FieldReady
01 / Origin
This started with a conference fee
FieldReady did not start as a plan to build an education platform.
It started because I wanted to understand why the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology international conference cost around $300.
That sent me down a much larger rabbit hole.
I started looking at how paleontology is organized, how expensive it can be to participate in parts of the field, and how fragmented paleontology can become from the other sciences it depends on.
Paleontology does not really exist by itself.
It overlaps with geology, GIS, ecology, field science, museums, public lands, specimen preparation, data collection, and a lot of other disciplines.
That made me wonder whether some of those fields could support each other better if the connections between them were easier to see.
From there, the question became much more practical.
Where do you even start testing something like that?
Neighboring colleges seemed like a good place.
02 / Test case
Why CMC and CNCC
CMC and CNCC are close enough geographically to share a regional environment, but different enough academically to make the comparison useful.
That is what interested me.
I was not trying to make the schools more similar.
I wanted to understand where their programs, courses, skills, locations, and regional resources might already touch.
At first, I thought this would probably be a fairly simple project.
It was not.
The more accurately I tried to represent the relationship between the two institutions, the more pieces appeared.
Programs needed courses.
Courses needed skills.
Programs and courses needed locations.
Locations needed campuses, facilities, public lands, roads, and regional context.
Relationships needed different meanings because "similar," "nearby," "transferable," and "formally partnered" are not the same claim.
Eventually I realized I was no longer building a page about two schools.
I was building a model for how educational systems relate to each other.
Geographic proximity is context. It is not evidence of partnership.
03 / Iteration
The system grew from the questions
Most of FieldReady was not planned in advance.
The map appeared because location mattered.
The knowledge graph appeared because a list of programs could not explain why two things were related.
Course connections appeared because saying two programs were similar was too vague.
Evidence and verification became important because I did not want the system creating relationships just because they looked plausible.
Transportation entered the picture because an opportunity a student cannot realistically reach is different from an opportunity that is actually accessible.
Each part appeared because the simpler version stopped being enough.
That is still how I think about the project.
I would rather let the problem tell me what the system needs than decide what a platform is supposed to contain and work backward.
- QuestionWhat matters?
- Location mattersMap
- Relationships need meaningGraph
- Claims need evidenceVerification
- Opportunity needs accessTransportation
04 / Disclosure
Why it lives on Trailasaur
FieldReady currently lives on trailasaur.com because Trailasaur is infrastructure I already own and maintain.
That was mostly a practical decision.
When the idea became complicated enough that I needed to build it instead of just describe it, I already had a domain, deployment infrastructure, and a codebase I could work from.
FieldReady was not originally proposed as a Trailasaur product.
Trailasaur was simply the workbench I already had available.
As the project develops, that relationship may change.
I do not think that needs to be decided before the system itself is better understood.
05 / Architecture
From webpage to infrastructure
At some point, a static site stopped making sense.
The information FieldReady is trying to represent changes.
Courses change.
Programs change.
Campuses change.
Relationships change.
Evidence improves.
New institutions may eventually be added.
That pushed the project toward a real backend.
FieldReady now uses a SQL database hosted through Neon, with Cloudflare Workers supporting the application layer.
That architecture was not part of the original plan.
It became necessary because the project stopped behaving like a collection of pages and started behaving like connected data.
- InterfaceFieldReady UI
- Application layerCloudflare Workers
- Data layerNeon / SQL
- Programs
- Courses
- Locations
- Relationships
- Evidence
06 / Inquiry
What I am actually trying to understand
The part that continues to interest me is the space between institutions and disciplines.
A college knows its courses.
A department knows its programs.
Faculty know how disciplines overlap.
Advisors know where students get stuck.
Communities know what opportunities exist around them.
Public lands, facilities, employers, and transportation all shape what is actually possible.
Those things are connected in reality even when the systems describing them are separate.
FieldReady is an attempt to make some of those relationships easier to see.
Not because everything needs to become one giant system.
Mostly because it is difficult to reason about connections nobody can see.
07 / Integrity
What I am trying not to do
I do not want FieldReady to manufacture certainty.
If two institutions do not have a partnership, the system should not imply that they do.
If a course looks transferable but has not been evaluated, it should say that.
If a location cannot be verified, it should remain unverified.
If two official sources disagree, the disagreement is useful information.
I would rather have an incomplete system that tells the truth than a complete-looking system built from assumptions.
- 01Unknown stays unknown
- 02Possible is not verified
- 03Nearby is not partnered
- 04Similar is not equivalent
- 05Disagreement is preserved
08 / Conditional future
Where this could go
Right now, CMC and CNCC are the test case.
The immediate goal is to find out whether the model is actually useful here.
If it is, then the next question becomes whether the same structure still works somewhere very different.
That could eventually mean testing it against a larger institution like Kennesaw State University, where I studied computer science.
But that is not the current goal.
The current goal is simpler:
Make this model accurate enough, useful enough, and honest enough that it earns the right to grow.
09 / Working test
The question I keep using
When I think about adding something to FieldReady, I try to ask:
Does this help represent the real relationship more accurately or make that relationship more useful to someone?
If the answer is yes, it is probably worth investigating.
If the answer is only that a platform is expected to have it, it probably is not.