For the past nine months I have working on-site at the Department of Parks and Wildlife (Parks and Wildlife) on a number of different projects within the Office of Information Management (OIM). I tend to be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades (master of none?) these days, so as well as working on a number of projects I also performed a number of roles including Business Analyst, Scrum Master and Developer.

The main projects I worked on included:

Knowledge Management Initiative

OIM’s ongoing program to improve digital information management tools within Parks and Wildlife using open Information and Communications Technology (ICT) ecosystem principles and architecture to enable and protect data collection, storage and access mechanisms for internal (and potentially external) users within the department. I joined forces with OIM’s Architecture and Systems Integration team to design and construct a suite of tools founded on contemporary open source software, while Piers and Alex were involved in also helping to build Departmental applications registers and provide guidance to this Initiative.

Biodiversity Audit

Serge and I both worked on the Biodiversity Audit (along with Florian from the Department), which is a decision support tool built around the 2014 Parks and Wildlife Biodiversity Audit. The tool provides users with the ability to quickly gain a regional snapshot of biodiversity issues as well as providing access to the raw data collected during the audit.

Biodiversity Audit is a custom solution built on top of the CKAN open source data portal.

BioSys

Serge, Tony and I worked on BioSys (again, with other Departmental staff – this time including staff from OIM, the Science and Conservation Division and the Kimberley Region), which is a pilot system to support the efficient capture, curation and management of field observation data. At this stage BioSys is only being rolled out to a single Parks and Wildlife region, with a view to include other regions in future phases.

BioSys was written from scratch using Django.

I really enjoyed working at Parks and Wildlife, they are doing some really innovative work at the moment and their approach to ICT systems by focussing on open resusable components really fits with our own philosophies on how these types of systems should be built. I think all of us involved are really looking forward to continuing our relationship with the people and the Department itself.

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Andrew