“The Electronic Commons: a community led natural resource knowledge portal” is a project of the Wood Education and Resource Center of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry program. The USDA Forest Service is working with grantees of this program to support the use of advanced communications technologies (e.g. Web pages, videoconferencing, video streaming, chat rooms, etc) to share information and solutions on topics of concern to national forests and their neighboring communities. Of particular interest are projects that link geographically disparate national forest communities in the 32-state eastern hardwood region. The Center for Technology in Government will work with the grantees and the USDA Forest Service to leverage their investment by capturing key lessons learned from the projects funded by this program.
The project activities are designed to both provide guidance to grantees in information technology innovation and to capture the lessons learned by grantees through these projects,. Lessons learned will be presented in a Web-based report.