[Environmental] A Round of Introductions?

BC Capps BC at OpenSpaceCouncil.org
Wed Dec 20 22:17:24 UTC 2006


Hello everyone,

In general, I would classify myself as a "Plone promoter" as opposed  
to a "developer". I have enough technical knowledge to often get  
myself into trouble, but rarely have enough to get myself back out.

Professionally, I'm very active with open space protection and  
riparian restoration throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. About 18  
months ago, we moved the Bay Area Open Space Council to Plone and  
haven't looked back. Although we are still using a fairly stock site,  
I have very high hopes for the near future:

http://OpenSpaceCouncil.org/

In addition, I am working with several other organizations to create  
a Bay Area Watershed Network / Forum / Council and have set up a  
basic site that the group can grow into over time:

http://BayAreaWatersheds.org/

Both of these efforts are partnership-based, and our Web sites must  
benefit both the parent organization as well as our partners. Along  
these lines, I am hoping to offer "workspaces" for various  
committees, working groups, and/or members. We are looking at a  
fairly basic set-up to start (email listserv, shared task manager,  
document sharing) with thoughts on using a more comprehensive product  
over time. Any input on successful "community building" tools would  
be very welcome.

Thanks again to David for getting the ball rolling on intros. Looking  
forward to hearing from others...

Happy Holidays!
BC Capps
Conservation Associate
Bay Area Open Space Council

On Dec 12, 2006, at 6:53 PM, Josh Livni wrote:

> Thanks for stepping up to the ice-breaking plate, David.
>
> As for me, I run a GIS (mapping) and web development company in  
> Seattle, and a lot of my work involves open source software,  
> including Plone.
>
> I've also had the opportunity to work with a lot of local non- 
> profits, both as a contractor with NPower and One/Northwest, and as  
> an analyst at CommEn Space, a local non-profit that focused largely  
> on providing GIS services to environmental organizations.
>
> Right now, in my increasingly little spare time, I'm trying to  
> think of interesting ways to provide GIS oriented web services to  
> worthwhile organizations.  A simple example might be basic list  
> management tools that allow you to attribute your members with  
> location data, such as voting districts.
>
> A slightly more tricky-to-explain tool I'm working on will allow  
> organizations to opt-in, and semi-anonymously share member location  
> data, allowing them to see aggregated stats and locations of  
> members that other opted-in groups have, in overlapping areas  
> (without giving up any actual member data).
>
> And, of course, I'm really interested in trying to allow  
> organizations to more easily share (mash-up?) their spatial data  
> with other organizations.  In GIS, we often have the problem of  
> trying to relate lots of disparate but interesting data sources.   
> To this end, some of the standards that David mentioned regarding  
> the exchange and aggregation of metadata is really interesting to me.
>
> Cheers,
>
>   -Josh
>
>
>
> David Siedband wrote:
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Environmental mailing list
>> Environmental at lists.plone.org
>> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/environmental
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Environmental at lists.plone.org
> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/environmental



------------
BC Capps
Conservation Associate
Bay Area Open Space Council
1259 McConnell Avenue
Santa Rosa, CA, 95404
707-569-0515
mailto:BC at OpenSpaceCouncil.org
http://OpenSpaceCouncil.org/


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