Plone as a cyanobacteria tracking site

[yvesm]

Cross-posted to : NGO-plone, Scientific-Plone and Community-gispython lists

Hi All,

A couple of years ago, I built a Plone portal that was aimed at solving the communication and mapping/scientific needs of watershed organizations in our part of the World : Québec.  Watershed organizations here are NGO's and they are called "organisations de bassin versant" (literally "watershed organizations").

The project was based on a few content types I derived from PrimaGIS (see products on Plone.org with category = geospatial) classes and PCL/ZCO, which was the prominent (in my eyes) Zope 2 geospatial stack software then.  Briefly, the content types had to do with Measurement stations, individual measurements and sensor objects.  The site allowed people to pinpoint a map to locate a new station (folderish) and the interface allowed people to create individual measurements in a given station.  Measurements could be plotted as time series [or almost ;-)] using matplotlib and I did a bit of CSS trickery to color code measurement values (in table cells) that exceeded regulatory criteria.  Measurement stations could be viewed both as lists of items in a folder (attribute search) or on a map (spatial search).  The last measurement value would pop up as one hovered above a Station.  The site ran on Plone 2.1.x and I later brought it to a 2.5 instance, but I never followed up on development and the project failed due to both my relative incompetence as a Zope newbie at the time and the lack of buy-in from the stakeholders of the project.

For two summers in a row now, Québec lakes and rivers have begun to show they were sick of all the junk we put in them and as a consequence we have witnessed important cyanobacteria blooming episodes that usually result in people not being allowed to use the lakes for recreational activities and also for domestic purposes (you can't take a shower with the polluted water, etc.).  I was asked if the portal I'd made earlier could be revived to serve as a "knowledge base" for cyanobacteria.  At this point in time, stakeholders are not well defined and user stories even less.  

My idea now is to use Plone as a true participatory environment.  I'm fed up of "web sites" presenting read-only information.  If people want to know about cyanobacteria, they can go to all the Wikipedias around and in my view we do not need to build yet another web site on the issue.  What I envisage instead is an environment where people at large could truly participate in the cyanobacteria blooming monitoring effort.  I'd like to let people living near lakes pinpoint a part of their lakes where cyanobacteria is seen (via GeoRSS ?) and eventually have a map of blooming events, that is a spatio-temporal aggregation of blooming event reports.  Given that some stakeholders will likely want to keep some control on the information (they won't let ordinary "non expert" citizens feed data in without review, which in some circumstances could make sense), how have people approached such a community issue to ensure the various stakeholders don't step on one another's toes and feel they all contribute to the issue ?

At this stage, I'm asking for urls of sites that tackle similar environmental issues that involve a large variety of stakeholders from government department officials though to county/city officials and citizens.  I googled "Plone cyanobacteria" but didn't find much so I'm now relying on the experts/enthusiasts on the above mentioned lists for pointers.  I need inspiration from what others have done :-).

TIA,


Yves Moisan


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[Karl Horak]

Yves,

Re:  "How have people approached such a community issue to ensure the various stakeholders don't step on one another's toes and feel they all contribute to the issue?"

Our international water monitoring and modeling portal deals with multiple stakeholders by means of equal but parallel subfolders.  Some data, presentations, documents, and models need to be closely held among the particular collaborative group.  We handle this with a customized workflow that allows us to either 'publish for partners' or 'publish for public.'

Similarly, our civil society portal is structured with folders for key domains while individual NGO affiliates have separate but equal subfolders.  In either case we rely on metadata and keyword tags to permit relevant material to appear cross-referenced in various smart folders/collections.

You may be interested in some of the work that Jennifer Golbeck (mailto:[hidden email]) is doing at the University of Maryland on calculating trust and means of removing untrusted data from collections and analyses.

Re:  "At this stage, I'm asking for urls of sites that tackle similar environmental issues that involve a large variety of stakeholders from government department officials though to county/city officials and citizens."

Kindly take a look at https://waterportal.sandia.gov.  Our use case isn't the same as yours because regulations require us to more tightly control users with upload privileges.  On the other hand, our civil society portal at http://wacsi.unm.edu is hosted at a nearby university so as to relax some of the constraints on content owners.  We have disabled Plone's default 'join' option on both portals.  In either case we would have to enable anonymous input via changes in workflow to allow contributions by citizens in the community at large.

We are currently working on an assessment tool that is directed at the nuclear energy community (regulators, advocates, academics, and critics).  We will be using PloneSurvey and its ability to allow anonymous users to take the survey.  That site is still under development, but I can see a few commonalities, especially if the survey asked cyanobacteria-monitoring questions, assessed user background and skill, and collected geo-coordinates for data.

At any rate, you may wish to contact Dr. Howard Passell directly (mailto:[hidden email]) to further discuss your common interests in water-related environmental issues, problems, and solutions.

Best,

Karl Horak


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[yvesm]

Hi Karl,

Thank you very much for your response !  Comments interspersed.

Yves


> Similarly, our civil society portal is structured with folders for key

> domains while individual NGO affiliates have separate but equal
> subfolders.  

Interesting.


> You may be interested in some of the work that Jennifer Golbeck

Indeed.

Re:  "At this stage, I'm asking for urls of sites that tackle similar
environmental issues that involve a large variety of stakeholders from
government department officials though to county/city officials and
citizens."

> Kindly take a look at https://waterportal.sandia.gov.  Our use case
isn't > the same as yours because regulations require us to more tightly
control
> users with upload privileges.  

Some of our use cases will be of that type.

> On the other hand, our civil society portal at http://wacsi.unm.edu is

> hosted at a nearby university so as to relax some of the constraints
on
> content owners.  We have disabled Plone's default 'join' option on
both
> portals.  In either case we would have to enable anonymous input via
> changes in workflow to allow contributions by citizens in the
community at > large.

I disable join on such sites too.  We'll probably rely on trusted users
to begin with.  That is, we'll invite people to register to the site and
only those registered users will be able to upload content.  Maybe we'll
open up commenting to the general public, but the way I believe we
should approach the problem of convening the largest possible audience
without risking having too much noise in the data/monitoring is to
invite people.  I may be wrong though.  Or maybe let people that have an
OpenID account log in to our site.  Not sure yet.

> We are currently working on an assessment tool that is directed at the

> nuclear energy community (regulators, advocates, academics, and
critics).  > We will be using PloneSurvey and its ability to allow
anonymous users to
> take the survey.  

I've user PloneSurveu in a couple of intranet projects here and I like
it, except for some UnicodeDecode errors [our users are part of the 5 M
French speaking community of NE America ;-)].  I gather the people at
Leicester aren't in a rush to port PloneSurvey to Plone 3 and I
definitely will deploy (if the project goes forward) a Plone 3 for my
project.

> That site is still under development, but I can see a few
commonalities,
> especially if the survey asked cyanobacteria-monitoring questions,
> assessed user background and skill, and collected geo-coordinates for
> data.

That's indeed a very interesting way of collecting user data.
Collecting geographic coordinates would likely need a helper environment
(like opening up a map portlet that the person could use to pinpoint the
location they are talking about).  One geodata is in the ZODB, we can
use the GIS python software stack to display/query/edit/chart it.

Thank you again !

Yves

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