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