The Fish hub
The Fish Hub was created because fishermen told us they needed easier ways to track and analyze the facts about their catch and share information with fisheries managers - basic requirements in a quota system.
But they also saw other opportunities in having better systems for slicing and dicing their data. For example, couldn't some of the information be used to communicate better with the marketplace? And what about enabling individual fishermen to go back into the data they share with regulators to do private number-crunching?
We found some excellent collaborators to help us tackle the challenge of creating a great tool. And we set the ambitious goal of building a system that would work not only for local fishermen but also for those working in other fishing communities. We worked with The Nature Conservancy in California, and Amplifier Strategies, who had the technical know-how to make our vision real.
Fish hub 1.0 has been working for the Cape Cod fishing community since 2012.
Here's a quick tour the Fish hub.
The Knowledge Center was built with the Cape Cod Community Development Partnership as a place to share best practices from their scallop quota leasing program. This part of the Fish Hub is also open to the public.
The Wheelhouse is a members-only space where fishermen can access their private NOAA account data, exchange messages with other members, discuss problems and solutions, and manage their marketing pages.
Boat Plan is a members-only application for managing business activities associated with running a commercial fishing business—from harvest plans, to business plans, to financial information.