It’s that time of year again – and we’re all just about to go on break for the Christmas period.  We’ll be closed from around lunchtime today (20th December, 2019), both here in Perth and in Brisbane – and our Darwin team are currently in Perth, joining us for our Christmas party.

Over the break we’ll be having a skeleton staff again over the non-public holidays – but we’ll monitor the Perth phone (08 92277309) and the support email address: support@archive.gaiaresources.com.au.  If you need help, let us know and we’ll get back to you when we can across the festive period.

I usually wrap up the year with some highlights, and link to some of our blog content; so here’s a highlight a month for a different approach!

• In January, our “Dynamic Field Guide” blog from the first part of the year really set the scene for us to start trying to make a difference and we even revisited it in August with an extension for plants and insects – this was something I’ve been keen to do for a while!
• February saw the launch of our Darwin office – which feels like a long time ago already, so much good stuff has happened up there – and it’s great to have both Chris and Tom down here in Perth for the Christmas party!
• I really enjoyed writing the discussion piece in March about automating disturbance mapping which was the result of a lot of discussion in our office,
• The CHIN review of collection management systems (which came out in April) is always a great thing to work through, Morgan did a great recap of that review and what’s out there.
• It’s hard to pick a single highlight for May, but I particularly liked the theme – giving back. We did a lot of support for students and conferences like DrupalCamp, and supporting our colleague Jessie in heading to the Citizen Science Association Conference.
• We got buried by the end of financial year rush in June, but despite that we launched the new Victorian Animal Disease notification app – another highlight.
• Kiri gets our highlight from July, for sure!
• The annual strategy week we reported on in August is always a highlight for the year – I mean, how often do you get a day to talk about the future, and play with Lego?
• Sticking with our support theme for the industry, Chris got GeoRabble up and running in Darwin in September.
• October was our big Quality win, and we are now accredited for ISO 9001 (quality) and ISO 27001 (information security). This has already seen a lot of improvements in our working procedures and practices!
• In November, again I’ll point to the win of working with students with the Work in Learning program where we not only finished two projects with students from Edith Cowan University, but we also started a new one with the University of Western Australia, and
• I think Morgan’s attendance and discussions at DrupalSouth is my December highlight – seeing Morgan’s take on accessibility always gives me food for thought about what we can do to make a difference.

It’s a real mix of things and this year has been a really busy year, with a lot of change happening – we’ve had a few new people join us, and a few move on to other adventures.  We’ve also done a lot of work on our processes (around the ISO certification) and around the technology and systems that we use – especially with our partnership with Amazon Web Services.

I think our whole team is looking forward to a break over the next couple of weeks, and there will be a lot of recharging happening ready for a new year.  2020 will be a challenging year with a bunch of large projects hitting deadlines in the first six months, and it’s going to be really satisfying to see those come to fruition – so it’s time to head off and recharge, and get ready to do it all again!

I hope that you and your families have a great break over the Christmas period – see you in 2020!

Piers