As part of my work with the Natural History Museum team working on EDIT we have been developing template websites for biological taxonomists to get the products of their work on the web. We are doing this through Content Management Systems (currently Drupal) that we have fitted out with various modules and templates go help get taxonomists started. With each request for a Scratchpad we buy the users a domain name of their choice and map this to a new Scratchpad template mounted on a web server at the NHM, London. We then help the Scratchpad "Maintainer" to populate the site with their data and we customize the look and feel of the Scratchpad, adding or removing functionality to reflect their individual needs. Thereafter, the Maintainer takes responsibility for the content and which becomes collectively owned by the all the Scratchpad contributors. All we (EDIT) do thereafter is offer enhanced functionality to Scratchpad users as we integrate and hopefully develop new modules.

My goal with these sites is to help foster the development of communities working toward a common goal of creating and sharing data about biological organisms of the web. Sites started to go live from early Feb 2007, and at present we have 10 communities signed up, though only four to date have any significant publicly accessible content.

I will be formally making the Scratchpads available to any taxonomic community on April 27th, 2007 at a "Data Commonalities" meeting to be held under the auspices of EDIT at the Natural History Museum, London.

For more information check out the Scratchpad section of the EDIT Workpackage 6 site at the NHM, London and watch this space! Some of the site maintainers have already done some fantastic things with these sites and I will be blogging about the best of these shortly.