On-Line Web Site Production Workshop > Detailed Overview > Community Center

Watershed Community Center Page

At this time, please open the “Watershed Community Center” page from the Upper Sevier site. You should be able to alternately bring this page forward to read this text and bring the Community Center page forward to look at the features being described. If your screen resolution is high enough you may be able to see both of these pages side by side.

The Watershed Community Center is a major part of each Interactive Watershed web site. On this page there are eight sub-section links that provide opportunities for users of these interactive sites and watershed citizens to participate in watershed restoration activities. In addition, there are many links to Internet information resources that provide the user with expanded opportunities to learn much more about local, regional and national watershed restoration projects and related concepts.

The eight links are provided in graphic text format at the top of the page under the main navigation bar. These same graphic text sub-links are repeatedly provided at the top of each of the separate pages as you visit them from the Community Center. The same links are also provided as text links on the left side of this page under the brief HTML text description. Each of these eight sub-section links will be described in a short paragraph below.

In addition, you will note that we have provided an interactive graphic panoramic collage that also contains these same links. This graphic has been produced to be a “Cubic” panorama which auto scrolls as it opens up on your computer screen. Beth Workman, Zeland Studio, helped design and lay out the four different horizontal screen “faces” with text, graphic and image overlays. These four screens were combined with two other screen faces on the top and bottom to create the cubical panorama. The bottom screen shows water and stones in a creek and the top screen shows a view looking straight up to the tops of trees found in each watershed. For your information, even the regular photographic panoramas located in the Resource Issues section are created from similar 6 cubic faces. In this Community Center panorama you can see the distinct lines or corners that distinguish each face of the cube.

All 5 of the current Interactive Watershed web sites have a similar panorama, but some of the inset images have been interchanged to show photographs from each individual watershed. Photoshop was used to create the image collage for the cubic faces and Real Viz stitcher was used to create the cubic panorama. GoLive was used to place the text and images on the page and make links to the related community center pages. (See 360º Panoramas workshop topic for links to resources.)

Hancock Fork Creek

The eight distinct sub-section links on this Community Center page are described below. You can see how these are organized if you click on each topic from the Upper Sevier Community Center page. Brief explanatory comments will be provided here to supplement what you see on each page.

• Bulletin Board (Watershed Community Bulletin-Message Board)

This section may also be termed a “message board” where watershed site visitors are invited to actively become involved in watershed activities, by posting ideas for new restoration projects or visits to monitor or photograph existing projects. People can use this “Bulletin – Message” board to find others who have similar interests.

Mountain Visions has encouraged each watershed group to find an interested person or group in each watershed who will initiate and maintain this bulletin-message board. There are many different models available on the Internet that make it easy to initiate such a project. However, finding someone who can make a strong commitment to the project, over time, is necessary. As of the end of December 2002, as these sites are used by more people, it is expected that more community members will express interest in being involved in this project. Mountain Visions has initiated an e-mail process where people can express interest. For each watershed this interest will be forwarded to the Watershed Coordinators and Partners.

• Events (Calendar of Events and Current Announcements)

This section of the Community Center will provide an updated calendar of future events, current announcements and ongoing events. A twelve month calendar has been provided where date, event name, time, place and contact information is provided. As volunteer opportunities, project monitoring events, public forum meetings, and educational programs are scheduled these will also be added to the calendar and cross linked to the corresponding web pages identified below.

• Volunteering (Volunteer Opportunities)

On each web site, including the Upper Sevier, selected examples of volunteer opportunities are listed. However, it should be noted that as of the end of December 2002, many volunteer opportunities that will be available for spring summer and fall of 2003 may not be scheduled yet. In the coming months it is expected that watershed coordinators and partners will continue to provide information to update this section of each website. It should be noted that the calendar of events should also reflect these updates.

• Monitoring (Project Monitoring)

Notice that the long-term goal of the Upper Sevier Watershed monitoring program is to gather basic information on the biological and physical components of local watershed ecosystems and to share that information with community members, schools, local agencies, other organizations and decision makers. Not only are professional scientists involved in this process, but also landowners, high school and college students, community members, businesses and natural resource groups participate in gathering information about changes that take place before and/or after a watershed restoration project. With the production of these interactive web sites we expect community people and scientists as well to take more photographs and create other audiovisual projects to more fully explain the results of the monitoring efforts. In addition to text and numerical data reports, we hope that photographs including panoramas, graphics, maps, GIS overlays, animations, and audio-video sequences are produced to visually show the changes that take place. These web sites are a start in that direction, but they only cover a short time frame. In the Upper Sevier this time frame has now covered two and one-half years for example. The other sites range from two years for the Potomac and Conasauga River Watersheds to six months or less for the Upper Platte and Pit River Watersheds.

• Public Forum

This area creates links to web site locations and documents which solicit desired community and public input for watershed projects and management plans. The same information should also be placed in the calendar of events. Scheduled public input opportunities are becoming more common on the Internet. In many cases in the future it will much less time consuming and costly for citizens to log on to a web site to obtain information and subsequently send comments via the Internet, than it will be to drive to a distant location to attend a public meeting. We hope that this area of the web site will stimulate additional opportunities for this more efficient form of public participation in management decisions.

• Educational Activities

This page contains a description and a list of watershed related projects organized by local schools and colleges. In addition, community education projects related to watershed activities are also listed. For example, this On-Line Web Site Production Workshop is located as a link on this page on each watershed site. A list of state and national teacher and student resources, and examples of other educational watershed projects are also listed. In addition, a link has been made to a number of resources for Educational Grants which are found in the Grants and Funding section of the Reference Library section of the Community Center.

• Resource Sharing (Resource Sharing Techniques)

This page provides links to information about unique technology or techniques that help solve problems related to watershed restoration. This page not only identifies these solutions for the local watershed community but may also contain links to other solutions that watershed groups throughout the Unites States may have developed. As a starting point, this page will begin to contain sharing concepts related to the “resource issue” topics for each watershed. In time it is expected that there will be more cross-linking between different watershed web sites about existing or new resource sharing techniques and concepts.

• Reference Library

This library section of the community center is a repository of more general watershed information that is available on the Internet. Links are being made to already existing web sites or pages that provide information that can be categorized into different watershed resource issues topics. In addition, example links to other watershed related sites, watershed glossary resources, grants and funding opportunities, and GIS resources are also provided on this page.

In some cases these web sites provide an opportunity to download external documents that are not produced as part of the web page. Examples are Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word or PowerPoint presentations, historic photographic resources, text documents, reference materials, photos, and other available materials that have accumulated in the past. Federal, state and many other agencies and organizations often produce these documents for other purposes than viewing on web site pages. Usually, the author or the organization that first produced this material can easily use a translation program to make them easily downloadable from a web site. On the other hand, it takes quite a bit more time to recreate the same information again specifically to be shown on a web page. For this reason, many “web ready” resources can easily be made available to Internet users if any one web site stores the document on an Internet server and creates a link to the specific file. In some cases some of these documents have been provided to Mountain Visions for this purpose, because the information was not available or was hard to locate elsewhere.

Suggestions to watershed coordinators and partners have been made that other publications, slide shows, PowerPoint presentations, animations or audio-video clips that have been produced in the past, or are currently being used, could be converted into web ready documents. Most of the original production programs for files of these types provide a web conversion option. When this conversion is done, these files can be placed on this web site or links can be made to other web sites as described above. A brief discussion about this topic was a part of the “on-site workshops” given in the watershed communities by Mountain Visions in 2001.

Note that other web pages you visit in this detailed overview of the on-line workshop may have some of the same page elements described above. Generally these will not be described again on each page. To get a good understanding of all of these features it will be imperative to visit all of the pages in this Detailed Overview section in the order given.

To continue the overview and analysis of the web site template, please choose from the links below.

• Interactive Watersheds Home
• Interactive Watersheds Map
• Welcome to Watershed
• Background
• Interactive Journey
• Resource Issues
• Watershed Community Center
• Partners
• Web Site Index