NMFS-NWFSC Collaboration Website: a dynamic interactive web application to facilitate communication, collaboration, and coordination between internal and external partners

Brendan Sylvander
Northwest Fisheries Science Center, NMFS

The Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NWFSC) presents the NWFSC Collaboration Website, a custom active server page (ASP) application built to facilitate collaboration, coordination, and communication between NMFS researchers and both internal and external partners. The dynamic, interactive site manages projects, plans, people, events (calendar), documents, links, discussion groups, and tools using ASP and an Oracle database server. Through separate schemas, different groups are able to have their own private workspaces, accessible either to NMFS only or to the internet. Within each password protected workspace, administrators can create and edit projects, people, meetings, links, tools, plans and topics, while all members can post messages, upload and download documents, edit their personal profile, and update meeting attendance. The site allows members to email links to documents, discussion posts, and meeting invitations to other members. Members log in to the site to retrieve documents instead of sending them through email. All documents are fully indexed and searchable, and every page has a free text search to locate individual records. By creating hierarchical topic lists, members can categorize and search everything through dynamically updated topic lists in a facet-search like manner.

Because the NWFSC Collaboration Website has been fully programmed from the bottom up, it is fully customizable for individual groups. We are working with the Northwest Region’s Hydropower document management group and the national NMFS Data Quality Act Implementation Group, which is responsible for NMFS implementation of the Guidelines for ensuring and maximizing quality, objectivity, utility and integrity of disseminated information. We are also setting up workspaces for the Pacific Coast Recovery Fund and its state and tribal partners and the NMFS Enterprise GIS workgroup, and other NMFS research groups have expressed interest in using the tool.