We have had a lot of learning to do as a bunch of technologists working in a specialised area like archives.  We’ve invested a lot of time in training our teams in how to “do” archives – from behind the scenes tours of archives that just give you so much context for everything you see on a screen, to attending professional development events.  And of course – our team themselves consist of people who not only deliver technology solutions – but also that have worked as archivists and collections managers themselves.  This means that we have developed a lot of the subject matter expertise that is absolutely necessary to delivering a good solution (I’m particularly grateful for having some wonderful people who have helped me – clients and colleagues – and my ongoing membership of the Australian Society of Archivists as well).

The Queensland State Archive holds over 67 linear kilometres of records

Open source technologies are a wonderful opportunity for archives -both in terms of costs, and in terms of transparency and accountability –  and it’s something that over 20 years we have built Gaia Resources upon.  This has included originally using open source spatial software like QGIS (which we still deliver training courses in to this day) right through to delivering archival management systems based on software like AtoM, Archivematica and ArchivesSpace.  Unfortunately we do still find ourselves busting myths around open source, and explaining how we support it with enterprise level agreements and the like, but thankfully that’s becoming more and more rare these days.

Open technologies, like open source software, can deliver really excellent outcomes for archives and other collecting institutions.  These technologies can provide transparency in many ways, and we also strive to do that in our project delivery; down to giving our clients a lot of visibility into the “under the hood” ways in which these things work.  It is challenging, but across our work with so many organisations, this has helped us to develop a strong relationship based on trust and openness that has really helped us to deliver across some challenging situations.  So you can see that this open-ness is right through our projects, from the tech stack up right to how we manage our relationships with our clients, and that’s an important thing for me personally.  While we say that we support open software and open data, it’s the “open” bit that’s the most important.

Our work with the Queensland State Archives, using open source software continues to this day

It’s fitting that this year’s Australian Society of Archivists conference is themed “opening the archive” and we’ll hopefully be presenting some of our experiences and ideas in Christchurch in October.  We are also just working on some other archive related initiatives around openness and technologies, and we’ll talk more about these in the coming months leading up to the conference.

In the meantime, if you want to know more, then feel free to drop me a line or start a conversation with us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram!

Piers

The post Opening Archives appeared first on Gaia Resources.

This year, you’re going to see a fair bit from us recapping what we’ve done to get to where we are over the last 20 years, and we thought we’d start this off in January with a bit of a look back to the start of things.

Back in 2004, I had left working in a biodiversity survey company to finish my Masters in Business Administration, and then started the current iteration of Gaia Resources (technically, I used the name back in 1997 and 1998 when I was doing some short term contracts for various organisations).

Gaia Resources started from my home – technically, from a small table in a side area off our lounge room – and look how we’ve come full circle – now, post COVID, we are mainly working from home these days once more.  

The story of Gaia Resources – right back from that table – is one that I look back and think about regularly – seeing some of the challenges we’ve faced and overcome really does help you to have the strength to take on new challenges and to solve other problems that arise.  So I thought I’d just write a little about the areas we’ve worked in over the twenty years as a starting point, and how far we’ve come.

When I started the company we were providing a range of spatial data services to the biological survey part of the environmental industry.  We were busy digitising the maps and tables from a range of different biological survey reports, creating digital datasets from paper sources.  Oh, how far we’ve come since then – like the projects we’ve done like using Artificial Intelligence to capture biodiversity data (such as our work with the Northern Territory).  One constant though – it has also been important to interacting with biodiversity data standards when doing this data collection (like the TDWG standards and the new Australian Biodiversity Information Standard), as we have done that throughout our history.

This pic was from The Stagg cafe in Hobart during the TDWG 2023 conference

In 2005 we saw the arrival of Google Maps, and that started to change the landscape of spatial data quite quickly – all of a sudden it was much more desirable to present spatial data through the browser.  Google Maps started to get traction over the next few years and we realised that digitising and producing paper maps was on the way out, so we started to hire software engineers into the company to build systems to manage spatial data.  To this day we are continuing to develop these biological data systems, such as our work on the Western Australian Biodiversity Information Office (both design and build) and the federal government’s Biodiversity Data Repository.

During those early days, we also found ourselves working with the Western Australian Museum, where we were supporting their collections databases – registers of all the vouchered specimens that they have in their collections.  This led to a chance meeting and discussion around Archives, and then we were providing services to a whole new sector, which has become one of the areas I’m very proud of.  

We have delivered a range of open source collections databases to the Archives sector in Australia, across Western Australia, Victoria and most notably Queensland, where – on the back of our work with the Queensland State Archives – we set up our second office in Brisbane.  All of a sudden, we were an Australian company – not just a Western Australian one.  So, from our origins around that little table, now we have offices and staff right around Australia – that’s been a big change!

As an aside – the Archives bug had bitten me in particular, and how!  Being at the most recent national Archives conference in Melbourne just reaffirmed how important this sector is – and how much we enjoy being part of it.  Going from our simple first steps of implementing collections databases to now implementing complete archival systems, including comprehensive digital preservation systems – all of this has been a big shift from our origins, but in the right direction!

Luke, Sarah and I went to the ASA conference in Melbourne in 2023 – our sixth one. Dennis Lillee was there already

The Environment and Collections areas have become pillars of what we do at Gaia Resources; there are other areas we also work in, but these two have come to be our mainstays.  We’ve even now designed the company to have these as our “units” – so that we are focused on our clients in these areas, and delivering high quality services to them.

There are a lot of people that have helped Gaia Resources get to the 20 year mark; clients, colleagues, friends and family.  But throughout the whole thing we could not have done what we have, as well as we have, without our team – our staff, our family away from home.  These people – past and present – have all contributed in some way to the organisation and without them we would not be here.  So to talk about the history of Gaia Resources without the people that came on the journey – so thank you to everyone who has, still does, (or will) work here at Gaia Resources – the place wouldn’t be what it is without your input along the way.  Thank you.

The team at team week in 2022 in Perth – one of the fondest memories from the last couple of years (which will be repeated this year – hopefully without COVID!)

I’m forever grateful to lead this team on our mission of making the world a better place, through the delivery of sustainable technology solutions in a responsible manner.  This year is going to be one where we get to celebrate that just a little bit, and that’s going to make for some fun times ahead.

Stay tuned for more about our history over the year, and for some bright new initiatives that we’re heading into.  Meanwhile, if you want to know more about us, why not drop me a line on email, or through our social media channels – Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and now Instagram!

Piers

The post Twenty Years appeared first on Gaia Resources.

One of the more common highlights that have been raised by the team is our company culture and values.  We’ve worked really hard since COVID to create a sustainable remote working environment, and this has been a success primarily due to a lot of passion from our team to make things better, especially from our Cultural Champions.  At our final company meeting there were many references to our values and culture that were around “living up to our values”, “looking after each other” and the one that made me the most proud – “not just doing lip service to this stuff”.  This is the softer side of business and it means that we have a really engaged team that pulls together to work through the problems that arise – it’s great to have the team having each other’s back.  We’ve got through some massive challenges this year because of our team pulling together to solve them.

Pet bingo was one of the more fun activities we did this year remotely – if you saw a pet in the video meetings then you got to cross one off!

Another common theme was the benefits of the work we’ve done in the management side of things – with our now expanded management team of myself, Andrew (now our Finance Manager), Justine (our People and Culture Manager) and Tanya (our Operations Manager) really starting to hit our stride as the year has gone on.  Having Tanya and Justine join Andrew and I has brought a breath of fresh air and really revitalised us – and the team are seeing that benefit as we are moving forward with a range of initiatives and are generally making the company really hum.

The other thing that has been pointed out by a lot of the team are the rest of the team.  Our meeting had a fair few “thanks” to others in the team from people that felt particularly supported, and that was often reciprocal across the team.  We’ve brought on 15 new staff this year as others have moved on, and there was a lot of praise for the way that people have been brought into the company and supported, and a common note that there was a lot of generosity and support from the whole team.  This again links back to our core values, but the Gaia way is to look after each other, so that’s definitely bedded into the company.

There are a lot of projects we’ve been working on this year, and a number of them were raised as highlights in our meeting from the team, including some of our larger projects:

• The Queensland State Archives project, where this year we’ve developed and gone live with an internal Digital Preservation System capacity, which will roll out in the new year to the agencies in Queensland, 
• The Biodiversity Data Repository (BDR) project, where we have delivered a data ingestions pipeline that takes incidental occurrence and systematic survey data into the BDR and through some very detailed operations, transforms it into the Australian Biodiversity Information Standard ready for use in a graph database, and
• Our work with the Biodiversity Information Office, where we have undertaken an extension project delivering more functionality this year for the Dandjoo system.

A range of other projects and initiatives were mentioned by people as well – trips to see clients and work collaboratively with them, or trips to the conferences that we attend (like the Australian Society of Archivists 2023 and TDWG 2023 conferences).

Luke, Sarah and Piers at the ASA 2023 conference

Above all, though, this year was all it was about the people we work with.  As someone commented in the meeting, this year has felt like five years rather than one – but every time we yelled into the void, the void yelled back with a great deal of support.  This is exactly the type of company I wanted to build when I started Gaia Resources and it seems like it’s really working well.

Our company meeting was a good way to review the year and celebrate our successes as we head into our 20th year of operation.  There’s going to be some interesting challenges along the way, but we’ve got each other’s back and we’re ready to get stuck in after a nice break over the holiday season.

We’ll see you in 2024!

Piers

The post Wrapping Up 2023 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Sadly, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about topics that impact DPS.  I’ve heard all sorts of things that are either mistaken or misguided.  For us, the key is to work transparently and honestly with your customers (or rather, as we call them, partners) and to help the customer to develop the knowledge and skills they will need to move forward on this journey – and putting more information like this out there hopefully helps.

First, let’s talk bout what Digital Preservation is, and how important it is for a range of areas – not just collecting organisations.  

There are various definitions of Digital Preservation:

• Digital Preservation refers to the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary  …(digital preservation) refers to all of the actions required to maintain access to digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological and organisational change. (Digital Preservation Coalition)
• In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavour to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and it combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and “born-digital” content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time (Wikipedia – which we don’t usually quote too often but this one is nicely holistic)
• Digital preservation consists of the processes aimed at ensuring the continued accessibility of digital materials. To do this involves finding ways to re-present what was originally presented to users by a combination of software and hardware tools acting on data. (UNESCO)

They’re all well and good, but the simple way that we think of Digital Preservation is this: it’s the way in which you make sure that the digital assets that you have under your care last forever.  

But what does that actually mean?  Well, it can be an addition to a digitisation program, but it’s definitely not just a hard disc sitting on a desk somewhere.  It’s a combination of a range of things – careful planning, careful ingestion of digital files, careful storage and monitoring of those digital files, a lot of skill and knowledge development in your people, and above all, careful and regular review of how you treat these digital files.

So you want a Digital Preservation System? Let’s talk about what this looks like for you moving forward.

First of all, we firmly believe that you need to understand exactly what this journey to a full live digital preservation system will look like before you start doing anything.  The journey itself will probably include stages of roadmapping, digitising or collecting born-digital materials, implementing the Digital Preservation System (DPS), training your people and then going live, as shown below.

But what do each of these mean and entail?

Roadmapping

Here we really are talking about a discovery and planning phase for your journey into the realm of digital preservation.  You need to be aware of what this journey is going to look like so that you can prepare for it and get all the right gear ready!

We recommend that organisations work on this through a basic series of capacity analyses – looking at some of the key pillars of people, systems, infrastructure, data and processes.  By doing this sort of a review you can then work out the gaps of what you need to have running for your desired future state – of preserving your digital information.  At Gaia Resources we do this as collaboratively as we possibly can, through interviews, workshops and all sorts of other methods.

Once you know where you are, and the gaps you need to fill to get to where you want to go – then it’s a matter of eliciting options, determining the pros and cons of each and then putting that into a roadmap.

Digitisation

You may have already started collecting born-digital materials, or you may be creating them from your existing collection by digitising them. Whilst Digitisation isn’t Digital Preservation, it can be a step towards. It. 

Digitisation is the process of taking something that isn’t digital and making a digital representation of it.  This is usually things like scanning pages, or books, but can be doing complex 3D scans of objects, or transferring from historical tape media to digital media.  Digitisation is a big and complex beast, and it requires a lot of expertise to be done right.

Some organisations may have already started digitisation, but you will need to be looking ahead to how you’ll preserve these digital materials for the long term, store it securely so it’s not lost, and prepare for migration of the data about these digital objects (something we talk about later).

We do recommend that the digitisation component of a DPS implementation can start once you’ve done the roadmap – i.e. once you’ve made some decisions about how you will be operating the DPS and the sorts of decisions you will make around storage quantities, file formats and so on, you can then start digitising – and storing it in a secure way so that it won’t get lost.

But you can start digitising in a “do no harm” approach like this pretty quickly after the roadmap is underway.

Implementation

In this stage, you will be well on your way to your digital electric dreams. This is going to be a complex information technology, business process and risk management project – and like most projects, you will also need a good change management process around it.

The way in which this stage will play out will depend on what you’ve decided in the roadmap, and where you’ve decided to go in terms of the technical aspects of the project.  If you’re doing this in house, on your own servers, then that’s a vastly different beast than going down an “as a service” approach (like we do with the Queensland State Archives, and others).  We strongly advocate for open source solutions (especially for archives, museums, and other collecting organisations), for various reasons we’ve outlined in places like here and here.

An example digitised item from Queensland State Archives: Item ID: ITM1640266

A key aspect I’d like to highlight of this stage – don’t rush it.  You need the time to implement this into your organisation.  You’re talking about procedural changes, technology introduction, and there is a lot to consider about how it will change your organisation and practices – so be careful and considered about this part. Most of the time it’s better to do digital preservation “right” than “fast”.

And before you know it, the big day is here…

Go Live

Congratulations – you made it to your system going live! Going live is always a mixture of anxiety and excitement; sometimes it’s a big ceremonial bang and sometimes it is just a quiet button pressed on a screen.  

For Digital Preservation, one of the things that’s going to be a bit of an anticlimax is that as soon as you do that first ingest, the files go into quarantine to make sure that virus definitions catch up and we don’t end up digitally preserving viruses (which of course, you might want to do if you run something like The Malware Museum!).

But what about those other two areas on the diagram – skill development and running the system?  A quick couple of final points:

Skill development

Skill development takes time.  

While you should be ergonomically developing the system (making the system meet the needs of the people using it), you also should be training the same people and developing their skills along the same time.  Skill development is something that we feel should start as early as possible, and ideally you should be doing it as you develop the system.

Some of this training is going to be targeted and specific, but a lot of it is going to just be about exposure.  Remember, this is quite a different beast than an Archival Management System, and requires some different skills – so you will need to be aware of this and cognisant of the skills of your team working on the DPS.

We would strongly recommend that you go “live” with an internal version of the system first.  Then you can take the material you have been digitising and start ingesting it through the DPS as the key way to do some skill development. 

Running the system

Once it’s up and running – then the fun starts.  You’ve realised your (electric) dream!

It’s time to tune your machine for maximum performance and flexibility.  To do that, you need to be looking at how the DPS runs – you will be tuning infrastructure, and making sure you have storage available, and a range of other technical tasks.  But you will also be turning into a “format whisperer” – you’ll be looking at what existing and new formats come through the system and determining how to best deal with those for the future as well.  There’s a lot to do here – but there are lots of resources available to help, and people that can support you, like your implementation partners.  You might get to play with a few interesting technologies as well – including Artificial Intelligence, like we’ve been doing lately.

So there’s a run through of what it takes to get cracking on a journey involving Digital Preservation.  If you would like to know more about any aspect of this, then feel free to start a conversation with us on social media –  LinkedIn, X, or Facebook or to drop me a line at piers@gaiaresources.com.au. 

Happy World Preservation Day – may all your bits be in the right order and your formats readily readable into the future!

Piers

The post Digital Preservation: building the Electric Dream together appeared first on Gaia Resources.

TDWG (“tadweeg”) is a great acronym and best explained from their own web site (www.tdwg.org):

Historically known as the Taxonomic Databases Working Group, today’s Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) is a not-for-profit, scientific and educational association formed to establish international collaboration among the creators, managers and users of biodiversity information and to promote the wider and more effective dissemination and sharing of knowledge about the world’s heritage of biological organisms.

Unlike what the local cafes thought (hats off to The Stagg for this one) , it’s not a taxidermy or really even a taxonomy conference: it’s about biodiversity data and standards around that data – and it attracts people from all over the world.

What I found really amazing was not only the efforts that the organisers put into making sure the hybrid conference worked for both in-person attendees and those attending virtually, but the range of interesting and thought provoking papers that were presented.

It’s always hard to come up with a summary of a conference that goes for a week and involves a lot of thought provoking stuff – I mean, I’ve got about twenty pages of notes to work through – but Mieke and I are giving it a go for our team, so here’s the recap of that recap!

Firstly and we’ve got to claim our own stuff as a highlight – but both Mieke and I gave talks this year.  Mieke was talking about translating between the Darwin Core data standard and the Australian Biodiversity Information Standard, and this is a key part of the work we’re doing helping the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water deliver the Biodiversity Data Repository.  Meanwhile I was presenting on the work we’ve done on the Restricted Access Species Data (RASD) Service with the Atlas of Living Australia. Note: we’ll update this blog in the future with the recordings when they become available.

The themes that we saw at the conference that really stuck with us included:

• Data quality – a bunch of talks about data quality made us really agree that what defines quality is case dependent on the end user needs.  Having some “fitness for purpose” flags (e.g. suitable for modelling) that can be associated with them – this is far more nuanced than the usual “good quality” tags.
• Integration – there were talks on a range of systems like taxonomic backbones, data repositories and other systems – there are a lot of opportunities to synthesize and aggregate data, as well as connect to some significant infrastructure services that can really help with standardisation and connectivity between data sources.
• Terms of useMore and more fields – with the RASD workshop, we also saw some great talks about both the FAIR and CARE principles that really have given us food for thought.  These principles – RASD, FAIR and CARE – all provide frameworks for how to format data so that there are appropriate levels of access depending on the content and context.  Adding in some additional fields not only to the data stores that we work with, but also the data exchange methods we use, will certainly add a lot to the accessibility and meaningfulness that’s out there in biodiversity data space.
• Artificial Intelligence is out there and being used – we already knew this, but it was great to see a wide range of pragmatic and useful ways in which AI can assist in the efforts across the biodiversity community to solve some big challenges – digitisation, transcription, data processing, identification and data indexing just to name a few!  

One of the big things we did differently this year was to help out and support the first ever TDWG Student Prize.  This is a really important thing to do – supporting our students is the way to make sure that we’ll have a thriving and active community moving forward.  So it’s really important to support our students, and congratulations to Michael Elliott for taking the prize home, and for all the students who were part of the conference.  

Any conference is not without a lot of side-bar (or maybe front-bar) talks and Hobart put on a great show for us.  We were able to get out and try a bunch of different places with colleagues and friends – we can definitely recommend the Blood Orange Stout from Custom’s House.  Hobart is a great place to visit (I’ve been there a few times now) and will be back again in the future as well.

So finally, a big thanks to all the people that made it happen, both in person and virtually.  TDWG is pretty unique – it’s a conference that ticks two of my great loves of technology and biodiversity – and I’m really hoping it won’t be another 15 years before I get to another one!  If you want to know more about any of the topics touched on in this blog then drop me a line, or start a conversation with us on social media Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook!

Piers

The post TDWG 2023 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Gaia Resources started at a messy little table in my house, where I was trying to find ways to merge my previous careers of wannabe ecologist and GIS data nerd together into some sort of job for life. So, when Rachel asked me for something for our EOFY blog, I started thinking about the last year and then I kept falling down the rabbit hole that is 19 years deep! I think we might have to climb out of that rabbit hole for a while and instead focus on this last financial year, though.

Speaking of a trip down memory lane, here’s some of our team photos from the past

This last year presented us with a solid footing for moving forward for this year.  We are entering into the new year with a number of “repeat” or “extension” projects, especially in the Environmental space. Our environmental knowledge and past work resulted in us being re-engaged to work on two very large and important projects for biodiversity management in Australia – the Biodiversity Information Office (BIO), and the Biodiversity Data Repository (BDR). We’ve spoken about BIO on our blog in the past (like the recent blog on BIO), but I realise we’ve not talked a lot about the BDR.

That project, led by our federal Environment department (the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water) has been something we’ve worked on for a couple of years in the “data partner” role.  In this sense we are the ones that work with data providers to ensure that data can be provided to the BDR’s main repository, and then we run all that data through a detailed pipeline to ensure that it meets the needs of that repository when it gets there. This is really important – the need to access robust, authoritative biodiversity data in a timely manner is a key part of the reforms that are being delivered by this government.  It’s something that we’re proud to be involved with, and we’ll have to explain more about it in the future.

The BDR is a large initiative that can be broken down into an ingestion pipeline (which we manage), and then a repository to store the data

The BDR and BIO have been really positive environmental projects, but in the other part of our business – the Collections side – we have also been delivering on a range of projects, with some milestones coming just around the corner as we push towards a Production release of the Digital Preservation System (DPS) for the Queensland State Archives.  This will be a big milestone – the first time that an integrated DPS will be included in the Archives there – and to get there has been a lot of work by our dedicated team.  I’m really looking forward to seeing that go live – that will be a big part of our wins from this last financial year.

Collections and Environment have been our two focus areas for the last year, and our team has changed around those areas.  We’re also recruiting for more people to come along and help us make a difference – including a range of ads that are out now for particular jobs, too:

Two of our recent job ads that are still live at the time of posting this blog

With these projects continuing into the new year, we’ve got a pretty full book already – so recruitment is going to be continuing, and if you’re at all interested in the positions we talked about in the last recruiting blog, then drop us a line at jobs@gaiaresources.com.au. 

Next year we are celebrating 20 years of Gaia Resources, from that little table in my house to to a team of over 40 spread across Australia (and even some in Europe). Stay tuned for some changes that are coming and make sure to be subscribed to our newsletter.

Right – we better get on with it and start this new financial year then! In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about our coming projects, or about our recruitment then start a conversation with us on social media – LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter or drop us a line.  All our best wishes for the new year ahead, and we look forward to seeing you during it! 

Piers

The post Happy New (financial) Year! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

At the moment we’re recruiting for:

• Project Managers – to add to our team in the Project Management area, as we’re about to start some big new projects in the new financial year – we’ve been looking through our recruiters, but stay tuned for an ad coming soon too,
• Software Engineers – we have already advertised and are in the interview stage for our Senior Developer role, but we are also about to start looking for more Software Engineers to join our team for the large projects mentioned above,
• Business Analysts – we are still receiving applications from our recent Business Analyst job advertisement, to again bring on some more people to help with projects, and
• DevOps – we are about to also start recruiting for new DevOps team members, to help with the every-growing work managing our cloud infrastructure implementations.  Another job ad will be out soon for this as well.

If any of these interest you then either hit up the linked job ad above, or drop us a line at jobs@gaiaresources.com.au and send us a CV and some information on what you’re interested in, and why.

While we have been busy reaching out to our networks and to our recruiters to find good candidates for these positions, as well as the adverts already out or coming out shortly, we thought we might also talk a bit about what a job here looks like, too – the things you can’t quite put in the job ad.

• People first – one of our core values is about supporting our people, and making sure that we think of the person as well as the role that you play.  We have a whole raft of ways that we support our teams, including our Cultural Champions and a range of training and support around “soft skills” (like we mentioned back in May, last year, and again just recently).
• Flexibility – we pride ourselves on our flexibility around working arrangements, and most of our team work from home for part of the week at least – some people prefer entirely remote roles, and others prefer to come into an office space, but the choice is yours.  We also get you the things you need to make work happen – our “I Need Stuff” email address has had some hilarious requests over the years
• Autonomy with accountability – we allow people to manage their own time to achieve the outcomes that are necessary for their work. To that end you will also have Work Leads to help support you and to help you find that balance, and a team of people that look at workloads and solve any challenges there each week.
• Get good – our functional guilds are full of like minded people who work in the same disciplines, and our Functional leads are the ones that help you to get better at what it is that you do – along with all the other members of your cohort.  From coworking time to knowledge sharing to just plain ol’ lunch together – there are plenty of ways to build your skillsets.

We take our work seriously but we don’t take ourselves too seriously – after all life needs to have some balance and we need to find ways that we can all work together and have a bit of fun along the way.  So from things like the more formal “welcome lunches” we are having in the next few weeks, to the much less formal Friday drinks, gaming sessions, jam sessions and other shenanigans all add some colour and personality to the place – and makes a nice break from our remote lives these days.

As we mentioned, we’re looking for people that want to join our team and so if any of the positions above specifically interest you, or you would like to chuck your hat in the ring, then feel free to email us at jobs@gaiaresources.com.au and tell us about yourself!

Piers

The post We’re recruiting! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The return to undertaking work travel still feels strange.  After COVID lockdowns and travel restrictions, we’re still very aware that there are plenty of viruses out there, so we do suggest to people to do what they need to in order to feel as safe as possible.  Gaia’s procedure “don’t come in if you are ill” is something we’ve been doing throughout and we want to keep, so that we don’t end up taking out the whole company with an outbreak of the flu – this used to happen in the past.  But for work trips – this means being aware of different people’s needs and requirements, and making sure that our clients are happy to accommodate during the meetings and workshops, which is, frankly, super easy these days. 

When we plan for work trips we try to make the people side of this paramount from the start. The team choose the flight schedule that works for them, so that they can be in the location we need in the best shape possible.  This also means that it creates the least disruption to their families and other commitments outside of work.  Of course, there is a need to be on site at a certain time, so there are parameters to consider here, but this flexibility is important for our team. You don’t want to start a work trip anxious that you’ve had to compromise on things like family!  

After travel and settling into the accommodation, we met up for the first time in person since COVID for some of us while we have brekky and get ready for the first workshop (L-R Megan, Piers, Mieke, Grant and Gail)

Accommodation is also an important choice for our team. We want somewhere close enough to the client site that you don’t have a hassle to get there.  A benefit of being within walking distance is that you can then also have some active recovery (non strenuous aerobic of physical activity) after the workshop as you walk back to the accommodation.  The key is that it needs to be spacious and nice enough that you don’t feel bad about living in a shoebox for a few days (we do provide accommodation for our team that extends across weekends either side of work trips if they want to hang around and explore a bit).  These little things can all go a long way towards making the whole time away from home just that little bit better.  All these little things add up.

So you’ve gotten to the workshop in the best possible state of mind – now we need to keep it that way, and that’s going to be different for everyone. I’ll use a recent trip as an example of how we do that.

Heading into the John Gorton Building in Canberra where our client is located – the basement was part of the intelligence efforts during World War Two (they have a small exhibition right underneath where we are walking)

For this trip five of our staff from different cities headed to Canberra to do some planning work for the Biodiversity Data Repository, a project we’re working on with the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

I tend to recharge with solitude and exercise myself, so for me, I made sure to have at least one night that was free so I could go for a run around Lake Burley-Griffin as part of my active recovery.  For other people the way to recharge was to go and do some social stuff – and of course because we have our own Pickleball champion in Gail, that means that there was the option to go play in a local pickleball team, which a few of the gang took up.

Playing pickleball for the first time for some – Sarah wearing our #stayathome t-shirt we organised during COVID lockdowns

We also wanted to have some time together as well, so we managed to organise a team dinner, where the local team from Canberra (Sarah and Rhys) as well as the travellers (myself, Grant, Megan, Gail and Mieke) could get together and have a bit of time just chatting.  As an almost fully remote team, it’s super important to make the most of the time that we have face-to-face. We went out for a nice low key dinner, so that we could let our hair down (yes, metaphorically for at least two of us).

Team dinners with (L-R) Grant, Mieke, Gail, Sarah (back), Megan (front), Piers and Rhys

There was a lot of good work done in Canberra on this trip, for both the client and Gaia, but also we have some really good memories of the things we did as well – playing sports, catching up as a group, or getting some time out to recharge in nice surroundings.  

We even managed a quick pre-airport catch up with our colleagues from Hudson Molonglo (who are based in Canberra) to have a drink and chat about our work together on the Queensland State Archives project.

So, as the sun set on our trip to Canberra, we had made the time for us to be the best versions of ourselves – for our clients, colleagues and most importantly for our families when we got home.

The sunsets in Canberra can be really amazing (not shown: amazing autumnal colours in the trees around the Lake)

As we have previously spoken about looking after our people, that continues, and we evolve as the times change around us. We are focused on making sure that we have a supportive environment that means that we can be at our best when we work with our clients, and that we can look forward to the next trip as well.  While we might be remote, that doesn’t mean we don’t have to consider our people – in fact, it means we have to consider them even more and be proactive about how we do that.

If you’re interested in working with a company that does look after our people, then why not drop us a line at jobs@gaiaresources.com.au to see if we have an opening for someone with your skills?  We’re always looking out for people who want to be part of our team and to help us make a positive impact on the world.

Piers

The post Healthy Work Trips appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We have been just re-engaged by BIO for a follow on from the pilot project to further develop the BIO systems, and this is where the thinking around our previous blog posts on the responsible use of data standards https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/responsible-use-data-standards-biodiversity-data/ has really come from.

Dandjoo is made up of multiple systems – Data Submission, Curation and Storage, and Delivery, as well as Nomos, the Taxonomic Names Management system we’ve developed for BIO

The next few months will see us collaboratively improve the functionality right across all the systems that makes up the Dandjoo platform, based on the results of the pilot project and the future directions that the BIO team are driving towards.  It’s been great to work with the BIO team to ensure that we have a good way forward, both for BIO and for the broader community, and it’s going to be a great thing to work further on Dandjoo.

BIO and the Dandjoo platform is a key part of how biodiversity data is managed within Western Australia, but it is only part of a much wider ecosystem of data moving around other processes, organisations and people.  

One of the internal projects that we’ve been working on here is to develop a more holistic view of the entire biodiversity ecosystem and data management landscape across the country, to work out how this flows – trying to create a way of representing this is a real challenge in itself – so we’re looking at some interesting ideas around capturing provenance and those sorts of things using the technologies that we’re implementing, like graph databases, to see where that can help us with this.  Technology in the biodiversity data management space has a lot of great opportunities at the moment – right through to the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – that are really starting to show promise across a lot of what we do here at Gaia Resources.

Our work with BIO has already commenced and will continue for the next few months – so look out for some more updates from us around this project in due course.  

For more information on our work with BIO, or how we can help you manage your biodiversity data, drop me a line here, or start a conversation with us on our social media platforms Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook

Piers

The post Biodiversity Data in Western Australia appeared first on Gaia Resources.

That story begins in Brisbane, where I was helping with some workshops with our client, the Queensland State Archives.  Our team are heading into the first milestone for the new Digital Preservation System there, and so we were planning the next stage of the project to deliver the final touches on the system.  After a good collaborative day of workshops, I climbed aboard a flight back to Perth, and found our flight firstly diverted to Kalgoorlie with a fuel issue, and then unable to finish the final leg of the journey due to a maintenance issue.  And so, there we were, 130-odd passengers, trying to find a way to sleep on the Kalgoorlie airport floor.

When we did arrive back in Perth, I realised that there really was no time to rush home to get changed into something more formal for my presentation, and instead headed to the RIMPA event wearing my plane clothes to present on the topic of “Preparing for the Future; Skills and Technologies”.

When I’m asked to present at an event, I like to do my homework into the people that are there and to try to come up with something that is useful for them to take away and use themselves.  I think it’s beholden on a presenter to make sure that their presentation is useful (and bonus if it’s also entertaining, which I do strive for).

In this case, I set up my presentation to look at where we are at today (including an explanation of my attire), where “here” really is, how you assess your baseline in terms of the skills and technologies you have before launching into a crystal ball gazing session about what Records Management professionals might need into the future.  To do this, I introduced them to a model we’ve worked with many times in our environment area; our model we use for assessing the health of an organisation across some key areas; people, process, data, hardware and software.  We started using this model across spatial health check projects, but we find that it works for other industries as well.

This model opens the door for an evaluation of some of the trends that are out there in each of those areas, and I highlighted the following in my talk

• People – it’s about “soft skills”, mental health strategies and resilience 
• Data – looking at the full data lifecycle means you have to consider the volumes being created, the environmental cost of storing all this data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and security considerations, 
• Hardware – it’s about location – is your hardware in the cloud (i.e. someone else’s data centre, or your own on premise approach), 
• Software – thinking about the life cycle of software and the 7-10 year lifespan of software, as well as the increasing opportunities that AI is bringing to the field, and
• Process – it’s about making sure you are developing the best practice processes that work on the digital side, not ones that are just converted from analysis projects.

When you put all this together, you end up creating a plan to evaluate your organisation – one that takes this strategic review as the first step, before moving into process creation, staff development and training, and potentially system implementation for the next generation of system for your organisation. By following that plan you can go on a journey from where you are to somewhere in the future you really want to be (and hopefully you don’t get diverted to Kalgoorlie along the way – but make the most of it if you do!).

It’s important in any organisation considering any sort of approach to really look at where you have come from, and what you have before you embark into the future.  I feel like this is something in particular that I’ve been learning about Gaia Resources over the 20-odd years and multiple evolutions that we have been through, and I hope that it was of use to the RIMPA attendees on the day.

While I can’t promise that I will never turn up to a presentation wearing a Goodies t-shirt in the future, I can promise that I’d be back to another RIMPA event like this in a flash – the audience were very well engaged and it was a real privilege to be there.

Thanks to Jo Kane (L) and Frank Flintoff (M) for the support on the day – and this photo

If you’d like to know more about how these sorts of plans work for organisations, get a copy of the presentation, or just want to follow up on something I’ve said on the day, then drop me a line at piers.higgs@gaiaresources.com.au.  You can also always start a conversation with us on our social media feeds Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, and it’ll get to me that way, too!

Piers

The post A long journey to records management appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Our most recent collaboration with AUDRC has been to help them build their Park Life survey tool. You can check it out at australian.park-life.com. There’s still time to participate and all surveys completed before 11:59pm AWST Friday 31st March go into a prize draw to win one of four $500 Westfield, Coles Myer or Bunnings vouchers.

The interface for the Park Life survey – a clean, simple approach to collecting data

The project is ambitious and aims to capture (and map!) a national snapshot of park use across Australia. The survey asks you to identify the parks you use and then explores how you use them and how they make you feel. AUDRC will link this data (which is anonymised) with their nationally standardised spatial layer of parks and public open spaces, which covers all Australian state and territory capital cities.  The results will help guide park managers in how they provide parks and open spaces for their local communities.

This dataset is just one example of the research projects that AUDRC undertakes, (listed at https://www.audrc.org/research) and  that we are proud to have helped support over the years, right back to some of the early work where we were helping them to use spatial software through to these later projects delivering interactive web sites like Park Life.

It’s a real pleasure to continue to work with the crew at AUDRC – and there’s plenty more from our partnership in this area to come!  If you want to know more about the survey or project, then feel free to contact Paula Hooper at AUDRC (paula.hooper@uwa.edu.au).

Piers

The post How do you use your local parks? appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We really spent the first half of the year trying to learn and plan for the second half of the year – culminating in our first face-to-face team workshop (“team week”) since COVID changed the way we work forever.

Team week 2022 – before COVID took us down!

Team week was – at least in my eyes – a great success.  Having our team together was a real morale booster for us all, despite the COVID hangover that hit us afterwards.  It also gave me the chance to test out the goals and approaches for the next year with the team and to get some really vital feedback from the team about how we were travelling – this has to have been, without doubt, the highlight of the year for me.

People are the key consideration here at Gaia Resources, and we started by expanding our executive team with the arrival of Gaye as our Chief People Officer.  Having Gaye join us to help recalibrate the company towards that people-centric goal has been an important part of our evolution and a huge part of this year.  Gaye’s been instrumental in gathering a huge range of really valuable feedback at the team week, developed new recruitment processes and set up our Cultural Champions cohort, which has already seen some great improvements to our culture and for people’s wellbeing.

Meanwhile, we’ve also been changing up the company to create Functional Leads – people who lead a guild of people that perform similar jobs (e.g. the software engineers, or the business analysts).  While Gaye’s been also helping there, the leads themselves have also been developing their own ways and methods to support their guild.  In both the Functional Lead and Cultural Champion cases, we’ve continued to work with Yentle as our partner to help grow our people into these roles.

The third leg of the stool are our Work Leads, and this is still a work in progress, but Andrew and the Project Managers have been working with Giles from Cantor and Ball to restructure our working arrangements to deliver better outcomes for our clients and for our teams.  As we’ve grown into a company of over 40 people, this has become one of our bugbears, and the systems that we created when we were 15 people don’t quite cut it anymore – so there’s a lot of evaluation and renewal happening in this area.

This three-legged stool metaphor is something we took from our coaching and work with the team at Adapt by Design, and it seems to work well for us.  The systems that Adapt by Design provide, in particular, are great ways to measure and monitor some of the more intangible things around the company, like the satisfaction of the team in the way we’re working.

An example of the ADAPT platform and some of the metrics that can be brought out of it.

In amongst all this “internal” stuff we were doing, we still had work to do and projects to deliver.  In this year, we’ve delivered two of the largest, and most impactful, biodiversity data management projects in our history – the Biodiversity Information Office’s (BIO) Dandjoo system in Western Australia, and we’ve also been working with the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water on the national Biodiversity Data Repository (BDR).

Both of these projects have made significant contributions to the way that biodiversity data is managed, and this is one of the key reasons that Gaia Resources exists – to make a positive change in these sorts of areas.  For BIO in particular, which was launched in July, 2022, the way in which data is collected – keeping every field that has been captured by the submitter, not throwing a bunch away to match a standard – is a key improvement in the way we manage biodiversity data.  This is a pretty big one for me personally (as you can probably tell from the blog I wrote earlier this year) and I think it represents a foundational change in how we will manage data into the future – as well as future-proofing it, as we’re doing with a range of technologies in the BDR project.

Dandjoo is made up of multiple systems – Data Submission, Curation and Storage, and Delivery, as well as Nomos, the Taxonomic Names Management system we’ve developed for BIO

There is another side of our business, though – the area we call “Collections”, which represents a big chunk of the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector.  The link to our environmental core is the Museums sector – specifically for us, Museums and Herbaria – and that is where we first started helping these taxonomic regulators manage their data and databases.  There are also other links – like how we could archive spatial data – as well.  Once we were managing biological collections, the same tools could be used in the rest of the sector, and we now operate archival systems with State level Archives in Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria, and have worked with the Tasmanian and South Australian Archives as well. 

This archival work this year has had a major focus on Digital Preservation – making sure that the digital files that are delivered to the archives can be opened again and again into the future (which is no small feat considering how fast digital formats change).  Over this year we have been working on a Digital Preservation extension to our work with the Queensland State Archives, with our colleagues at Hudson Molonglo, Recordkeeping Innovation and Artefactual.  Digital Preservation is really an area where we want to bring something back to the environmental sector – thinking about how we preserve digital environment data for the future is something we’ve done a lot of work on this year, as well.

Josephine Marsh presenting (virtually) on our work for the Queensland State Archives at the national Archives Conference earlier this year

With all that, it’s been a very big year.  There are a range of other project highlights that come to mind as I write this, such as;

• Continuing to support our partners at Liquid Interactive in the deliver of the My Aged Care web site,
• A whole raft of interesting things we’ve been doing with Artificial Intelligence in the archival and environmental sectors, such as capturing biodiversity data from handwritten and printed forms, through to capturing data from images of handwritten archival documents,
• Helping develop wildlife corridors within the urban environments in the Perth hills, with our work with the Shire of Mundaring,
• Attending the Here We Are conference in Canberra – our first face to face conference since COVID started, and where our clients at Queensland State Archives presented a few papers on our joint work,
• Continued work with groups like the Northern Australian Fire Index, where we produced a mobile app to help people to see the fires in northern Australia on their own devices,
• Continuing to support the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art with their Collection Online system, and
• Working with the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions on spatial data management tools for their internal spatial data management.

That’s a sample of some of the projects that we’ve had the opportunity to work with this year – there are many more there, and in the works for the new year as well.  When I look back at these projects and initiatives for 2022, I think how different it was when we started back 18 years ago, and how far we’ve come – and that just enthuses me more to make even more of a positive difference to the world we live in.  

I’m looking forward to taking a breath for the next week or so with the Christmas season upon us, and getting a chance to plan more of our initiatives for the next year.  I hope you get a similar break to recharge, spend some quality time with your loved ones, and look forward to seeing you in 2023!

Piers

The post 2022 in Review appeared first on Gaia Resources.