.

who wants to go next? :)

cheers
--
David