The journey started for us back at the start of 2015, when we thought we’d like to see Dolphin Watch get some recognition for our client, the Department of Parks and Wildlife (and of course, for our own work here).  We looked through the entry criteria and put in an application for the state WAITTA awards.  As a result, way back in March, Alex, Marnie Giroud from the Department and I were presenting on Dolphin Watch to the State judges, and in June we were at the State Awards dinner, where Dolphin Watch was made a State finalist, and entered into the national iAwards – and as a result I had to do a short piece to camera on the night:

Our Finalist summary at the WAITTA Awards (why do I have my eyes closed in the preview!!)

Then in August, Alex and I jetted across the country to the National iAwards in Melbourne, where we again presented on the project to the judges, and then attended some of the events around the awards ceremony. This included an interesting “VIP Lunch” for all of the finalists, which was sponsored by the UK Office of Trade and Investment and focused around entrepreneurship.  I found this interesting not to hear from entrepreneurs, but from the agencies that support them.

When I started Gaia Resources 11 years ago, it was from my kitchen table, with a rough idea to do a couple of years of contracting as an experiment to see if I could combine my two passions of environment and technology.  There were minimal entrepreneurial advisory services, no incubators and no angel investors.  Nowadays, well, we have a few incubators now, like Spacecubed, but little else has changed.  It left me feeling a little bit sad at the state of the “industry” (be it information technology, spatial, environmental or whatever you like to call us), despite attempts by industry associations to work through these challenges.

At the iAwards dinner, we got to hear very brief outlines of a range of different projects in the IT space, across the different categories.  This was pretty interesting for a range of reasons (not just because Dave Hughes was the Master of Ceremonies) but because it really gave you a quick overview of what businesses were doing in the IT space.

Dave Hughes presenting at the iAwards

This also generated a few ideas and possibilities, but also spurred me on to look more closely at our own technology situation at Gaia Resources (ranging from our infrastructure, to our approaches to various products and projects).  In turn, this set us up really well for a few client meetings while we were in Melbourne, too.  With a bunch of fresh ideas in mind, we went to talk to a few existing and potential clients and came up with a range of interesting projects we can run in the future – and since then we’ve been working on getting these ideas into action, with more to come on those in the near future.

So although I came home with a massive head cold/virus of some sort (which took Alex out for a few days as well), I also came home with a head brimming with ideas and plans for the future.  Oh, and although we didn’t come back with an iAward, the journey was really interesting and has opened a few doors I didn’t even know were closed.

Leave a comment below, or connect to us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

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Gaia Resources were one of the gold sponsors for the conference, and we also pitched in to help run the event – Alex prepared and supported two posters (one on our new Citizen Science Hub, and another on the BDRS), while I presented a talk (embedded below, or available on Slideshare), ran the second workshop and helped run one of the Saturday workshops on technology usability.  It was a very busy conference for us, because in amongst that we also spoke to heaps of clients, collaborators, and a lot of new and energetic faces.

My talk on factors for success in citizen science

For me, the highlight of the first day was the success of workshop two, on data collection and management. My co-chairs (John la Salle and Luigi Ceccaroni) had given me free reign, so I took a risk with the format.  It totally paid off with the passion and enthusiasm that the delegates brought to the fore. The five talks I had selected to open the session were all well delivered and really gave the delegates the overview I was hoping for – why we need to collect data, the emergence of a project based data standard, two large projects (one is spatial extent and data, the other in time), and finally a reminder that people want to use (and cite) the data.  After a Question and Answer session, I took a deep breath and jumped.

The Q&A Session in Workshop Two

In the second hour of the workshop my aim was to engage the audience to explain the challenges and opportunities that were to be found in data collection and management, using the DataOne data life cycle model to pick out the “Collect”, “Preserve” and “Integrate” steps. After a brief explanation, I asked a lecture theatre of 210 people to work with their neighbours to come up with three challenges and opportunities for each. After 15 minutes or so of roaming the room with my co-chairs, I brought up a document and started to type… and type… and type… I type pretty fast, but I was hard pressed to keep up with the shouts coming from the audience.

Trying to keep up with the influx of ideas in Workshop Two

The full list of all the answers is here, but I’ve also taken that and Wordled it below… one for challenges and one for opportunities.

Challenges

Opportunities

It’s pretty interesting just to look at these two Wordles, especially given the great big commonality of data (which was so often cited, Wordle included it twice in each) – but that’s worthy of something a bit more than just this overview.  I’m working on how to write this up into some sort of a report as well, so stay tuned for that.

I don’t think I’ve been happier to see a risk pay off and I’m working on both a report on this workshop, and a paper around these challenges and opportunities to submit to the nascent Journal of Citizen Science, something Alex and I found out more about after the Saturday sessions in an international meeting.  That meeting was another highlight, which I’ll get to in a second. Anyway, workshop two went better than I expected,  and the importance of BBQs in citizen science was finally recognised.

Day Two saw us being delegates once again, and there were quite a few highlights here – the vote to go ahead with the incorporation of the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA, pronounced “axe-ah” it seems), the election of the management committee and the understanding that ACSA has funding ready to start working on initiatives was a great start to the day. It got better as we heard from various speakers around their projects and other areas – there was much inspiration to be found throughout the day (helped by the doughnut balls at afternoon tea).

The final day I attended all four of the workshops. Although they were a bit ragged, they had plenty of enthusiasm. I helped Paul Flemons run the technology usability workshop by firstly giving a talk about the software engineering process (showing the difference between the waterfall and agile methodologies), with a focus on what you need to do as clients (not “users”).  Then Paul had a prepared exercise ready to go, where delegates broke up into groups, chose a use case, and prepared a list of requirements, designed the workflow for their use case, and even got to sketching out a rough design for the app (thanks to a handy whiteboard!)

Our whiteboard (seriously, I think I have an addiction to whiteboards)

This was a new experience for many of the people in the group I was with, but they went along with the process, and at the end all four groups came back to present their elevator pitch (and suddenly I found myself being an impromptu mime in an elevator). This was quite fun, and a good way to end this session.  You now also have the origins of the BBQ, doughnuts, and elevator hashtags you will have seen in the Twitter feed…

After these four workshops, the new ACSA management committee had invited the international delegates and a few of us with experience in international projects (Paul Flemons as the Oceania representative of TDWG, and Alex and I for our past experiences with TDWG and OGC) to discuss potential collaboration,  the new Journal of Citizen Science, and interoperability and collaboration generally between ACSA, and their European and American counterpart organisations. It was a pretty productive discussion, in that we might have some more Australians on the editorial board, plans for an interoperability working group, and a few other initiatives that the new ACSA management committee will be working on.

It’s pretty hard to sum up the conference in a blog post as to all the things we learned… so in the end I didn’t try.  I think I can speak for Alex by saying that the conference was one of the best experiences we’ve had and it was exhausting.  We had some time on Sunday to decompress and write out our thoughts before coming home.  I think we wrote out about three pages of bullet points to work with, and I think we’re going to be working on this for a while to come… and yet, I can’t wait for the next one.

Piers

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Social media harvesting

Previously, you might recall we ran an experiment of harvesting observations of mole crickets from Twitter.  Initially we were just using this for a test of technology, but I also ran a bit of an experiment about how engagement drives your data volumes, as well.  You can read up on this on the following posts:

• Initial call for data and explanation – https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/mole-crickets/
• One month in – https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/mole-crickets-revisited/
• And the engagement summary – https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/engaging-with-mole-crickets/

Well, we’ve just done a bit more of a revamp on our social media harvester, and this is because the mole crickets around my area are starting up their calling again, so I wanted to start doing some more recordings.  I even picked one up last week in the backyard..

Another mole cricket sighting!

I’ve been using Hootsuite lately for Twitter posting, and I’ve realised from my latest post that I have to do a bit more tuning for the GPS accuracy in the settings – I’ve switched recently to a new Samsung S5 (and a Gear 2, which is where this photo comes from above).  In any case, we’re up to 98 sightings of the mole cricket through this experiment, covering a lot of my own records around Perth, but a few from more widespread locations (including an “absence” record from the middle of Western Australia, thanks Judy!).

The mole cricket survey got out a bit, through articles like this one from Science Network WA.  I got known by a few people as “the mole cricket guy”, much to my chagrin.  Interestingly, we had a few people volunteer sightings through email and our Facebook page, although there were some cases where people weren’t happy to provide locations (but others that did).  That got me thinking… I wonder where we can get other sightings from…

Traditional media

We’ve been working on Coastal Walkabout for a while now, and I began to notice that the sightings that we see from people logging records are sometimes also in the media, as was the case for Steven Sealberg, the elephant seal that hauled out at Sorrento beach in February, 2014.  He even made the news…

So, this got me thinking about the media as a source of biological observations, so I’ve been doing some trials of harvesting data from traditional media sources for Coastal Walkabout.  As a result, I’ve added sightings from all over Australia from a variety of media reports, as summarised in the map below:

A summarised map of my own sightings in Coastal Walkabout, the majority of which are from media reports

Although I would have loved to have gone to these places myself, the records are pretty much (apart from the ones in the capital cities) all from media reports.  Stories like this one from the ABC actually can deliver some pretty accurate information on the species, time, date and even a photograph.

Unfortunately, a lot of these are what I’d call “bad news stories” – they often depict the harmful interactions between humans and marine animals.  But I’d also call them “bad” for a few other reasons:

• Often they don’t have a date but some reference to a vague point in time (e.g. “Last week, a dolphin was spotted”),
• They very rarely have a time (e.g. “On Wednesday morning, …”), and
• Sometimes they don’t provide much detail for the location (e.g. “…on the southern Eyre peninsula.”).

However, if I can find one story like this then I can usually find a few, and sometimes even a press release from an organisation that can fill in the blanks.

The difficulty is finding the stories in the first place.  I’ve tried using Google Alerts, but so far this is not producing any useful results.  The difficulty I’ve found is in coming up with alert terms that are actually reliable – using thing like “whales” brings back all sorts of news stories about protests and whale-watching which we need to then work through manually to identify any gems of data.

I’ve also noticed in my trawls that some organisations – like Surf Life Saving WA – post sightings and reports via their own Twitter account.  That is a potential source of observational data using this manual process but it could also be harvested with the appropriate settings, like geolocation, species and an identification hashtag, through the social media harvester.  Or we could try to interpret the location based on tweets like this one:

An example SLSWA tweet, posting infromation from Department of Fisheries

So far I’ve found the most reliable means to harvest observational data is to simply do some searches of the ‘net using terms like common names, “stranding” and so on, but I’m also seeing a lot of interesting articles from my friends on Facebook which are pointing me to a range of articles I’d otherwise miss.

There’s probably a few things that media providers could start to implement to help automate this sort of data harvesting, like:

• Using tags on their articles (like the ABC does, e.g. http://www.abc.net.au/news/topic/animals, but with a tag that was unique for observations of wildlife – by the way, this tag got me another sighting!),
• Adding in some more structure around the reporting of place, date and time (perhaps as metadata on articles if not in the article itself), and
• Finding appropriate ways to share articles with the relevant groups that want to harvest them (e.g. Twitter).

The traditional media does look like it’s a potentially good source of data, but the challenge will be in how we can automate this to come up with some great outcomes.  I smell another experiment coming… and a lot of engagement to do.

Got any good articles yourself?  If so, drop me an email, or post them on the Gaia Resources Facebook page, or drop us a line via Twitter.

If you are interested in participating in some of the citizen science projects we’ve been working with, then have a look at Coastal Walkabout, Dolphin Watch, or the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre.  Either Alex or myself would be happy to talk to you about how you can contribute as a volunteer citizen scientist, as a scientist looking for volunteers, as a project leader, or as a group interested in having your own technology solutions for your project.

Piers

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