Stephanie O'Donnell
- @StephODonnell
- | She / Her
WILDLABS
Fauna & Flora
Hi everyone,
We are very much looking forward to speaking to you all in tomorrow's virtual meetup! It's going to be all about low-cost, open source solutions - as usual we'll hear from our three speakers, @Alasdair @davidtlang and @IBEIS , who will set the scene and then we'll open up the floor for some open discussion to dig into the topic at hand. Remember, you can still register here!
Now, ahead of tomorrow's discussion, we thought it might be helpful to flag some of the questions/topics we think will come up in this second part. As part of the registration process, we ask you to tell us the one question you are hoping to have answered in the session. This has turned out to be a wonderful way of getting a feel for the current group think about the topic at hand. The questions coming in seem to fall together into a couple of big buckets.
We think this is a fantastic resource that should be shared back to you - maybe it can trigger discussions/work beyond the boundaries of the virtual meetups? And hopefully sharing these big qeustions we are hearing from you ahead of time might help get you thinking and provide a landing point for discussion to continue after the meetup.
The big questions we're seeing:
Sustainability, business models, mobilising community
- Sustainable Business models (India)
- I’m developing open source, low cost drones for conservation. How to do financially sustain the development of open source projects, and build a community around them. (Spain)
- Would both designers and customers both be interested in having a UK producer holding stocks of open source designs? (UK)
- What models can open source innovators rely on to spread their products and reach users? (UK)
- How these low-cost tools achieve scale and/or are funded (USA)
- Open source business models and community building. (USA)
- How can we rally the open-source community around camera trap work? (USA)
- How do groups using open-source make reproduction of their products feasible for others? (USA)
- Interested in different models for making innovative tech widely available and sustainable (UK)
This discussion might be of interest: Sustainability of Open Source Projects
Collaboration
- Options for collaborative frameworks to support the roll-out of new biodiversity surveillance and monitoring technologies. (UK)
- How do you suggest finding collaborators who have the time and resources to help early-career researchers use open-source tech? (Switzerland)
- How can greater and transparent collaboration across org's develop and deploy more low-cost/open-source solutions? (UK)
Cost vs Quality
- How to balance low cost and high quality (India)
- QA in open source solutions? (UK)
Interoperability
- How addressing the issue of interoperability of data on multiple technological platform? (Phillipines)
- I would like know how projects are using several technologies (Peru)
- Cost effectiveness and possible integration viability into COFDM solutions (South Africa)
- How do we share data across these platforms? (USA)
Capacity + Skills
- Lots of questions that were just about finding out what’s out there (Eg: What are some low-cost, open-source solutions that I don't know about?
- We need to move better and faster at real time data decision making to respond to the scale of our threats. Barriers of adoption of such tech, can we come up with a clever way to increase capacity on the ground? (travelling mentors?) (Romania)
- Should we have a role in any organisation or should this highly important issue be part of a more cultural teams orientation (Romania)
- We run workshops/help develop solutions for communities to solve problems with tech. We are interested in doing more in conservation (UK)
- What level of technical skill is required? (UK)
- Capacity building needs and resources (USA)
- A clear detailed method of application and accuracy rate... Where and how to use the technology (Zimbabwe)
This discussion might be of interest: Are you working on an open source project? Tell us about it + link to your github repository
How to get involved
- I am interested in the topic and to get more hands-on, integrated into such projects. How people put these projects together (Sweden)
- To learn more about the topic and start my own projects (Singapore)
- Need to design and build own novel field equipment. Who to partner with to construct new designs? (USA)
Big Picture
- What does success look like? (UK)
- What are metrics of success and have they been met? (USA)
- What are the barriers from having an open source conservation technology toolkit? (USA)
Lots of meaty questions in there! It should be a really fun discussion, I hope you'll join us.
Stephanie
9 April 2019 12:36am
Looking forward to the meetup and discussion. Can't wait :)
Akiba
Freaklabs
10 April 2019 7:04am
Hi everyone.
Yesterday's virtual meetup was great and gave me a lot to think about. There were a lot of amazing projects happening which is really exciting. I think there's really an untapped need that has been uncovered by WildLabs. One thing I noticed was that there wasn't much discussion about how to bridge the gap between people that focus on wildlife conservation/research and people that focus on tech. I think this is such an important area because so many potential opportunities will be lost just because one group doesn't have a piece of critical domain knowledge from the other.
One of the main ways I'd like to contribute to this community is to work towards putting together free course training materials on technology in the context of wildlife conservation. It's a broad topic so I would probably focus initially on beginner to intermediate level training material with a focus on hands-on and practical experience. I'm thinking along the lines of how-to articles, videos, and possibly virtual workshops. I've been discussing this with Steph also. Any suggestions are welcome and it was great to meet all of you last night.
Akiba
Stephanie O'Donnell
WILDLABS
Fauna & Flora
16 April 2019 4:27pm
Hi everyone,
Thanks for joining us at the meetup last week! If you missed it, @TaliaSpeaker has just posted the recording and her fanastic notes from the meetup. In this one, she's also included a list of recommended reading, compiled from all the resources you were sharing in the chat.
There were some threads of conversation that came up that I'm interested to pick up here. If there are others, please do pop them below or use the reply as a new thread option below to break off into new discussions.
1. Help offered vs Help needed
Every meetup we get people joining who share in their registration that they are either looking for projects to get involved in, or need to find tech savvy people to help them with specific projects. Meredith (@snapshot_serengeti) is nice example of this. She came to meetup needing to design and build novel field equipment, and wanted to know who she could partner with to construct the designs. She's now started a thread about her needs and is getting lots of help here. Likewise, @Carl_Emogor was looking for specific advice about tech for studying pangolins and has had feedback here.
Q: Ideas for how we can facilitate this better around the meetups, or this good enough? Should we have a 'community announcements' thread attached to each meetup where people can say 'i can offer this'/'I need this'? Or is there a better way you've experienced elsewhere?
2. Mapping the conservation tech ecosystem
This comes up so. often. I get asked to contribute to this sort of map every other week, and I know of a handful of exsiting spreadsheets being maintained by people that go some way to answering this quesiton for various parts of our community (specific tech, specific conservation challenges). I think it's been raised every meetup as a good starting point, but it's been a particularly strong point of discussion in this meetup and the next gen tracking tech discussion. So my question is,
Q. Who is interested in this and where do we start? Are there examples from other sectors/communities of this sort of thing? Do we need to build out WILDLABS with new functionality (e.g. beef up profiles , tags + introduce project pages) to make it real, or is there an easy first step we could do right now?
3. Swap meet?
@Rob+Appleby raised this after the meetup:
Also, on a complete side note, I have about 25 used 9602 Iridium modems and patch antennas, that I am happy to donate to someone through WILDLABS, and possibly a few other useful bits and pieces if there's any interest out there? And it got me thinking that a "swap meet" or donation page could be a useful resource maybe? I was thinking about all those VHF and GPS collars sitting in cupboards and drawers around the world that could be recycled/re-used etc. And David mentioned his Trident donation... Just a thought.
I think this sounds like a great idea! @Rob+Appleby - first step could be to take it forward and reply as a new thread below, throw it out there and see if others are interested?
UPDATE: Continued here
4. Specific space for sharing funding opps
@kemprachael, you raised this, could you elaborate a little more on what you were thinking? My first impulse is that it's totally possible and probably needed, but I'm curious to explore more about what you want from it. Is it a new group, is it just a test thread as a start?
5. What is a platform?
@Alasdair - you were keen to get into the details of the platform - to pull out what is needed and how to sustain each part. I'm up for it, this is one to break off into a new discussion?
6. Financial sustainability of open source projects
@Freaklabs has made a great start getting into the depths of this discussion topic here. He's pulled the relevant questions from the list above and shared his perspective/experience in response to each one. It would be great to hear some other voices in response to the questions, so you're interested in the topic and have ideas/experience, check it out.
7. Wildbook Q&A
TBC - there was obviously a LOT of interest in Wildbook, so we're talking with the team about having a specific space where you can get all of your questions answered. It'll likely be a thread - maybe live? - we'll keep you posted.
Finally, if you have ideas for what you'd like to see in future meetups, drop them in this thread here. I've done a summary of where we're at in responding to requests to-date, and I've also shared the ideas we're throwing around for season three. They are by no means concrete, so now is the time to help shape them.
Thanks
Steph
Niklas Jordan
17 April 2019 4:32pm
Hey folks,
I've written a collection list of resources about open hardware for conservation. Maybe it is useful for somebody here: https://blog.niklasjordan.com/conservation-technology/
If you have any resources I've forgotten, please share the stuff with me, and I will add it to the list.
- Niklas
Akiba
Freaklabs