Collaboration

It has been widely reported in the national news media that attitudes are changing in the western United States. For example, a recent edition of Time Magazine ( MacCarthy, 2001, p. 21) quoted Patricia Limerick, a history professor at the Center of the American West in Boulder, CO: "There has been a tremendous surge in collaborative conservation groups and watershed alliances in the past 10 years." This evolution toward broader input into decision-making is, in part, the result of over-allocated or over-stressed resources and changing values.

The trend toward collaborative and localized decision-making is well served by real-time monitoring/Internet technologies because the latter provides information to everyone with access to the Internet (which is rapidly becoming everyone). There is no more information elite. Better and timelier data, universally available, is leading to better decision-making and improved water management. Websites like www.sevierriver.org reports real-time conditions throughout the Sevier River Basin (including river and canal flows, reservoir storage, snow and weather conditions, water quality, etc) for everyone to see. Decisions are made with a better understanding of present (and recent past and historic) conditions.

With Websites like www.sevierriver.org, the networking possibilities for connecting real-time field sites to the Internet are being exploited (near universal data sharing). However, there are also potential gain to interconnecting all the human players together. This allows the water users to interact with each other (ie. placing water orders over the Internet), water users to interact with engineers and scientists (ie. seek advice on scientific questions), and for low-cost troubleshooting of the network itself. The intent here is to make technological innovations more sustainable.