Hello and welcome, everyone, to our World Plone Day session. I'm Sally Kleinfeld. I'm with Jess Carter, which is a US-based company specializing in open source web technologies,

including Plone, of course. And with me is Lauren Drummond, who is the digital content manager at the Washington Trails Association, and Dean Erickson, who is the information technology senior manager at the Washington Trails Association. So as Jesse and I described in the last Plone Conference,

the WTA Plone site has been cruising along for about 13 years, which is not a record, but it's a good long time. And we thought we'd share a bit of the history with you, with a particular focus on the role of volunteers on the site.

So with that intro, could one of you start off maybe with a brief history of WTA and the site and et cetera? Sure, I would be happy to. So WTA has been around for more than 50 years. And we were established in 1966 as a way for people

to share information with each other about hiking trails and public lands advocacy. And we started as a little news press a little hand crank press in a barn and have since become the largest state-based hiking and trail maintenance organization in the country.

So our website was created by volunteers back in the 90s, partially because we're in Seattle. We have a really large volunteer and stewardship spirit as part of our organization and a couple of very savvy volunteers are like,

you know, the way that we're doing some of this is it's not efficient. It could happen better online. And so they built our website. They built trip reports, which are a way for people to tell each other about trails and the conditions on trails. They're like, we could do this better online. And so I believe our first trip report was filed in 1996

online, so pretty early days. And similarly, we had some volunteers built a custom volunteer management system way back in the day. And it was to help get work done on trails.

We had now we have, I think, over 100,000 volunteer hours, typically 150,000 volunteer hours a year, hundreds of trails across the state. It obviously started out much smaller almost three years ago. And so we have lots of different kinds of trips. We have day trips.

We have single party trips. We have backcountry trips in the summer. We're about to launch those tomorrow. And so we have lots of different kinds of trips for lots of different kinds of people all across the state. And so we needed a really good way to connect people with trails and from trail work

and the volunteer opportunities. And so a number of years ago, we took this volunteer built system and Jess Carter helped us build a very, very custom system and clone that interfaces with clone to meet all of our needs. One of the things that we really have is we have a lot of custom work

and like to do things in really specific ways for really specific purposes to meet the needs that we have with all of our land manager partners and all the different kinds of people who are hiking. And so, yeah, so that's sort of the very brief history of WTA and the work that we do and how that has rolled out onto our website.

So we've gone through a number of changes. Yeah, did you want to add to that, Dean? Anything? Oh, just that it's kind of an amazing ecosystem of working with Jazz Carter as WTA has over the years. It's an unusual and actually really great relationship

of understanding kind of what we're trying to accomplish as an organization and making those customizations that allow us to make progress. And the website itself and the integrations that we have with other tools really have liberated us

to do more work and better work in the last year. So it's great. Awesome. Maybe we should turn our attention to some of the ways that the website clone itself has sort of helped with volunteer engagement and contributions on the site.

And I'm going to share a screen at this point and Lauren and Dean, tell me where I should go and you can talk about the things that will show starting off with the homepage. Yeah, so this is our homepage. When WTA, we, a lot of people, if you Google Hiking Washington,

that's the way that a lot of people find us and connect with the work that we do. We do a lot of different kinds of work. We do advocacy work, we help bring funding to every sort of level of land that we have. We do a lot of stewardship work on the trails themselves out in the field. We work with connecting youth and educators

with the resources that they need to get out. And so all of those, all of that like engagement sort of starts with the website. People often find us and they often find us through the hiking guide and our, maybe you could start on the hiking guide map, Sally.

Yeah, so this is one way that people find us either here or we also have an app that was developed by volunteers, which is pretty great. And if you zoom in or out here, and this is a way, this just represents a bunch of the trails that are in cities that are in states across all different kinds of lands.

And it dives into our database of hikes. We have almost 4,000, I believe it's like 3,600 hikes across the state with detailed information. And so often this is how people find us. They might also run across us when they're out on trail.

And when you dive in, and so this is Little Spokane River and you can see that little hard hat at the very top of the page that says that we've worked on that trail pretty recently. And so we've had trail crews and volunteers out on that trail. And so people might actually, some people run across us for the first time on the trail. Most people run across us through Google searches

and going out for a hike and wanting to sort of get outside and de-stress, especially in the last year. Trails have played a really big and important role for folks. So if that's the case, you may also want to see how can you get involved? How can you volunteer? And so we have a whole other system

that connects this monumental database of trails, the 3,600 trails with the volunteer opportunities that we have. So, and then if the volunteers, yeah. So these are all of the upcoming work parties that we have. And like I mentioned before, we have work parties across the state. There's a map view here

and we run work parties all around the year. Almost every day or almost every week of the year, we have work parties and some of them are single work parties. This upcoming Saturday at Coyote Wall, we're gonna be out doing some work there. And we also have work parties that last a week long

or that you go into the back country and you need certain skills for. And so this just helps really prepare folks for what it's like. One of the things that we like to say is that no experience is needed and we really like to prepare people to come out for a day of work party. So when we redid our system here,

we thought a lot about what would you wanna know? Like, what do you need to know before you join us on a work party? And we really try to create a really safe, welcoming environment. So obviously how you get there, what are the kind of things that you need to have? We've also created this cool system that's gonna help us create the system

where all of the documentation that you need, you can fill out ahead of time, create an account, sign a waiver, which we built several years ago, but in the last year really came in handy because of the requirements that we needed to keep six feet, safety protocols around COVID.

So all of this infrastructure that we had and are baked into our volunteer system online really helped and we were able to like make a few adjustments. And Dean was more involved in that than I was in the last year to account for COVID. And so we were actually able to get to work on trails a lot faster than we thought we could, so yeah.

That's really awesome. How about talking a little bit about the content that your volunteers create? Like I know that trip reports, which you haven't talked about yet are an important part of the site. Yeah, like I said, trip reports have been a part

of our work from the very beginning. People have always, that was sort of one of the purposes and land managers use them. We look at the data around trip reports to anticipate use in different places so that we can work with our land manager partners around that. So trip reports are user created content. We have over almost 150,000 trip reports,

I think on the line since 1996. Obviously there were more before hand, but they are regular hikers, folks who are coming for the first time or who have, we have some trip reporters who have more than a thousand trip reports.

They've been on more than a thousand hikes and then filed a trip report. They're incredible. That's amazing. I mean, it's really just this incredible sense of a gift that Washington hikers give to each other of it's the take a penny, leave a penny. Hey, here's what I saw. Here's what you should go prepared for. Here's where the water or there are some hazards here

or just I had a great time. I proposed to my girlfriend and we get all kinds of amazing stories and as well as like really good data. And really, just sharing information from hiker.com. And I think a lot of trip reporters don't think of themselves as volunteers,

but in the act of creating this piece of content, sharing their photos, sharing the data that they had the experience on their trip report, it really, they really have. So that's sort of the other piece. There's also is a photo contest, I think that, so that's another volunteer donated. Yeah.

Yeah, and it's sort of a win win. There isn't a lot of motivation that we really put out into the community to send your terrific photographs from on the trail, but a lot of people do. And it's just, it's kind of a virtuous cycle. I mean, people send in these photos

and we're able to use those in the context of our work and I don't know, people love it. Yeah, it's an amazing collection. I have to say that the huge number of photos on the WTA site are one of the technical challenges because storing them and serving them

took some special doing, there are so many of them. It's true, I think between the trip reports and the photos submitted there, and some of the form interfaces for a photo contest too, but it's, we have a tremendous amount of content for an organization of our size. It's sort of unusual in that the visitorship

that we have to our site and the amount of content pieces that we have is much more outsized than a lot of other nonprofits who really have just sort of focused on the work and not necessarily doing this content service, this information service at that same time. Yeah, it's incredible. And of course the volunteers that submit trip reports

have accounts and have this certain place where they can submit the trip reports so that the content is managed by role according to whether you're a site manager like Lauren and Dina or whether you're a volunteer just submitting a trip report and et cetera. There are a number of different roles.

I believe that volunteers also can contribute to the hike descriptions themselves. Maybe you wanna say just a word or two about that cause that's kind of an amazing, that's just the body of information about hikes. The official hike information is incredible. And is enhanced by volunteers as well. Yeah, way back when we,

the origin of our hiking guide started a little bit as with the spirit of a Wiki that people could contribute to it. And since then we've evolved it and we now have a specific staff devoted to managing that content and a cadre of volunteers whose official volunteer role is collecting really good data, mapping trails,

making sure that the trails descriptions that we have, but we still rely on folks to tell us like these directions are off, something has changed. The trail ahead has actually moved, it doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen. And it's really important. And we lean on our community to help us keep informed about that. So there's always been baked in this way to say

like update this trail, or I think especially we've really been building out our city trails and urban trails and parks. The last year it was something we were working, we've been working on for the last couple of years to one of our campaigns, the trails next door campaign, but the importance of it has really grown. So that's something we've been really seeing

people contribute their favorite neighborhood trail. And I believe you created a fairly specific process for people to submit amendments to those hike descriptions and get them reviewed. And so that was a somewhat custom developed feature that for that use case,

cause it's not just like everyone can dive in and the Wiki model sort of broke down after a while. Yeah, it's a really structured review workflow in the backend. Well, so we've been talking about content so far and the enormous amount of content that volunteers contribute to the site

and all the value that that provides. But in addition to that, you mentioned being in a very tech no centric sort of part of the world in Seattle with a lot of, well, some amount of people who are able to contribute even very specific technical features to the website.

And maybe you could talk about them a little bit. We saw one of them, I think, when we looked at the hiking guide map there. Yeah, so I think we've had this, I think probably the best example for us

is really the app and- The mobile app, you mean. The mobile app that we have, which was developed in a, I think a hackathon years and years ago by some Microsoft volunteers. And then we had another really amazing volunteer who still sits on our advisory board say, hey, I really want to bring this to iOS and Android.

And then did, put together a team, managed a bunch of other volunteers and something that's been really cool and amazing is sort of this dual, we had a volunteer designer, interaction designer, and we have, we sort of work with folks like Jos Carta as well as volunteers. And then we have a lot of volunteers

who do things like user testing or advisory capacity for us. Just, so we have the advantage of using, pinging people for their brains on things, but we're actually implementing what we can with the budget that we have. So it's a really interesting process that's always evolving and yeah, it's just, it's very cool.

One, prior to joining WTA a couple of years ago, I didn't really understand that nerds like to hike. And it's interesting there, I think there is a real Venn diagram of people

that are deeply interested in our mission and also have some great technical skills. Even if they're not sitting down and writing custom integrations for Plone for us, they have really good understanding of capabilities out in the real world. And for a nonprofit to have that kind of,

I don't know, partnership with the technical savants, it's terrific. Oh yeah, and WTA, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I mean, even in the getting feedback from folks, when we hear that something is broken, it's always with a really generous spirit

and often very good documentation. What's broken and which platform it's on. Yeah, here's how I fix it in Python. And I know that as far as the mobile app was concerned, that's a great example of where it's fairly outside of the Plone world,

but it needs the data that's in the Plone world. So WTA had a Plone developer develop the API and Plone comes with an API, but this was a somewhat specialized API to support all the features of the hike finder map and trip report creation.

And of course integrate, the app can just access all the photos that you just took on your phone while you're writing the trip report in the field. And so WTA was able to have Plone provide an API that the app could talk to, and then the app developers were off on their own developing this fantastic feature.

And somewhat the same, I think for the hike finder map, there were developers who knew Mapbox, which is the particular technology that provides those maps that were able to develop, it was a designer and the people, the Mapbox people who were able to create just exactly how that map would look. And then it just got plugged into the Plone environment

and there it is. Yeah, and I think that WTA has benefited from, there's some developers, there's vendors out there that they like the mission. And so a lot of the tools that they bring to bear

are ones that we may not have had as easy access to, but Mapbox being one of them, our relationship with them is great. And I think we've learned some things about how to deliver that sort of visual mapping content in ways that it's because they're kind of psyched on WTA.

And that's a good place to be in, especially when you don't have $50 million to throw around, we're a nonprofit organization. And so those relationships mean a lot. Yeah, fantastic. Do you wanna say anything about your, you're working on a new feature that I haven't really seen at all myself,

this Hike Recommendations, you wanna say anything about that? Yeah, this is a project that we've wanted to do for a long time and we finally have the budget to work on this year. And we're starting to put in place a recommender. Again, it's built a little bit, we have a little bit of volunteers

working with our Plone developer and we're working on taking that database of hikes and make some recommendations to people with the goal of really helping people find sort of the next, after the first few trails that you hike in Washington often tend to be the same 10 trails, the word of mouth trails that you hear about,

they're great and they're popular for a reason, they're wonderful trails. And then you're like, okay, I love hiking, I love trails, I really wanna get out, where do I go next? And when you're looking at a database, even if it's a map and a really good searchable tool of 3000 hikes, it can be really overwhelming to know sort of what to do next. And so helping people sort of find the next step

or the best trail for them through a recommender, and also thinking about the impact, we've just had a lot of impact on public lands and there's a lot of pressure on public lands. There's, their population is growing here in population centers, which is great because it brings so many people

also to care for the lands that we have, but thinking about helping folks find trails that maybe are a little bit less well known, or that can handle a little more foot traffic. And so really taking into account that piece as well, and teaching folks about the bounty of the state, there's a lot more trails than just the few

that people know right off, really right off of the highways. If you go another mile or two in any direction, there might be five more trails that have a lot to offer. So both location and also like, if you love waterfalls, you may not know that there are all these other incredible waterfall trails that you can do. So really helping connect people in a different way.

So we're excited about that. We're hoping to launch it this summer, sort of a beta version and see how it does and see how our math and our algorithms stack up. Awesome, and I think that's another example where this very specialized technical, technically skilled volunteer or data scientist specifically you're working with

on that recommendation engine for the hikes, which will be then integrated within Plone to do that work, which is really cool. All right, well, that was a wonderful overview of what you all are doing. Any final words before we close out here?

I mean, I think the thing that's just been great about the site and Plone is really just helping us, the information that we're sharing is one thing, but really connecting people to the purpose and protecting lands and enjoying them and the benefits that come from that. And I think what's been wonderful is just seeing that through line, not getting too caught up

and helping really refine like what's the goal here and through all of the tech projects. It's really about connecting people to places on every level and that has come through in all of our projects with you and as we work on them. I'm always extremely inspired whenever I go to your website

for whatever purpose, it's easy to just get sucked in to the amazing photos and places that it showcases. All right, well, thank you so much for sharing this information for our world Plone Day celebration. Thank you. Happy Plone Day. Exactly. Bye.

Bye.