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.

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.

We always do some sort of end of financial year event, and this year will be no different – except that we’re doing it next week rather than before the year ends.  This year will also be our first time that we’ve all gotten together in person since before the COVID-19 pandemic, and it will see people travelling to Perth from all over Australia to be here for our first in-person team event for some time.  That means we might have to dust of the hermit rags from working at home for so long and remember how to deal with other people in person (there’s a quote about 18 years and being a hermit from the movie The Life of Brian that feels quite relevant here).

Our team has grown and changed a lot in the last year –  we’ve had a number of people join us this year and work through their probations to be added to our permanent team, and we’ve also had a number of people join us as contractors to assist in the delivery of some very large projects for our company.  The year wouldn’t be the same without these new team members, and indeed for some of our past team members who moved on from working during the year.  

No business is anything without its team, so as I wrote about in May, this has been the year of doubling down on how we support our team and each other.  As executives, we thought that it was paramount to support our team through the difficult times we’ve all lived through over the last couple of years, and partnering with Yentle, along with employing Gaye Mackenzie as our Chief People Officer, has been critical to the success over the last year in particular.  We can still do more to make Gaia Resources the best place to work, but as a result of the work we’ve been doing in this area we’ve got a really solid footing to start from, and that is really a highlight for me from the past year.

With the team supported and growing, you can imagine this was due to some pretty big projects that are now coming online.  There are a vast number of projects in the last year that we’ve been involved with, but one of the ones launched just last week was our work with the Biodiversity Information Office (BIO), developing Dandjoo – the biodiversity data platform.  We’ll write more about this project shortly, or you can read more about the launch in the media statement from Minister Whitby on Friday.  In any case, the BIO project, along with our work with the federal government on the Biodiversity Data Repository (more on that soon, too), has been very rewarding – we’re seeing the combination of our work in the collections, archives and environmental areas all coming together in these large projects.  More importantly, we’ve delivered these projects on time and budget – something that we take a lot of pride in doing, especially in these difficult times.  Our team has been working extremely hard on these projects to achieve that – and again, without them we wouldn’t be where we are today.

There are so many highlights from a financial year that it’s hard to pick some, plus, I already spoke about the first half of the year and included the team’s highlights in the end of calendar year blog in December.  So I think for now, we’ll save some more highlights for the end of the calendar year – which I’m sure will come around very quickly!

There will no doubt be a bunch of shenanigans very productive things happening next week in our team catchup in Perth, which I’m sure we’ll also do something with – you’ll probably see at least a collage of photos on our social media accounts coming through during the week as we talk about all the things that we’re doing as a team to celebrate getting together in person for the first time in what feels like a very long time.

So for now – it’s somehow the end to another financial year (our 18th!), and so it’s time to take stock as a team and discuss where to next.  In the meantime, I hope the last year has been great for you, and look forward to what the new one will bring!

If you’d like to know more, you can start a conversation with us on our social media platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or send us an email.

Piers

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2021 was certainly another big year for Gaia Resources – it’s that time of year to do a recap.  So in this blog, we thought we’d walk you through how we’ve grown as a company, commenced work on a number of large projects, celebrated some significant awards alongside our clients, hosted an open-source spatial conference, as well as to give you some of the highlights from our team.

Despite global pandemics, lockdowns, restrictions and other disruptions that had many of us working from home or in limited numbers at our offices, we’ve brought on a number of new team members this year. 

We welcomed nine new staff in 2021 and it is already surprising to think some of them have only been with us for a few weeks or months!  We know we’re behind on updating our web site for these people – so let’s have a look at who they are:

	Rachel Pennington joined the team in Perth early in the new year as our new Marketing Coordinator to help drive our marketing strategy and engagement forward.
	Rocio Peyronnet is a recent Masters graduate who has jumped onto our Data Science team in Perth as a Spatial Analyst. Within weeks of starting Rocio participated in a NASA Space hackathon, and her team went onto win the Perth prize, beating out 10 other teams! (see her blog article here)
	Sally Mitchell joined us in Brisbane a few months back as our newest Support Coordinator, looking after service level agreements and support to our archives customers.
	Claire Sands recently joined the team as a Business Analyst in Perth for the start of one of our major biodiversity projects.
	Gordon Campbell is our newest software engineer with a wonderful Scottish accent who joined the Brisbane team to support a number of archival projects.
	Gail Wittich came on board recently in Perth as a Data Scientist to crunch and model data for the teams on a number of our biodiversity projects.
	Charith Nanayakkara is our new Project Manager in the Brisbane team, managing a major archives project in the area of digital preservation.
	Grant Malcom is a new Project Manager in the Perth team, heading up one of our major biodiversity data projects.
	Tanya Aquino holds the temporary title of our newest team member, joining the Perth team as a Project Manager to manage another one of our major biodiversity data projects.

A few of our colleagues have also moved on in the last year to new roles – and whilst we miss them, we wish them all the best for 2022!

Over the last few years, we saw our team spread out across Australia.  As we’ve all become well versed in working remotely, we’ve been expanding our “satellite offices” as well. Since Chris moved up to Darwin in 2019 to shake up the Perth-Brisbane office duo, we’ve since established space in Hobart, Canberra and now Melbourne.  We’ve established these spaces in co-working spaces, or home offices where they better suit, and we’re working on more strategies to keep our team connected.

With this growth – and to be proactive in our remote working arrangements and distributed offices – we knew it was important to focus on cultural aspects and the structure of our teams in the company. Good open communication has been important at every step of our journey as a company, and through our new focus on the culture and soft skills training we are helping to equip our team to be resilient and values-driven. Putting that focus on people has been a key reason we’re able to deliver our projects during very disruptive times, and we are able to then win more work, hire more people, and keep on supporting our team.

There have also been a large number of projects that we’ve started, continue to work on, and a few larger ones that we’ve started during 2021.  Three in particular that have recently started will see us very busy into the new year (and yes, we’re still hiring, so if you’re interested in joining us, drop us an email), include:

• Working with the new Biodiversity Information Office of Western Australia, helping them to make Western Australian biodiversity data more discoverable, accessible and usable,
• Our work with the national Biodiversity Data Repository with the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, as part of their much broader Digital Environmental Assessment Program, and
• An extension of the work we have delivered with the Queensland State Archives, where we are now moving into the delivery of Digital Preservation Systems, along with our consortium partners.

Speaking of projects, it was also a wonderful surprise to see our Retromaps project win the Spatial Enablement category of the Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards for Western Australia. This was a project collaboration we completed some time ago with the State Records Office of Western Australia, but has continued to grab the attention of the public and history enthusiasts. We also saw our work with the Dieback Information Delivery and Management System help the South Coast NRM team to win an award in the 2021 Australian Biosecurity Awards – you can read about both in our straight to the pool room blog article. 

In November, we also hosted the FOSS4G Oceania hub. This was a great chance to bring together a community of open-source spatial professionals, and to hear about the projects and applications people were putting open-source software (like QGIS) to in their workplaces. We did write a recap on that event, and videos are now up and live via this Youtube playlist.  Supporting the open source community takes many hands to make this happen, and the team involved in making it work did a fantastic job – and we’re happy to be able to give back to the community that has helped us become who we are today as a company.

Some of the team involved in running the FOSS4G conference – Nick Middleton, John Bryant, Bryan Boruff and Grant Boxer

An end of wear wrap up wouldn’t be a thing without asking our own team for their highlights, so we did that in today’s last “all company” meeting for the year.  Some of the highlights that we had are summarised below:

• Working with all the new people that came on board this year, and supporting and learning from each other,
• Getting our carbon neutral accreditation, and continuing to keep that up,
• Providing a family friendly, supportive environment for our team and their families,
• Our running of our 2021 Metrogaine,
• General shenanigans (including Princess Leia hair buns, comedy hats and general pranks),
• Being challenged every day,
• Our focus on people through our soft skills training and the flexibility that we offer to our team members (including remote working),
• Winning the awards we listed previously in this article, 
• Growing individually – be it moving up in the “bands” we have, or learning new skills, and helping support each other in that growth, 
• Delivering projects like our work with QAGOMA and Fishscale,
• Focusing on our purpose to make the world a better place – and actually doing it, not just making it about lip service.

Gaia Resources has been operating now for 17 years, through the various forms and evolutions that it has undergone.  As we wrap up 2021 (with our Christmas party on the 23rd, and closing on the 24th as usual) and move into 2022, we’re looking forward to it – we will be back on deck on the 4th January, ready to start afresh.

From all of us at Gaia Resources, we wish you and your families a safe and happy holiday season, and we look forward to seeing you in 2022!

Piers and the team at Gaia Resources

The post 2021 in review appeared first on Gaia Resources.

When the pandemic arrived, I personally promised our team that no one would be losing their jobs to COVID-19.  And if I just look at that, I think we’ve had a massive win on that front.  We didn’t have to make any tough decisions on implementing redundancies, although a few people have moved on from the company towards the end of the financial year.  So as a result, we’re currently working through recruitment plans; you’ll already have seen a job ad out on SEEK for a Support Coordinator role in Brisbane – and there’s more to come!

Bizarrely (and completely unexpectedly), the pandemic has also revealed a highlight for me – how well our team continued to deliver amazing results throughout the whole period – definitely some form of a silver lining in an otherwise very grey year.  It started when we ran trials of working from home, which went very smoothly, and we’ve continued to deliver successfully since then – although with us all working from home, it’s been really hard to maintain the “team” feeling we used to have when we were all in one office. 

To try to combat this isolation and fragmentation, there were also a whole bunch of really great things we did together, despite not being able to see each other all the time.  This is a testament to the many wonderful people I get to work with who organised and set up events like International Women’s Day, Harmony Week events, and yes, another metrogaine event – this time we ran one at Christmas.   It is a testament to our entire team that we all held it together during the year that was the last financial year, and still managed to both deliver what our clients needed, and what we needed as a team from each other, too.  Some of our blogs from the last year try to let others know what we learned as well, including help for trainers and parents – we’ll keep trying to share what we learned as well.  

You can’t beat a pandan cake, one of the delicious dishes from our Harmony Day event in Perth!

With our team all aligned as much as we could, we delivered on a large number of projects, many of which are listed in our online portfolio. There’s a number of these that are highlights from the last year, so a specific shout out to three of my favourite initiatives (although this is like trying to pick your favourite child – quite difficult!);

• Queensland State Archives (QSA) – we implemented a new Archival Management System for QSA which was a major accomplishment for us – we delivered the biggest project we’ve done to date at Gaia Resources, and thanks to our partners of Hudson Molonglo and Recordkeeping Innovation, we did it on time and budget,  
• Fishscale – we worked with our partners at Griffith University to implement a new innovative proof of concept project, thanks to Commonwealth Government funding, that utilises artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify fish species from video footage, and this is just the sort of innovative technology project we love doing,
• Northern Australian Fire Index – both the new mobile app and the QGIS plugin were great projects that make a big difference for the northern rangelands of Australia; providing information straight into the hands of people that work on the land – something very close to my own heart – especially when it includes open source software!

Some business highlights that I’ve also been personally very keen on were also achieved, including becoming Carbon Neutral (after a lot of research about the process) and passing another of our ISO Quality System audits – this last one with zero non-compliances!

We also worked really hard to make sure that we were set up for the recovery on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, including a whole raft of changes to our processes, tooling and the like.  Leading into this year, we’re focusing on the approaches that will deliver the best outcomes for the company in that area, including:

• Working closely with ADAPT by Design, who are helping us to transform Gaia Resources into a more resilient business, 
• Retooling the company across a range of different areas, including our knowledgebase, ticketing systems and support systems, 
• Undertaking a holistic review of our quality management system – all processes and procedures are being reviewed to capture the learnings from using them for over a year, using the “Opportunity for Improvement” model that ISO brings, and
• A brand new marketing plan that I’ve developed in conjunction with our new Marketing Coordinator, Rachel (with loads of things to come from that).

As a result of all the hard work from the last financial year, we’re in a good position to start working the next financial year, and to build on our success.

So, as we head into a new financial year, we’re taking a breath before we start on what looks to be a year filled with a range of new projects and opportunities, with a bunch of great ideas from the team to implement, and a solid plan for those changes to happen.  So now, we just need a global pandemic to play ball and things should all be good – easy, right?

In any case, I’m hoping for our colleagues and clients that the next financial year brings about some really positive experiences – and let’s keep looking for those silver linings that these trying times can bring.

If you’d like to know more, you can get in touch with me directly or strike up a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook

Piers

The post Wrapping up another financial year appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Looking back

To say that 2020 was not the year that anybody expected is probably an understatement.

The COVID-19 pandemic was certainly the focus of the last year, and we spent a lot of time within Gaia Resources making sure of two things – that we looked after our team (physically and mentally), and we still kept the business operating on an even keel.

Starting from way back in March, we kicked in our Coronavirus response, which was to keep our staff physically safe, and when the lockdowns began, we trialled and then implemented our Business Continuity Plan and had the whole team working from home. While this “physical health” arrangement went into practice across all three of our offices in Perth, Brisbane and Darwin, and then we doubled down on the “mental health” aspects, increasing the frequency of our planned online interactions .

We then started to work towards the way forward, keeping up our connectivity, changing up our office space (and in Brisbane’s case, moving completely), and making sure we kept to the health guidelines for each State we operated in. All this was also based on as much evidence as we could get from the team from our internal monitoring.

In looking back at the six months since then, even with our best efforts, we had staff that became isolated and run down during the virus. It feels very much like we staggered over the line to the Christmas/New Year break period, but we did make it, and we learned a lot that we are implementing into the new year (more on that later). Our internal monitoring has been fantastic to learn from as we went, and we now know what we should monitor into the future, too – but hopefully, we won’t need to do that.

Speaking of staff, we also hired a bunch of people during the year – including Billy, Rory, Sara, Gus, Tania, Tawanda, Sarah, Shushma, Marion and Jeff. We have a bit of updating to do on our “Staff” page as an early task this year!

With all these new team members, it’s no surprise that in the last year we saw some amazing milestones delivered in the very difficult circumstances we described earlier. Along with passing our annual ISO certification with flying colours, the project highlights included:

• Transforming the Queensland State Archives by implementing a new Archival Management System ecosystem
• Improving the way in which data comes into the Western Australian environmental impact assessment process through a new portal for the Index of Biodiversity Surveys for Assessment
• Updating the Essential Services Volunteer app to help support our volunteer firefighters
• Delivering the Q-Album project for Queensland State Archives
• Releasing a new fire mapping plugin for QGIS, which will assist a wide variety of organisations managing the land across the north of Australia
• Releasing Retromaps – a way to view our historical maps and to better understand the history of Perth

There are a number of other projects that we’re still working on or are yet to formally launch or announce – so there will be plenty of things to announce as we proceed with this new year.

Looking forward

Our forward plan for the new year revolves around five key points, which we are implementing through a program that stretches across the first six months of the year. This focuses on:

• Revising our corporate structures to cope with our growth,
• Focusing on improving our communication with each other,
• Continuing to improve our processes,
• Upgrading a range of our various operational technology stacks, and
• Ensuring we remain environmentally sustainable.

Gaia Resources 2019-20 carbon emissions, by type

To enlarge on the last one, a month or so ago we provided an update on our efforts to become even more environmentally sustainable and this included becoming an accredited Carbon Neutral company as well as becoming a partner with the ClimateClever team to support our team to become more environmentally sustainable at home. This is a big part of our rollout for the new year, where we will also be looking at keeping our carbon footprint as low as possible, and including some new initiatives that will include our clients as well.

2020 wasn’t the year we thought it would be, but we’ve made the best of it wherever we can, learned from it, and are ready to come back even stronger in 2021. It’s certainly going to be another “interesting” year ahead – but I for one can’t wait to see the efforts we’re putting in bear fruit.

In the meantime, stay safe, happy and healthy and get in touch if you’d like to chat about any of these initiatives via connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Piers

The post Welcome back! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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@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

The post It’s the festive season again! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

In previous years for our Christmas winddown we have have been to the movies to watch the latest Star Wars film and then head to a nearby pub for a few drinks.  That was reasonably popular, until we had our launch ‘do’ last year where we went to the Mount Lawley Bowls club for a bit of barefoot bowling and barbeque, which went down as one of the best events we’ve done.

Our Mount Lawley bowls event was a popular one with the team

I asked around discreetly, and listened to a few conversations here and there to hear a few common themes came up from the team about what would be a good event;

• They wanted to do something that had us all doing something together,
• They wanted to do something that made a difference, and
• There needed to be some unwinding and perhaps a beverage or two.

One of my original aims in starting Gaia Resources – which remains true to this day – was to support active on-ground conservation work.  Mostly, we are able to do this indirectly through discounts and in-kind work on our technology projects, but I realised that this Christmas function presented an opportunity to move closer to that aim.  I thought we could volunteer for one of the conservation groups that operate along the beaches, do some volunteering, then hit the water for a swim before we then sat down to a late lunch.

I contacted Perth NRM (as you can do through their Corporate Volunteering page) to find out if any of the Coastcare groups would be willing to take us on as volunteers for the last working day of the year for a couple of hours.  It turned out there were plenty of groups that were willing to help out, right up and down the coast of Perth. So we had a few to pick from which was great to have that opportunity!

So all I had left to do was to work out where to have lunch.  Being the spatial creature that I am, I did a quick scan of the Coastcare groups areas, where the team live, where there was public transport, and that seemed to point towards Cottesloe.  After a few calls to the potential places there, we ended up settling on a really good deal with the cBlu restaurant, part of the iconic Ocean Beach Hotel.  Once that was booked, I let Adeline and the Cottesloe Coastcare team know we were ready to head down.

To be honest, the hardest part was finding the lunch venue!

We arrived down at Cottesloe in various ways (mostly public transport, though), and were met by the Coastcare volunteers who gave us a run down on the Grant Marine Park, the efforts that they have put in over the years on that area.  After a bit of a safety briefing, we all grabbed our gloves and got stuck into the tasks lined up for us;

• Watering the plants that had been planted over the cooler months, to get them through summer,
• Weeding the area, picking out the seed heads of the weeds that were present in the area so that they didn’t sit in the seed bank ready for the winter rains,
• Collecting any seeds for the native plants that they wanted to grow more of (they have been collecting, propagating and replanting from within that reserve in a great display of keeping the right provenance for the reserve), and
• Picking up any litter we could find, to get that removed from the area.

So without further ado – here we are in action:

The Coastcare co-ordinators and the volunteers went out of their way to make it a really great and productive few hours for them, and we really enjoyed it.  They even provided a bunch of morning tea treats for us to have, which was fantastic! One of the quotes that stuck in my mind was when I was talking to one of their team that said “your team in two hours is going to deliver a lot more for the reserve than we can do in a day”.  It really made me think about how even these little acts can make a difference.

After the cleanup, we helped tidy everything away with the team (we were pretty much out of things to do, as we’d watered, weeded, picked and cleaned up the whole reserve) and grabbed our team photo:

Gaia Resources Perth team – yes, that’s an epic Christmas rashie Sean is wearing

The swim at North Cottesloe Beach afterwards was a great way to cool down, clean off and get ready for the afternoon’s festivities at cBlu – but that’s just a boring old lunch and a few drinks compared to the morning of making a difference.

I can totally recommend looking to your local Coastcare, Landcare or other volunteer group enough for your staff events.  We made a big different to that little reserve in a small number of hours, and it was a great way to give back to our environment and our community.  We’ll be looking to make these more regular occurrences around the place for our teams, and we’re also going to start tracking them in our own GRID instance so we can see what sort of positive difference we make as a team to our environment directly – not just through our technology projects.

If you want to know more about how your teams can help groups like Cottesloe Coastcare, then either get in touch with them directly, or contact groups like Perth NRM to see how you can help.

We head into the new year with a real drive to make a difference, and I can’t wait to see what else we can do in 2019.

Piers

The post Giving back to the Environment appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The first thing we wanted to was to lift the lid on our Perth Christmas party, where we decided to do something positive, as well as let our (metaphorical, at least for some) hair down.

Our day started with a quick jaunt (via public transport) to the Grant Marine Park in Cottesloe, where we met up with the Cottesloe Coastcare Association to help them to do some maintenance on the Park area. So we spent the first two and a bit hours of our Christmas party watering, weeding and cleaning up the rubbish in this little pocket of bush right on the coast. It was a great way to give back to the groups that have been supporting us; we support their use of GRID through the Perth Region NRM team, and we’ve trained these groups in GRID, QGIS and other technologies. If you’re looking for something different, contact your local group, via the Perth NRM group at this link – https://www.perthnrm.com/support/corporatevolunteering – and keep an eye out for some photos of our day next week when we’re all back on deck.

Our Perth team, along with a few Coastcare volunteers, made a significant difference in a couple of hours

After that, we had a good hour break where the team either went to straight to the Ocean Beach Hotel or down to the beach for a quick cool off and swim before we all sat down to lunch at the cBlu restaurant. Our Brisbane team – currently a little smaller than the Perth team – hit up the Newstead Brewing Company for a lunch for their part as well (and Steph in Hobart wasn’t left out, with a Christmas hamper). This multi-office approach we have now is really starting to get us to think about the nationwide Gaia team, and how we can really support and look after each other.

Part of that is about getting the right people on board, and this blog comes with a few announcements – the first is that we now have former GeoImage founder, Sylvia Michael, on board to head up our Brisbane team as the new Manager. Syl sums up our long collaboration pretty well in her “starting” quote:

“I am very much looking forward to working with Gaia Resources and contributing to their future growth and success. Over many years, I have enjoyed a respectful and professional association with their management and staff, and I fully support Gaia’s commitment and responsibility to deliver sustainable technology solutions.”

Our Brisbane team has been working well with a lot of remote support from the Perth team, but now that we’ve got a growing team there, we all figured it was time for some more support and hence Syl has come on board.  It also means that Andrew and I will be flying back and forth across the country less frequently now!

Along with Syl, Megan Edward joined the Brisbane team late in 2018, and has been getting up to speed with some very large projects in the Brisbane office, with some experience in the project management.  Megan has been on board for around a month now, and with her background in the environmental space, she really fits into our team well – although right at the moment the focus for the Brisbane office is on our Collections projects, we hope to shortly bring in a few more core environmental projects for Megan to manage.

Sylvia and Megan joining our first team meeting for the year (bonus Andrew)

Speaking of new team members, we also have additional team announcement for Perth – we have now got two additional software engineers on board – Arjun Kannan and Drew Robinson. Arjun and Drew join us for a large new project working with Drupal, and have started in the last few weeks in the hectic lead up to Christmas. Arjun has a wealth of PHP experience, while Drew is a Drupal “gun”, and both join us for a large project we are working on in the Drupal tech stack – an area we have experience in already. Both of the lads have settled in very quickly (Arjun has been with us for around 2 months now, Drew about two weeks!).  We’ve also got a few short term contract staff on board for that same project, who are performing various different roles – our Perth space is heaving now (thank goodness we moved into a larger dedicated area!)

Arjun and Drew in our new larger office space in Perth

And while we’re announcing changes, Chris is also off on a new adventure – he’s off to a new adventure in Darwin, although he’s not leaving our team. Chris’ family is moving up there for a new opportunity for his family – and so we’ve now officially got another state covered, meaning we’re now present in WA, QLD, TAS and now the NT. Chris will continue to manage a range of projects that he has been managing across the country, just from a different location and timezone.

So there’s a bunch of changes for our team, which is all setting up 2019 to be a great year with a great start… and a lot to get on and do!  We’re looking forward to all the new projects, partnerships and opportunities to make the world a better place that the new year offers.  So don’t hesitate to drop us a line, or call us, at either of our main offices;

perthoffice@gaiaresources.com.au

(08) 92277309

brisbaneoffice@gaiaresources.com.au

(07) 3063 0418

So, with all those changes and announcements it’s time to get stuck in!  From all our team we hope you had a great break and we look forward to catching up with you all again in 2019.  Of course, you can always start a conversation with us via social media (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn) or you can call us on the numbers, or emails, above.

Happy new year!

Piers

The post Welcome to 2019! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Ten years – 1,873 trees planted!

Over the break we’ll be on skeleton staff in our Perth office, but the Brisbane team will be away for the whole period – stay tuned for a couple of exciting announcements around both our offices when we return in the new year, though!  If there are any support requests or issues that you have then please use our support email address – support@gaiaresources.com.au – and the team members who are in the office will get in touch with you on one of the non-public holidays.

We usually take this opportunity to reflect on the year to date, as we are halfway through our usual reporting cycle of the financial year.  It’s certainly been one of the most challenging and interesting calendar years for us, with staff changes and some of the largest projects we’ve won kicking off (which we’re still not allowed to talk about publicly, but stay tuned for those announcements in the new year as well).

Gaia Resources has changed a lot since we started almost 15 years ago, from a tiny little home office through to the team we have today, with two offices and 25 staff.  The beast has grown quite a bit bigger than even I thought it would, but these vast uncharted territories are full of excitement and opportunity – this year has been no exception.

We asked the team what their wins were for 2019, and the list is pretty nice to reflect back on:

• Working on the Public Records Office of Victoria project – a great team including a great client,
• Building the Brisbane team up into a “real” office,
• Working collaboratively with our clients to reduce their anxiety levels around the Agile process, so that they are now looking forward to starting sprints instead of being concerned about how this will all play out,
• Running the training in Archivematica with the University of Tasmania special collections team,
• Attending the FOSS4G conference in Melbourne, to be around like minded people and learn a heap of new things in the workshops,
• Getting our first full-time support engineer, and generally becoming more mature around our processes for support,
• The Wildlife Drones project, especially seeing the demonstrations that have been held in Perth the last few days to see the reaction of the clients to all the work we have been doing on it,
• Setting up new technologies, like Grafana, cross platform mobile technologies, Sparx Enterprise Architect, and better use of our existing systems like Youtrack,
• Working on our new larger projects (more on that in the new year),
• Seeing our growth this year, but sustainably – just like we do everything at Gaia Resources,
• Our rehabilitation and data project with IGO Mining, where we were able to really help that organisation to make a difference,
• Our recent focus on “telling more stories” with our blog, especially the story of the Leadbeaters Possum, which has had quite a bit of interest since we released it, and
• The general transformation that the company has had over the last year, in terms of the move to FLUX, the focus on process, the new projects coming in and the exciting opportunities for the new year.

That’s a bunch of good things to reflect on as we wind down to the end of the year – and as a few people said afterwards, that’s not even the full list, as I only asked for one!

For me, the highlight has been the team that gave me all these points above.  A company is really only as good as the people who are in it, and due to them, it’s been a great journey over the last 12 months.  As always, it’s been the roller coaster that is running a small business, but I have to say, with this team around me and with us all supporting each other, it’s been a great year.  So my own highlight is the people that work here with me in this crazy ‘family’ we’ve created that is called Gaia Resources.

I’m looking forward to the break – where as is tradition a few of us will be working on a range of things to do with the business for the new year, including preparing for our ‘usual’ new year launch event, and bunch of new and exciting announcements.  I hope that you and your family – work or otherwise – all have a safe and happy Christmas break!

Merry Christmas and see you in 2019!

Piers

The post Merry Christmas! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The last financial year saw another evolutionary jump for Gaia Resources, this time really in terms of how we operate as a business.  The main change there was our move of the Perth office to FLUX, a co-working space.  While many (including me, I’ll readily admit) didn’t think much of coworking when it started to appear around 10 years ago, it has turned into a major trend in business and totally suits us at Gaia Resources, both here in Perth and in Brisbane as well.  We are just about to reshuffle our space at FLUX in Perth, to move into a larger section of our floor, and that will be our dedicated space, with plenty of room to grow. Brodie, Kali and the team at FLUX have been very supportive – getting to work is certainly a highlight of my day!

Smoothest moving day ever

As it sometimes happens we said goodbye to a few people this year, but we also hired a few new people along the way.  Behind the scenes, Andrew and I have been doing a lot of work on trying to make the business work even better for our team, and have been working on a range of initiatives, from top-down reviews of our processes and culture to the development of new structures and contracts.  We’ve even started to put together some professional development streams for the team. It’s been a challenging period for me, but I came to a realisation that our team is really strong and we’re all here for the right reasons – so it’s been something I’ve stewed over a lot but we’re seeing benefits and people seem to be pretty happy!

A realistic depiction of Andrew and I at the EOFY event

The numbers (and there are quite a few) do speak for themselves.  We’ve had a good financial year. We don’t put out public numbers about how we’re doing, but we were all pretty happy with the results.  Our productivity was up, we hit a lot of our targets and KPIs that were set during the year, and we have a range of good projects and outcomes to look back on (just scanning through the blog articles for the financial year as I wrote this article was pretty uplifting!).

I asked our team for the highlights from the last year before our workshop day, and there were a bunch of things mentioned, but the four most commonly cited things were:

• Hiring our first dedicated support engineer (Jake T., aka “Jake 2.0” and “New Jake”),
• The work we’ve been doing with Public Records Office Victoria,
• The move to FLUX, as mentioned before, and
• A whole raft of technologies that we’ve been working on lately, revisiting some of our architectural choices in light of changes in the industry and technology base.

The fact that “New Jake” gets a mention in the listing indicates just how well our support processes are working – and we’re still working to improve that even further.  This revamp has been a real benefit to our clients and to us as a business. In our new setup here in FLUX there will be a few new systems and processes around support that we’ll continue to push that further.

Our team are experts in looking serious, and talking while waving their hands around

So what’s coming in the next financial year?

There will be a few changes in terms of structures and roles, like the fact I’m now called the Chief Executive Officer, while Andrew is the Chief Operations Officer.  We’ve started on an organisational structure that I tend to draw “upside down”, indicating that those of us in the managerial positions (what we ironically call the “suits”, even though there’s few suits observed) are there to support those in the operational positions (our “technologists”).

The main thing we always reiterate in our meetings is our mission, and that mission isn’t changing from what I started this company to do.  We have it as a tagline on this web site:

“Gaia Resources is a consultancy that responsibly delivers sustainable technology solutions to companies that work with the environment”

We’ve been thinking hard about this statement, and while the main gist of it still rings true, we’ll be doing a little tweaking of the words in the coming months, to ensure that it really matches what we do – wordsmithing these sorts of statements can take a long time!  But at our core, supporting groups that work with and in the environment, through the sustainable use of technology, remains our core mission.

Over the next financial year, I’m really looking forward to continuing our mission… to explore new environmental issues, seek out solutions to a range of problems, and to boldly go where no company has gone before…

Engage*… with us via our social media feeds at Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email. 

Piers

* Yes, I’m not only a Star Wars fan.

The post End of Financial Year recap appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Our biggest change would have to be the Perth office move.  Not that long ago we bundled up the office and moved into the FLUX co-working space in St George’s Terrace, in Perth’s Central Business District.  After we moved the Brisbane team into the @Workspaces co-working space earlier this year, I was quite enamoured by the idea – and then when we started talking as a team about where to move, and the required features and layout, FLUX totally fit the bill.  To top it off, it also reduces our operating costs by a fair whack by moving into the co-working space, and we get much better facilities than we had in our old building in Leederville!

Our crazy moving weekend – powered by donuts

FLUX wasn’t our only change – we had some staff changes as well.  Tamara, Rob and James (H) left us this year, but we also had James (P) and Sean arrive – both of whom escaped Welcome blogs, so I wrote one for them!  And happily, we welcomed Steph back to the team – although she’s now based in Hobart rather than with us in Perth.  Our little family here at Gaia continues to change and evolve, and we have some new staff to welcome in the near future, too.

Project wise, this has been a really big year for Citizen Science projects; with the impending release of three major new citizen science apps, including the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub, the phoenix-like resurgence of MicroBlitz, and a return to our very first citizen science project, ClimateWatch, saw a lot of our work this year in the citizen science area.

This year we also continued our behind-the-scenes support for the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA).  Alex will be presenting at the ACSA conference in Adelaide in early February to discuss some of our work and findings – especially in the area of engagement, which we think is one of the most important considerations (which says a lot coming from a technology company!).

Of course, there’s more citizen science coming from us next year, too – there’s another new version of Dolphin Watch coming in the new year (after the recent release of version 3) that will bring some pretty exciting changes!

Meanwhile, in our Natural Resource Management (NRM) projects, we’ve released a number of upgrades to our GRID product, with many different blogs coming from the team about these changes.  In amongst all that, the NRM community is currently deep in responding to the National Landcare Program new rounds of grants – we’ve been helping a number of NRMs in Western Australia with their responses, ranging from assisting in development of the bids through to undertaking spatial analysis to support their bids – and some of this will be out when we come back from leave in the new year.  2018 will certainly be an interesting year for the NRM community, and we look forward to helping support them through all the turbulence and out into clear skies.

Our Gaia Bucks got another workout this year at the State NRM conference

Collections are also a big part of our work – and the Archives area has been particularly rewarding in 2016.  We began on the Archives journey thanks to the link between the Western Australian Museum and the State Records Office of Western Australia, and we quickly realised that Archives have a lot to offer the wider Collections community.  So, our work (mainly in AtoM and Archivematica) with a variety of Archives in Australia has continued, including a lot of participation at this year’s Australian Society of Archivists conference.  Other projects, such as Discovering Queensland and Aggregating Tasmania have kept us doing some really cutting edge work in this Collections areas.  Meanwhile, our initial work with CSIRO on the Collections Pilot has seen us working further with them throughout 2017 migrating the Australian National Insect Collection and the Australian National Herbarium to CollectiveAccess (and there’s a few more projects that we’ll announce when we’re back from the break).

We group a lot of other projects together into “Environmental Technology”, and there’s been a few great projects over the year – more work supporting the important research into saving coral species via the Corals of the World project, supporting the fight against dieback with our work on the Dieback Information Delivery and Management System, searching for the elusive Malleefowl in the Great Victoria Desert, riding around in seriously cool 6 wheeled vehicles learning about mosquito control, and even helping people care for their local wildlife via the Wildcare Helpline app.  In amongst all these – and a range of other projects – I really feel we’re achieving one of our core goals of supporting environmental research and conservation.

This blog always inspires a bit of reflection in me for the year that was, and the way in which we went about it, so it’s always challenging – as well as a little bit cathartic.  This year I did a lot of work “on” the business, and during that I learned a lot about myself – from working with several advisors to the business from various places – but also from our own team.  Andrew’s 10 year blog really does reflect just how far we’ve come as a team and how we’ve weathered many different challenges – but always as a team.  I think as a result of all this, our little family is really starting to come together and hum along.

So, in closing, I’d like to thank you for your continued support over the year and look forward to seeing you all in 2018.  We’ll be breaking on Friday 22nd December, 2017 (to go and do our “usual” Star Wars themed afternoon) and we’ll be back on deck on Tuesday the 2nd January, 2018.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Gaia Resources!

Piers

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