discussion / Community Base  / 17 June 2022

Friday check in - what have you been working on this week? 

Hi everyone, 

How are you all doing this week? I'd love to hear about what you've been working on - drop into the thread today and share photos, wins/fails, interesting papers you've come across, all welcome. Big and small! We'll also post on twitter, so feel free to participate there as well. 

This week's twitter thread 

Steph 


 




Alrighty, since I may as well participate in my own thing and I have thoughts about the tech4wildlife world this week..

It's been a very welcome calm week over with our team. It's been a really crazy nine months so it feels like this week has been the first time we've had a chance to do a big inhale.

I'm still so happy the new wildlabs platform is live out in the world and you all seem to be enjoying it - we've had 250+ new members join in the last few weeks, users are up 70% compared to this time last year and pageviews are up 160%. And we're seeing heaps of activity!

That pageview figure is particularly important for us for right now, as it means we're hitting that big goal of making all the great information sharing by our community easier to find and explore. As activity keeps scaling up, the challenge we're going to face will be about curation and making sure it's not just overwhelming. We have some tools, ways of configuring the site, different roles and new programmes ready to respond and help with that, but for now we're just happy you're all finding and starting to use the platform. 

We are doing deployments every week to fix bugs, improve performance & launch new features. This week was a big one- our DM system went live, which has been the most requested feature. If you're curious, @FilipNest is providing an amusing deployment log here. 

This week we've also been doing a big feature about our East Africa Community - @Netty_Cheruto took over all our socials (@wildlabsnet and WILDLABS Community) to share updates from the first workshop of our Women In Conservation Tech Programme: Kenya. 

Our East Africa Community is the first regional WILDLABS community. It is the first step in our plan to establish locally led regional communities to connect and support #tech4wildlife practitioners all over the globe. 

And finally, this week I've also spent a lot of time poking around various parts of the #tech4wildlife ecosystem. A few highlights..

This week I'm seeing a lot of questions coming up about career paths in #tech4wildlife. More than usual - which makes me wonder if it's time for us to do a proper series sharing different career paths people have taken into the sector (shout out if you want us to do this?)

EDIT: I'm getting DMs about this, so have started a thread here if you have ideas about us doing a series about career paths. Tell us your ideas here!

If you have advice.. 

  • @soumyabhatta ya is asking how to make the jump from a 30yr IT career into conservation over 3-6 months Conversation here
  • If you're in the bioacoustic world, PhD student @esnyder is planning his next career steps and is curious to hear about realities of different #bioacoustic career paths. I like how he frames his questions quite specifically and I'm curious to see replies, so please jump in. Conversation here
  • The final one is a bit different/interesting - @Joyeeta  is looking for cofounders in a climate/conservation tech company, and brings a background in engineering and experience from raising $15m for his last company and 2 exits. Conversation here

My favourite ongoing convo this week is this discussion about solutions for tracking goats on a remote mountainous island. So much good advice and real experience being shared in it.

My favourite open question. We're seeing that most straight foward #tech4wildlife questions are being answered pretty quickly by our community, but if you're into #drones, @LindyClydeKnowlesasked one yesterday that still open but should be a simple answer if you have a moment.  He's looking for advice about open source photogrammetry software options

Finally, my fav article this week was from the team at Fieldkit about the impacts of the chip shortage on conservation tech - we've been hearing a lot of chat about this from our community, so the article and the subsquent comments on twitter etc have been interesting. 

Right, I think that's a wrap from me. Our digest will hit inboxes in the next few hours so I'll drop a link to it as a final tweet to wrap this thread then. In the meantime - how's your week going? Would love to hear/see updates!

Steph 

This has been a really exciting week for me! A lot of cool stuff happening in the WILDLABS East Africa Community. Well, first of all we launched the community and I am happy to see all the interactions happening there. If you are based in East Africa- have you joined the Community? If not, then, head on over here; introduce yourself, take time to explore the resources we have and engage in the discussions- I am looking forward to your inputs on ongoing discussions e,g:

  •  If you are using EarthRanger, I'd love to hear all about your interactions with the tool here.
  • What are some of the Conservation Technology gaps in East Africa? Share your insights here.

Then, I also had a hand in reporting on the first workshop of our Inaugural Women in Conservation Technology Programme; this was a great reminisce of the week we had with the cohort and I'm really excited for what lies ahead and to also witness the impacts of capacity building and mentorship on emerging conservation leaders. If you haven't already, you can catch up with all the updates in this article, and in our socials (Twitter and LinkedIn), as Steph has mentioned. 

Aside from that, I came across a couple of interesting projects and work, that we will definitely highlight in the community. It was a great week and I'm looking forward to continue on with learning, interacting, exploring and highlighting more on conservation technology!

Netty.