Ent Club Community Site

Jonathan Rees, Gary Alpert, Andrea Golden, and the 6.171 team - September 2003

Update 11/7/2003: Club members and friends are invited to examine a prototype. For technical reasons I prefer not to put a clickable link here, but the location of the site looks like this: http://web.entclub.org. Type this location into the your web browser's location box. Feedback on the site's design is welcome; send email to entclub@entclub.org.

This page holds notes about the ent club community web site project, which is now being designed and built.

The purpose of the site is to create a community resource for the Ent Club, New England entomology, and the general public. Among other things, it will allow submission of content (messages, images, audio, etc.). Forums will be moderated (or moderatable), and there will be a way for volunteers to develop organized static content. We'd like the site to be useful to both amateurs (especially K-12 teachers and students) and professionals. We'd like for the site to be used to organize expeditions, fields projects, and other activities.

Some questions that a visitor might post:

• What camera should I buy?
• Do I really need to mix up a special relaxing fluid or can I just use water?
• Do I need a permit to collect in {town parks in Arlington or Cambridge; Great Meadows in Arlington; Great Meadows NWR; state parks}?
• If so, how do I get one?
• What endangered species might one find around here?
• I photographed this 6 inch beetle in Peru; what is it?
• I hear this sound every evening in late September; what insect makes it?
• Do I need to worry about these big black ants in my kitchen?
• Has anyone ever seen a Noctua pronuba around here before?

The site is currently going by the name 'web.entclub.org. This name is provisional; we'll make a final decision later on after more people have provided input.

Goals for the site:

• To encourage both amateur and professional interest in insects and other subjects such as ecology and conservation as they connect to insects
• Specifically, to help visitors help one another with identifications and problem solving, and allow them to contribute information, images, and sounds
• To facilitate the creation of organized static content, especially by 'promotion' of forum submissions
• To emphasize the New England insects, projects, and activities, but not exclusively (remembering that Ent Club membership is worldwide and members have strong interests in entomology abroad)
• To improve communication and resource sharing among Ent Club members, while also welcoming those unconnected with the Club
• Support slow (modem) connections and present technically simple, no-frills, browser-independent pages, a la Amazon - no applets, no
• To require minimal administrative overhead - the site should be as 'self-maintaining' as possible and should be welcoming to volunteer moderators and administrators
• To avoid duplicating content or functionality available elsewhere on the web (e.g. Iowa's entomology resources pages)

It is not a goal to replace Psyche, but we're looking into possible connections with it. It is also not a goal to replace the Ent Club site, although that's an option - information about the club might end up as just a set of static pages integrated into the overall content of the site.

Topic under investigation: Controlled vocabulary ('ontology') for taxa and geography (to facilitate searching). E.g. if you look for 'Hymenoptera' you should find 'Formicidae'. Also under investigation: controlled handling of 'label data' (location, collector, date, ecological information, taxonomic determinations) for submitted specimen descriptions and images, again to facilitate search and summary.

Sites to peruse for technological and design inspiration:

• Tree of Life
• U Mass Boston Electronic Field Guide
• New England Pest Insects
• Coleopterists' Society and Orthopterists' Society
• Microscopy UK
• Wikipedia

The site and its software are being designed and implemented by Jennifer Liu, Howard Chou, and Sha Ma, all students in MIT's subject 6.171. See the request for proposals to see how it got started.

Progress so far: I wrote a proposal for the site in July 2003; work began in September. There have been two general meetings. Jennifer, Howard, Sha and I attended both, and Andrea Golden came to the second one. Gary Alpert and I talk about the project from time to time. There is a working prototype.

I'd like to get others from the Ent Club and elsewhere involved. Send me email if you're interested.