For a handful of our non-technical team members, workshops such as those hosted by She Codes provide a great environment to expand their understanding of web development.  She Codes hosts one-day weekend workshops for women and non-binary individuals to introduce them to coding. Sophie Darnell wrote about taking advantage of a virtual She Codes workshop at the beginning of the pandemic. Although these classes are outside of normal working hours, they are recognised as work hours by the company. 

While as a company we fully embrace continual learning, we also enjoy giving back and fostering the learning of others. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Software Engineer Sarah Aldrich donated many evenings and weekends to mentor for the She Codes Plus six-month bootcamp. 

Our team at Gaia Resources are a pretty diverse bunch, and the ways we prefer to learn and communicate are pretty diverse too. We have a broad range of skills and an amazing cohort of colleagues who are happy to share what they know. So sometimes when we want to learn a new skill, the first place to start is with each other.

Gaia Resources prefers to use open source software in our solutions, where appropriate (Read Chris’s introduction to open source software here). One open source solution that we have implemented for our clients is Drupal. Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS), available to download for free. One of our Senior Developers, Brianna Williams (Bri), has been using her knowledge and experience with Drupal to bring open source content management systems to our clients. One of the most recent of these was the delivery of the Collections Online solution for the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) late last year. She is also a member of the Drupal Brisbane Meetup group, sharing ideas and challenges with other developers using the platform.

Bri realised that other team members (mostly non-technical) were interested in expanding their knowledge of CMSs but struggled to find solid foundational beginner resources. Having had positive experiences using Pantheon hosting on Drupal projects, and benefiting from their online resources, she decided it would be a good place for the team to start. While the resources themselves are self-paced and online, it can often be intimidating if you are starting ‘from scratch’ to complete them by yourself. If you encounter an issue, there may not be many ways to solve it in real-time, and it is harder to confidently complete. Bri recognised these barriers to entry and arranged a session for interested team members to work through the training together, with a dedicated chat line for her to help out anyone who got stuck as soon as possible, and for us all to learn from each other’s mistakes.

Voon-Li Chung leading an Arduino lesson

Once a month, all Software Engineers meet to discuss tools and practises, to stay abreast of what is happening in the field. In these meetings we also share the outcomes of personal PD projects and discuss avenues for future ones. Recently the Software Engineers have embarked on a bit of group PD. One of our mobile developers, Voon Li Chung, kindly volunteered to run Arduino workshops for all interested parties. Upon completion of official business, the Software Engineering meetings turn into hands-on lessons where Voon-Li guides us in a build. Each lesson is designed to build on previous lessons and to demonstrate specific capabilities of Arduinos. Starting with turning on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and making them flash, we have progressed to learning about H-Bridges that will eventually enable our robots to move both forward and in reverse.  

It is great to learn with a team who are so interested in taking on new challenges and discovering new solutions. Whether we are learning from each other or teaching each other, Gaia Resources has successfully fostered an environment where we are all comfortable exploring new things.

If you want to be a part of a team that values learning or if you have something you can teach our team, reach out! We would love to hear from you. Reach out directly via info@gaiaresources.com.au or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Sarah

The post Learning Never Ends: Professional Development at Gaia Resources appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The study focused on BRUVS (Baited Remote Underwater Video System) footage, and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to collect data and accelerate our understanding of fish in our oceans. AIMS and other researchers spend a lot of time manually capturing data from the videos, so finding efficiency measures and improvements to data consistency and quality would be of tremendous value. Out of the study we built a prototype application for processing and visualising BRUVS data, including automatically identifying and counting tropical fish species.  

Taking the OzFish open dataset and many hours of AIMS BRUVS footage, the team focused on training the AI model to accurately identify a range of fish species representing rare and common fish, fast moving and very small species, schools of overlapping fish and also differentiating morphologically similar species. Demonstrating  the effectiveness of our method for these specific challenges, allowing us to produce quantified, highly accurate results. We are now able to look confidently ahead towards tackling hundreds of species that live in Australia’s tropical waters.

The Fishscale online prototype – video metadata and playpack showing annotations and count statistics.

When we look back at it, we’ve achieved an incredible amount in a short space of time. Our nationally distributed team (Perth, Brisbane, Darwin) worked really hard to make sure we were on the same page and productive with online meetings, collaborations and workshops. This was no small feat when you think we had two COVID-19 lockdowns affecting our Queensland team members.

With a new Fishscale prototype web interface, a new BRUVS video can be uploaded and processed within minutes. While the researcher grabs a coffee, it generates the statistics they need to help model and understand population ecology and fish behaviour. There’s an important human quality control element as well, meaning that fish experts have the ability to make corrections, improve the model and increase the value of their data. 

We really enjoyed the regular interaction with the AIMS team as well, which helped us to design our Fishscale prototype with exciting features that will eventually deliver lots of value and efficiency gains for research workflows and other industry applications. 

So what happens next? Well, there is still plenty to do if we progress to the next phase. We know there are still challenges around much larger numbers of species, variations in water quality and environmental factors. In phase 2, our plan includes customising the user interface to adapt to different user types depending on their requirements for data capture and output. Different products based on the AI framework will have different audiences in mind depending on whether they come from research, monitoring, education, or not for profit groups.

We are confident this is just the beginning of an exciting journey to develop a highly valuable product for streamlining research workflows and generation of important statistics. In fact, the Proof of Concept phase starts up around September, and we are hopeful we can progress and continue working with AIMS on this key initiative. 

If you are interested in this space or are someone who works with underwater videos and fish identification, we would love to get your perspective for future development. Feel free to give me a call or an email though if this type of work interests you – strike up a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

The post Artificial Intelligence for fish species identification appeared first on Gaia Resources.

There was a fine range of symposia and discussion sessions to choose from. These annual conferences serve two purposes:

• to provide a forum for developing, refining, and extending standards in response to new challenges and opportunities; and
• to provide a showcase for biodiversity informatics – much of which relies on the standards created by TDWG and other organizations.

Data standards that describe and support the exchange of biodiversity information are critical scientific infrastructure. They enable data to be integrated in support of research, decision-making and conservation planning. Ultimately, standards extend the usability of data across taxa, scientific disciplines, and administrative boundaries.

Gaia Resources now has a long history of actively participating in TDWG. Having attended my first conference in Reading, UK in 1998, I became the Oceania representative from 2002-2008, and in the year I took my leave from that position Gaia Resources played a major role in helping host the conference in Fremantle, WA.

This year a small team here prepared an interesting case study for presentation in the conference session entitled “Avenues into integration: communicating taxonomic intelligence from sender to recipient”, organised by researchers from Arizona State University. Serge, Kehan, Jason and I worked on exploring ways of validating taxonomic names data embedded within environmental impact assessments and survey reports. This was spurred by two initiatives:

• the availability of a new and improved taxonomic names interrogator – GNfinder, that significantly improves the speed of finding and retrieving taxonomic name strings from a document with references to the Global Names Index, and
• the availability of IBSA – an open repository of environmental surveys in Western Australia.

The result was a small prototype we called ‘Species Informer’.

We created a procedure for uploading PDF documents, analysing taxonomic names, and then interrogating the Atlas of Living Australia for ancillary data for those names, such as local conservation status, in order to provide an automated summary of taxon names issues within each document for further analysis. We also ran a small test on image-only data using AWS Textract, to extract text from documents scanned as images to use as well.

Preliminary findings, from a small sample, included:

• gnfinder speeds the process of finding taxon names uttered in a document
• of course, it finds all taxon name mentions, not just the relevant ones for the survey
• we didn’t explore the gnfinder options for sensitivity, data source or context searching
• Species Informer produces a CSV report in c. 1 minute, as opposed to perhaps 8 hours for manual verification
• at a c. 90% success rate for finding taxon names in a report, environment officers still need to check the whole document
• not currently included in the Global Names Index are ‘phrase name taxa’ – c. 7% (1,143 of the 15,558) of the native vascular plant taxa in WA, and c. 15% (558 of the 3,782) of conservation taxa.

Some primary conclusions from this study included that ‘data governance’ is required at all parts of the process:

• preparing the source report to ensure all taxa are resolved
• the taxon names available to the Global Names Index could be expanded to include authenticated unpublished (phrase) names
• the regular maintenance of name currency, conservation status and child taxon information is necessary
  conservation status needs to be better maintained at regional, national, global levels.

The video of is now available so you can hear the presentation and see the detailed results of our study. In fact, I would commend all presentations for viewing as many innovative methods for communicating taxonomic intelligence from sender to recipient were presented.

If you’d like to know more about this project, please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

The post TDWG 2020 Conference – avenues into integration appeared first on Gaia Resources.

More recent work focused on improvements in real-time data display of the drone position and radio tags, offline base-map useability and back-end data processing. Wildlife Drones have presented their integrated solution to conferences around Australia, and have a growing client base where our desktop app is a critical component contributing to important wildlife conservation efforts and research.

Debbie Saunders demonstrating the Wildlife Drones method

Dr Debbie Saunders, CEO of Wildlife Drones, gave us a great wrap:

“Gaia Resources did a wonderful job turning all our user interface ideas into reality.  Within a relatively short period of time we went from having a general idea of what we wanted to having a very impressive, incredibly user friendly and intuitive user interface.  This has dramatically increased our ability to demonstrate our technology to anyone who is interested.  All the feedback from customers, investors and the broader community has been overwhelming positive and we are also now thoroughly enjoying using our cutting edge technology with much greater ease.”

Wildlife Drones are currently working on a project looking at the differences in behaviour and movement of Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in burnt and non-burnt environments. In this recent article, Debbie says:

“Usually when you are tagging wild animals there are always some that disappear, there are always some that take off. You end up spending all your time and effort looking for the missing animals. When you are on the ground with a handheld receiver, you’re tracking one animal at the time, you’re taking hours. With the drone we can track [the signals of] 40 animals at the same time, we could see all of the koalas all the time.”

In the aftermath of last summers devastating bushfires there is a lot of work going on in New South Wales and Victoria to monitor remaining populations of Koala and drones are playing a crucial and time-saving role in this research.

Over much the same timeframe, Gaia Resources has been working with the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) to develop another approach to monitoring Koala populations, via the I Spy Koala citizen science app. There is clearly a role for both approaches to help save our dwindling Koala populations, and perhaps there may be some synergy between them.

More information about this project can be found in our blogs and project page. And you can hear more about Wildlife Drones direct from Debbie in this upcoming Environmental Institute webinar.

If you’d like to discuss any of the topics covered in this post, please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

The post Drones for Wildlife 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.

Then, in early 2020, funding became available to develop a much more fully-featured product, resulting in the Essential Service Volunteers (ESV) app, which was quietly published in the last two weeks.  The app is free to download, but full functionality is only available for users who volunteer for an essential service that has an active subscription.

Screenshots from the ESV app

This new app is an indispensable tool for volunteers who provide essential services such as firefighters, paramedics, surf lifesavers and search and rescue personnel and is free to use for all volunteers of registered essential services (although there are costs associated with other services outside of the Bush Fire Volunteers joining up with the app).  Managers of Bush Fire Volunteer Brigades that are not yet registered should contact ES Volunteers to discuss how to get set up.

Key features of the app include:

• a virtual ID card that proves the user is a currently registered and approved member of a legitimate volunteer essential service,
• the ability for the user to log the duration, location and type of work volunteers undertake,
• support for the Brigade Captains and Local Government officers to obtain statistics around the volunteering efforts of their Brigade, and
• the provision of discounts and deals offered exclusively to volunteers by nearby businesses.

As well as providing this valuable information to volunteers and important general statistics for their whole service, if a user chooses to log their GPS coordinates while at an incident, the record may be useful as evidence in future health, employment, reimbursement or other claims.

Businesses and other suppliers ranging from small regional coffee shops, mechanical repairers and hotels to multinational retailers can list discounts and offers exclusively for the volunteers, with the ability to choose which volunteers have access to their offer. Suppliers can choose who sees their offer by location, service type and later, even by specific Brigade.

A second phase of development that is underway already will provide a more comprehensive web app allowing volunteer users to manage their details, generate free reports of time spent, and the location and types of work undertaken. The web app will also enable authorised volunteer Brigade leaders to add and verify the volunteer users within their team.

So, what next?

• If you are in charge of an existing Bush Fire Brigade, then visit the ES Volunteers website to register your Brigade, which will require you to provide listings of your volunteers, so that they can start using the app,
• If you are a Bush Fire volunteer (and once your Brigade Captain has set up your Brigade) you can download the app to your device from the Google Play or the iTunes App Store,
• If you are involved in a different service than the Bush Fire Volunteers (e.g. ambulance, etc) then visit the ES Volunteers website to get more details about the small set-up fee and annual service charge, and to get started.

Hundreds of Bushfire Volunteers are already registered and using the app, including a number of whole Brigades, and we’ve already delivered an update with additional features – with more to come as we get feedback from the volunteers.

If you’re interested in how mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to comment below, contact Angus Mackay, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

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

The new submissions portal complements DWER’s existing online repository of land-based biodiversity surveys in Western Australia, known as the Index of Biodiversity Surveys for Assessments (IBSA).

The objective of IBSA is to capture and consolidate data contained in biodiversity survey reports to support assessments and compliance under the Environmental Protection Act (1986). The survey data and reports are available for everyone to download from the IBSA repository, delivering:

• improved quality of data for assessment
• a broader decision-making base for regulators
• an expanded knowledge base of WA’s flora and fauna
• improved availability of environmental information for the community.

The new IBSA Submissions portal enables proponents to submit and digitally sign a data package for later ingestion into IBSA itself (Source: DWER 2020 IBSA factsheet)

The new IBSA Submission Portal makes it easy for proponents to submit biodiversity surveys via a single page web-form. The web-form automatically validates files on upload and immediately alerts the proponent when information or files do not meet the IBSA data standards. This makes completing the process very responsive for the proponent and provides greater consistency in the submissions process. It also provides efficiency gains for the DWER officers, significantly reducing the time they need to spend checking IBSA submissions, which results in time savings for the broader environmental assessment process.

We developed the IBSA Submissions Portal using Serverless technology; this is a lightweight, innovative approach that provides a highly responsive system but eliminates the cost of managing servers. A key component of the Serverless approach was ensuring that the new submissions portal is a conduit, temporarily housing the data packages until they are incorporated into DWERs existing IBSA database.

While the submission workflow is relatively simple at this stage (survey submission and sign-off), it has a flexible design that can be expanded to accommodate more complex workflow steps if required. The project was designed and delivered within a three month period, including significant testing rounds.

The IBSA Submissions Portal is now launched and in production.

If you’d like to know more about our work with portal development using serverless technologies, and how it can help you improve your stakeholder interactions and process efficiency, please send me an email or start a conversation via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gill

The post IBSA Submissions Portal launch appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Screenshot of the Q-Album home page

After the program concluded there were a number of iterations, design improvements, and customer testing rounds which led to the development of Q-Album, which went live with a soft launch in late 2019. Q-Album hosts over 500 historic collection items from the collection and has now been opened to community groups across Queensland to contribute their historic items to build a community resource.

The platform includes:

• comparisons between historic photos and modern street views,
• digitised archival materials,
• publishing workflows between community groups and QSA,
• mapping tools,
• tag-based taxonomies of content,
• organisational profiles, and
• cross-referencing to TROVE and other historic data sources.

If you’d like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help with you archives project, let me know via email or on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Q-Album – visualising Queensland’s archive collections appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The program is managed by the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) and is delivered in partnership with seven regional Natural Resource Management (NRM) groups. The program currently has almost 2000 properties across Western Australia.

Land for Wildlife property owners, Robyn and Andy McElroy, at Boyup Brook – photo ©Parks and Wildlife

The team here at Gaia Resources are really excited to support this valuable nature conservation program by doing what we love – delivering sustainable technology solutions to make the world a better place.

We developed a web-based spatial system to manage information about the existing LFW properties and new applicants to the program.

The system allows DBCA and regional NRM officers to view and edit the data in an integrated system, with all officers able to see updates in real-time. This makes collaboration much easier, both within each group and across all eight organisations. It also saves officer time (previously information was stored across multiple formats and systems) allowing officers to focus on the landholders and wildlife conservation.

The LFW GRID allows real-time collaboration and centralised data management for many users across eight partner organisations

The system also has a new webpage for the public to register their interest in the program. This connects directly into the spatial system, so DBCA and NRM officers can see new applications in real-time.

The LFW registration page submits data directly into the LFW GRID, visible to DBCA and NRM officers in real-time

We also set up the system to trigger an email to the LFW program coordinator and relevant regional NRM group as soon as a new application is submitted.

The system is based on our GRID product (Geographic & Reporting Information Database). This is an easy-to-use, online geographical information system (GIS) for regional NRM groups.

It allows regional NRM staff to record valuable information about NRM work in their region (for example, weed control, revegetation etc) and encourages real-time collaboration between staff within an NRM group, and across multiple NRM groups working on the same project.

GRID was originally developed for South West Catchments Council and is currently in use in seven NRM groups, and two other whole-of-state programs (State NRM and the Dieback Information Delivery and Management System).

GRID is a great example of how NRM groups can leverage and build upon each other’s investment in one system, resulting in a product that is tailored for each group’s specific needs but grounded in a common platform with which the vast majority of the NRM community are familiar.

For LFW we worked closely with DBCA, Peel-Harvey Catchment Council (PHCC) and the other regional NRM groups to tailor this version of GRID to suit the workflow and partnership-based delivery of the LFW program. This work was completed as part of a State NRM Program funded project, managed by the PHCC and DBCA.

If you’d like to know more about GRID and how it can help you improve collaboration and efficiency in your organisation and partnerships, please send me an email or start a conversation via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gill

The post Land for Wildlife gets a boost with GRID appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Anyway, when I arrived, I had feared that the location – down in Hobart – may have detracted for attendance, but that was not the case. While the code sprint on the first day was a little quiet (they normally are), a few hundred of the faithful descended by Thursday morning ready for the full conference.

Getting ready for Day 1 of talks

The conference location was pretty damn good, with some amazing views of the Derwent River and harbour from most of the rooms. A perfect spot for two days of Drupal and all related things. There were four simultaneous ‘tracks’ running, plus a birds-of-a-feather room and workshops, so always plenty to choose from, but I was happy with what I ended up seeing.

The view from one of the conference rooms

Things got started on Day 1 with Margery Longman talking about migrating 14 Dept of Finance websites into GovCMS SaaS and the data migration challenges with that … and importantly, dealing with usual considerations that come with Government projects. Next up was the totally excellent Nick Schuch, who explained how Kubernetes could be used for Drupal hosting better than anyone I’ve heard speak on the topic before. He also went through a lot of gotchas and talked about Skpr, a management tool that can better manage SysOps.

Nick Schuch explains how he uses Kubernetes in Drupal hosting

Next, is, well, me. I decided to ignore my track chair Janna Malikova’s kind offer to take a good photo and took a selfie with poor focus to mark the occasion .

Looking cool and calm before my talk

Despite the poor photo, my talk went really well. Great audience, great questions, and I was really happy with the presentation. I had to cull half the content of my talk after I timed it in practice, but I left in all the theory and considerations. Everyone loves theory!

After the morning and lunch, we had our first keynote Mish Manners, GitHub Community Manager – an accomplished public speaker – who talked about Open Source more generally and what GitHub has available to facilitate the wider Open Source community. As Drupal is firmly partnered with GitLab, it was great to hear from other providers about what’s shaking in that major platform and how GitHub is working in the wider community.

Michelle from GitHub delivers the first keynote

Then came Josh Waihi from Acquia who gave one of my favourite talks of the conference, and something super topical in the community – when to decouple and when to stay with the older style server-generated theme pages. It’s something we as a community have talked about a lot and Josh reminded us all that just because ‘decoupled’ (like a React front-end over JSON API talking to Drupal) is a newer approach, doesn’t always mean it’s best. He talked about some great ways to determine when to go server-generated, when to go fully decoupled, and when to go partially decoupled.

Josh Waihi talks about when it’s time to decouple

Next was another favourite of mine, ‘the 45-minute site audit’ with Scott Anderson. This showed us how to spend 45 minutes strategically and thoroughly auditing a project, so that you know what you are taking on when you inherit a project or program of work. Some great advice right there …

Scott Anderson introduces the ’45 minute site audit’

At this point in the blog, it’s important to remember the stunning natural setting in which Hobart is situated. It’s pretty special – this is a nice little snap I took on the walk to the conference on the second day:

The views in Hobart… what else can be said

Day 2 continued the trend of great talks. This kicked off with Toby Bellwood talking about GovCMS tooling, and later in the morning I ran a workshop to ‘how to run a site accessibility audit’.

We then received our second keynote from Neil Drumm who spoke about how Drupal.org is run. Some big numbers on that site … like 140 million pages and 2 million unique page visits per month. It was really interesting to hear how they keep the whole thing together and some of the innovations they have developed to deliver to the community and keep the site responsive.

After the keynote I attended Karl Hepworth’s talk on Automated Auditing, with a focus on GovCMS PaaS and using the Drunity tools for auditing in federal government PaaS sites.

Karl Hepworth presents Automated Auditing on the GovCMS platform

And lastly, Jess XJM gave the final keynote and the highlight of the conference, explaining the coordination of security releases, dependency management and the release path for the future.

Her talk showed how difficult it is to manage big Open Source projects that ‘swim’ in a sea of dependencies but also need to support large codebases, upstream users with different release cycles, the need to support versions (e.g. PHP or jQuery versions) much longer than other packages, and so on. I do not envy her job to keep all that together (but am extremely grateful she does it so well!).

Overall, an amazing conference. Great talks, great new innovations and really happy that I could part of this meeting of like-minded people.

Feel free to drop me a line to ask about Drupal, accessibility or anything related, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post DrupalSouth Hobart 2019 reflections appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The Friday was a code sprint, where the group worked on some problems… It was pretty much that open, someone would suggest a module to be worked on, a problem to solve, or an approach to collaborate on, and we worked on trying to solve them.

I decided to try and tackle writing a user guide for the new Bootstrap 4 theme, this is a lighter weight alternative to Barrio, which also uses Bootstrap 4, but is a more opinionated implementation. Bootstrap 4 just uses the Bootstrap CDN, has a small number of pre-defined content areas and allows you to get moving quickly. There’s a plan on the roadmap to include SASS compiling in the module, which will be very cool.

I’ve written the user guide, but I don’t quite have the user credits on Drupal.org to contribute it to the official documentation page. I’ll work on getting my score up so I can push that out…

The second day had a great program of talks:

• Building a Slack ChatBot – Eduardo Garcia
• Backdrop CMS: 4 years after the fork, is this still a thing? – Greg Netsas (unfortunately Greg was delayed, so Vladimir Roudakov filled in with a spontaneous talk – Gitlab for Developers)
• How to create custom fields? – Jibran Ijaz
• WCAG 2.1, Web Accessibility and Drupal 8 – Me!
• Theme with Bootstrap: how awesome it can be – Janna Malikova
• Make it extensible! Using PluginCollections so others can extend your module – Saul Willers
• Writing code that doesn’t suck – Cam Green

During the second half there was also a workshop room, so you could attend the talks, or learn about Backdrop. Backdrop sizes up as a good alternative for those who cannot, or don’t want to fully migrate off Drupal 7 when support finally ends at the end of 2021.

All the talks were excellent, with a big shout out to Janna and Cam for their amazing sessions. Janna for bringing a focus to how we can make front end development so much easier by considering how design patterns in Bootstrap can empower excellent user experiences when planned with a technical focus. And Cam, for taking the last session of a big weekend, and talking about pragmatic approaches to coding to make the world a better place for those who need to work with what you’ve written.

I gave my standard Accessibility talk focused on WCAG v2.1 and the differences to 2.0; standards talks are always the most exciting straight after lunch!

One very interesting development though, was on the morning of the talk I downloaded the release candidate of Drupal 8.7 (now fully released) to try out the new Layout Builder and its accessibility features. When I heard of layout builder my immediate reaction was its probably an over-engineered site builder tool, not really required when we can solve many problems already with Display Suite, or TWIG, or some other module. Or worse, a copy of the Gutenberg style editor from WordPress (side note – accessibility not as bad as mostly think it is on Gutenberg). But, I was actually super impressed with Layout Builder, not just the accessibility (which does a damn good job of making the drag and drop possible on keyboard), but also how good it is. It’s really actually very, very good. I tried to incorporate that brand new review into my talk during breakfast to *mixed* results.

After the talks, we went down to the excellent Stone and Wood Brewery to ensure good code and good company finishes with good beers.

I’m proud that Gaia Resources sponsored the event, as being part of the Open Source community doesn’t just mean code contributions, it means contributing the community of collaboration and developing software that we all benefit from. And this camp certainly delivered on that front… now time to get internal score higher so I can get the code sprint documentation into the official pages!

Feel free to drop me a line to ask about Drupal, accessibility or anything we related, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post DrupalCamp Byron Bay 2019 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The technology was inspired by a need to understand more about the movements of small, migratory Swift Parrots within their winter range.  The Swift Parrot is one of Australia’s priority bird species for conservation action and is listed as critically endangered under the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999.

The critically endangered Swift Parrot (image source: Brett Allen)

Compared to conventional tracking methods, the Wildlife Drones approach has some distinct advantages. Firstly, their system can track up to one hundred individually identifiable animals all at the same time instead of manually tracking one at a time. Secondly, the drone and its payload delivers much more data from a superior vantage point in the air compared to conventional handheld antennae methods. And finally, the base station application that Gaia Resources developed for Wildlife Drones provides on-line and off-line mapping capabilities to visualise incoming radio frequency tags in real time. This includes the ability to download imagery tiles for situations where tracking is happening outside of mobile data range.

Conventional radio tracking technology (left) and Deb demonstrating the Wildlife Drones method (right).

Deb gave us a great wrap up on how we worked together:

“Gaia Resources did a wonderful job turning all our user interface ideas into reality.  Within a relatively short period of time we went from having a general idea of what we wanted to having a very impressive, incredibly user friendly and intuitive user interface.  This has dramatically increased our ability to demonstrate our technology to anyone who is interested.  All the feedback from customers, investors and the broader community has been overwhelming positive and we are also now thoroughly enjoying using our cutting edge technology with much greater ease.” 

Following the informative morning presentation Deb gave, there were many questions ranging from hardware options to data accuracy and limitations. One, in particular, was around tracking animals whose habitat tends to be in caves and beneath rocky ledges (like the endangered Brush-tailed Rock Wallaby) – and what we found out was that the Wildlife Drones solution is able to collect useful data to triangulate positions from multiple vantage points, meaning that the remoteness and difficult terrain is no longer a logistical constraint for trackers.

From the boardroom to the outdoors, we headed out to the West Australian Model Aircraft Sports Centre to see the drone in action. Some tags were randomly distributed in the mini-airfield and surrounding bush, and Deb piloted the drone in a flight path that involved 360-degree rotations in multiple locations around the site in order to triangulate the tag locations. It was also quite windy that day with gusts over 44km/hr, but the stability of the Matrice 210 in those conditions was pretty impressive.

The demonstrations in Perth and previously in Hobart have generated a fair bit of interest in the wildlife tracking community, and we are really looking forward to continuing to work with the Wildlife Drones crew in their journey to success. If you are interested in getting a conversation going, jump on our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn links– or drop us a line on (08) 9227 7309, or email me on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

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