Collaborating With Orchid Data
The North American Orchid Conservation Center is a coalition of organizations dedicated to conserving the diverse orchid heritage of the U.S. and Canada. NAOCC needed a system to capture data about orchid samples, with collaboration features to allow project participants to view and contribute information. Data and collaboration features had to share a common access control structure. One approach would have been to build on a web database platform like Django, but this was a low budget project and adding the necessary collaboration and access control features would have been a big undertaking. We had a trick up our sleeve - Plone, which has collaboration features galore and makes it easy to create custom content types to capture specialized data. With a short discovery process and just two weeks of development, we were able to create a system that provides Plone's usual features (member roles, workflows, fine-grained access control and permission-sensitive search), plus custom content types that capture 50+ data fields, photos and files about individual orchid plants and the symbiotic fungi that live on their roots, a CSV import of the existing data and a flexible reporting capability.
