The course will be held over two days – 18 and 19th November at our office on St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD. 

You will learn the fundamentals of GIS and the QGIS software, including:

• Coordinate Reference Systems
• Vector and Raster data
• Creating & editing shapefile data
• Symbology & styling data
• Georeferencing images
• And the most fun part: Making maps

We keep the class size small (10 people or fewer) so that our trainer can spend plenty of one-on-one time with you and make sure everyone gets maximum value and learnings from the material.

If the Beginner’s course doesn’t quite meet your requirements or you’d like something more advanced, we can also customise the course to include advanced features important to your enterprise. For companies looking to train multiple staff we can also deliver this course at your own facilities, or even offer a condensed one-day version.

We have limited spaces available for our course, and we’d love to have you there! If you’d like to register, or if you’d like to discuss more custom training requirements, please contact us via training@gaiaresources.com.au or call us on 08 9227 7309

You can also read more about our training here https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/services/training/ or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gus

The post Two day QGIS training course appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Support for our clients is something that we take seriously and over the last year or so we’ve been evolving and changing our offerings around it.  This is all driven by the fact that, we need to shepherd our resources (mainly our time) very carefully – we need to make sure we can plan the time required for delivering on projects as well as have the time available for making sure our launched projects are cared for.

Therefore we have decided to implement a new set of Service Level agreements (SLAs) for our support offerings. For those not familiar with SLAs, they are formally defined agreement between the vendor and the customer, which provides a common understanding around the important parts of the SLA – the level of service, covering areas such as response times, scope, priorities, responsibilities and the like.  In simple terms, we are providing a promise we will respond and resolve the issue within an agreed timeframe.  The quicker the times, the more valuable (and expensive) the agreement is – we can turn the dial up to 11 if the client needs us to!

We also recognise that we have clients of different sizes, so it makes sense to have a four tiered approach – making sure we have solutions that fit the needs and the budget of our clients.  The Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum SLAs all have different costs but the key differentiator is the response times for us to respond to our client’s requests, and the amount of time we include each month to provide support.  We also still offer the a lower cost (Time and Materials) approach for those that do not want to engage in an SLA and are happy to engage us only when required – which helps if you have smaller systems, or smaller budgets.

So why are we revising our support offerings to the new set of SLAs?  Primarily it is from our experiences on supporting the bigger projects we do now (such as with the Queensland State Archives, as we wrote about recently), but the main reason is also to address two primary needs:

• Future planning – by locking in an SLA, we can schedule our core work with greater accuracy, giving a better service.  The client knows how many hours are available for support for the year, and we know in advance the time that your SLA will require and have it scheduled in.  If nothing breaks, (which is generally the case) then the hours are used on preventive maintenance or enhancements, and 
• Confidence and security – our clients are assured that timely support will be coming, and know what your response time and resolution time will be on any issue that arises.  This provides more certainty than the previous more informal approaches that we used to reduce the cost to the clients.

Simply put, we wish to make sure we have the right time available for support while making sure we can continue doing good work on our projects that are also running concurrently.  This assists in reducing bottlenecks which can have a cascading effect on productivity across the organisation.  At the same time, our client is getting a ‘locked in’ response time at a scale that matches their needs – and budget.

We’ve been listening to our clients who wanted to see some change, and we think that these Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum SLAs will capture these and provide a solid basis for the ongoing delivery of support services from Gaia Resources to our clients.

If you have any questions around support,  or what these services can do for you, feel free to email me or strike up a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Gus

The post The Importance of Support appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The course will be held over two days on Monday 21st and Tuesday 22nd June at our office on St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD. 

You will learn the fundamentals of GIS and the QGIS software, including:

• Coordinate Reference Systems
• Vector and Raster data
• Creating & editing shapefile data
• Symbology & styling data
• Georeferencing images
• And the most fun part: Making maps

We keep the class size small (10 people or fewer) so that our trainer can spend plenty of one-on-one time with you and make sure everyone gets maximum value and learnings from the material.

If the Beginner’s course doesn’t quite meet your requirements or you’d like something more advanced, we can also customise the course to include advanced features important to your enterprise. For companies looking to train multiple staff we can also deliver this course at your own facilities, or even offer a condensed one-day version.

We have limited spaces available for our June course, and we’d love to have you there! If you’d like to register, or if you’d like to discuss more custom training requirements, please contact us via: 

Email: training@gaiaresources.com.au
Phone: 08 9227 7309

You can also read more about our training here: https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/services/training/ or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post EOFY – QGIS Training Course appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Using the cloud is a greener alternative. The great thing about this solution, is that you are only burning energy and creating carbon when your infrastructure is being used. No servers whining away in the back room burning dinosaur juice while it waits for its next task – there is no idle time. The cloud processing goes and does someone else’s work if you have nothing for it to do. This leads to Cloud Server Farms being more efficient than having your own data centre. Other benefits of green computing are:

• reduced environmental impact (less Greenhouse gas emissions, less e-waste, fewer virgin resources needed for manufacturing new devices)
• lower energy costs
• longer lasting computing devices
• reduced health risk for computer workers and recyclers

To focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS) – their infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy-efficient than the median of surveyed US enterprise data centres. Factor in the carbon intensity of consumed electricity and renewable energy purchases and AWS performs the same task with an 88% lower carbon footprint.

Carbon efficiency of AWS infrastructure. Source: (see 451 Research)

AWS has multiple initiatives to get to these numbers, such as changing how they use water for cooling the servers, utilising technologies like evaporative cooling, recycled water or onsite water treatment. In fact, AWS claims to be working to achieve Amazon’s goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025.

This is no small feat considering the amount of processing they have all over the world. To get to this lofty goal here in Australia, Amazon’s first renewable energy project is a 60-megawatt solar farm anticipated to come online in 2021 in northern New South Wales. Once complete, the project is expected to generate 142,000-megawatt hours – nearly the amount for 23,000 average Australian households. A second 105-megawatt plant is also in development east of Newcastle in NSW.

AWS solar farms in Australia. Source: AWS

To sum up, servers, storage and computational power are essential to, and a cost of, business. By using AWS, Gaia Resources is looking to honour our motto and ensure we get the job done in a greener and cost-effective way, providing stable and practical solutions for any size of project.

You may be interested in some further reading on this topic. And if you’d like to know more, feel free to reach out and see what Gaia can do for you in this rapidly emerging space. Comment below, contact me at angus.mackay@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a chat via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gus

The post Sustainability and the Cloud appeared first on Gaia Resources.

As a relatively new member of the Gaia team, I have been making myself aware of all these tools on the way to becoming fluent in their services. Since March I have completed a few accreditations, well on the way to the first certificate. Quite a few staff have now completed, or are in various stages of completing, accreditation both on the technical side and the business side. We have staff both designing solutions and implementing them. And yes, AWS has a lot of support and training for their vendors too.

We have been quietly achieving successful outcomes using AWS. For example, recently we have implemented:

• online web forms for local government – a solution that is actually serverless and has a minimal monthly cost (Amazon Lambda, S3, SES, Dynamo, Cloudwatch);
• a back end to a mobile app that was made for one of the states volunteer services. Its infrastructure was mounted in AWS, giving a robust infrastructure that runs with minimal intervention (Elastic Beanstalk, S3 storage and protected by AWS Shield, WAF and Guard Duty).

Integration is key

In fact, our DevOps team are finding better ways to utilise AWS on nearly every job now coming through the door. From server and application replacement to data analytics and more. So if you are thinking about your operational future, or are getting your PAAS, IAAS, SAAS in a tizzy, AR to VR, AI to IoT, there are a lot of options for you to explore. So much so, that there may well be a solution in there that you just haven’t thought of yet.

If you’d like to know more, feel free to reach out and see what Gaia can do for you in this rapidly emerging space. Comment below, contact me at angus.mackay@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a chat via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gus

The post Gaia’s cloud secret weapon appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Of course, Covid-19 caused a number of disruptions for both our staff and the client. For the Volunteer Bush Fire Brigades of WA, regular brigade meetings were interrupted and so word of mouth knowledge of the app was impacted. For Gaia Resources ESV App team, going to lock-down to keep everyone safe made it somewhat harder to collaborate on ESV Stage 2. But by no means impossible! Gaia Resources management quickly responded to comprehensively support working from home and so development continued at a good pace.

Screenshots from the ESV app

During this stage, our development team also commenced work the web-based administrative portal to manage volunteers, brigades, businesses and the reporting of data. The admin portal is looking to be in a usable state this week and has just been presented to the clients for comment. Work will then continue for the near future to make it even better for all parties.

Bunbury Volunteer Bushfire Brigade – Cadets (photo courtesy AVBFBWA)

For more detailed information about the ES Volunteers App, including usage instructions and information for suppliers that would like to list a special offer for volunteers, please visit www.esvolunteers.org.au — help these guys help our community.

If you’re interested in how mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to comment below, contact me at angus.mackay@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a chat via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Wishing you all well in this trying time and hope you are keeping safe.

Gus

The post Essential Service Volunteers App update appeared first on Gaia Resources.