Hi everyone, 

Friendly bit of community housekeeping here. If you're interested in the What would an open source conservation technology toolkit look like? discussion, it's continued (with enthusiasm) here. 

I recommend using the 'reply as new thread' button, as it'll now drop in a link where the conversation diverged that directs people to your new conversation. 

Steph

Hi everyone, 

Okay, so I've been going through and compiling all the comments here to double check we're covering off all the ideas and requests that have come out. I think we're doing a pretty good job thus far with Season 1 and what we're planning for the rest of Season 2. 

Here's where we stand: 

Open Source and Open Tools for Conservation (covered)

'I'd be really interested in seeing our growing community focus efforts on developing cost-effective, modular, open-source designs using a similar principle to Arduino (i.e. a common base or concept module that we can all build around), rather than re-inventing the wheel so-to-speak.'

Explored in Low Cost, Open Source Solutions Meetup. To continue the discussion about this topic (including whether we need further meetups to pick up ideas raised?), join the meetup discussion here. It'll also be covered in the second meetup of season two (tools and space for collabration). 

Collaboration (covered)

'How best to collaborate, share resources and spread design and testing loads without doubling up etc., would be fantastic'

To be covered in the upcoming Tools and Spaces for Collaboration (both online and offline, e.g. APIs and makerspaces) Meetup. Are there specific questions/discussion points you want covered? Join the discussion here. 

Open Data (partially covered)

I'd be interested in a discussion on Open Data and how that can support wildlife conservation. Eg training in the creation of open data, licensing and publication, accessing open data and the potential risks and benefits. There is pressure for more and more conservation research data to be  published openly, what are implications for threatened species? Are there any good examples of the benefits of publishing data?

This was partly covered in our Big Data meetup, and I suspect it's going to part of the discussion in the upcoming Tools and Spaces for Collaboration meetup and the Creative approaches to data-driven storytelling Meetup. I think that a stand alone discussion thread on this topic could help move it forward, @thaliebel . I recommend getting this started in our Data Science group and see who also is interested and start hashing out what's needed. If it emerges that there's a big need to give this stand alone space for a meetup type discussion, we can pick it up from there. 

Wildlife Tracking (covered)

'Very cool. I’m in. Telemetry and drones...(remind me to ask you about drones for tag placement after my experience in Niue) happy to participate and pull colleagues in if needed.' 

Explored in Next-Gen Wildlife Tracking meetup. There are some follow up activities identified, including the need for a landscape map of who is doing what in developed tracking devices - where they are on the roadmap - if you have ideas for taking this forward, please shout out. And there was a lot of interest in ICARUS. We're talking with the team about potentially doing a one-off Q&A session with the team so you can ask all your questions. Let us know if this would be of interest. 

Outstanding ideas: Possibly for Season 3 

• Non-invasive Techniques (including DNA) 
• GIS
• Camera Trapping
• Bioacoustics 

We're starting to think about season three, for the second half of 2019. We're throwing around the idea that it could be focused on field users of some specific technologies, which may be challenging technology/connection wise, but it would be really valuable to hear from a variety of field applications. What do you think? Are there other topics we should cover? Let us know if you are deploying tech and can share your experience, or if you know of someone we should get involved. 

Outstanding ideas: For other follow up

Using high resolution satellite imagery 

Interested in a session about using high resolution satellite imagery for wildlife monitoring/IWT, principally 'what are the best sources of free high resolution imagery?

@isla and @Thomas+Starnes - as you flagged this topic for discussion, are you still interested in it being covered? I don't know enough about what your open questions are but I'm wondering if there is another format that we could explore for answering this question. Maybe the training materials/videos Akiba is suggesting here? Is a walkthrough what you're looking for, or is it more about a sharing/discussion with peers? 

How is everyone powering remote tech?

Also, how is everyone powering remote tech.? I imagine solar is a big one, but doesn't that make systems easily observable/avoidable or worse?  - @Rob+Appleby 

I think this needs to be a stand alone discussion, possibly building on the discussion @Femke+Hilderink has started about the Battery Challenge - how to reduce battery waste and potentially connected to this thread about extending battery life with solar panels. Rob, what do you think - is there a separate discussion to be broken off here? 

Future Gazing

• If you did future gazing, I think what role could 5G / meshed networks in monitoring, or a meetup to cut through blockchain nonsense and see what exact problems it can address may be useful? - @craigmelson 

• I agree, it would be good to sort out what we have at hand right now, what's just over the horizon (for example, any implications of the recent deal between Iridium and Amazon for cheaper satellite data services?) and what's a bit more distant. A very good idea indeed - @Rob+Appleby 

This ties in really nicely with an idea @JoeNash and I have been playing with about a simple series where we call up an expert and ask them to cut through the hype. We're thinking of questions like 'What is an API?', 'What is Blockchain?', 'What is Machine Learning?', 'What is 5G?, 'What is open source?' etc. These pop ups could be a different way to get at these questions - laying the ground work so we all have a common understanding of what we're talking about before we have these more technical futurecasting discussions. More on that very soon - i'll update this comment with a link when we post about it.. 

Connected to this - I've also been wondering if there's a need for spaces for smaller groups to have more technical discussions. The virtual meetups are awesome in that they create a common ground for everyone to talk about these big picture ideas and throw questions to the experts. I thhink it makes it accessible for both the conservationists and the technologists, and I'm keen to keep them as their own distinct thing, rather than trying to make them try to do everything for everyone. By their very nature they are not going to go into the hardcore technical space, they're more for exploring ideas. So having seperate spaces (smaller meetings/working groups?) that taking ideas forward in more detail (maybe this ties into your nasa idea, @Rob+Appleby ?) - could be complementary. What do you think? 

As always, I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas. Thanks for the energy with which you've embraced these meetups, it's made it such a pleasure to be involved with them and to help create a space for you all to make things happen. I'm looking forward to seeing where else we take this. 

Stephanie