Note: See related posts at the Non-profit Blog Carnival: Social Media Roundup
Today is Earth Day so I thought I’d pass on what I’ve been doing at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute (AWI) where I volunteer as the Director Education, though I’m not limited to just educational activities.
We’ve been working on building a wildlife response network, first in Atlantic Canada and eventually throughout the country.
Effective response to wildlife emergencies requires coordination and commitment from diverse and sometimes divergent stakeholders. In order to build capacity to respond to wildlife emergencies across Canada, AWI envisions a Wildlife Response Network. When fully functional, this network will provide communities, industry, and regulators with standards and strategies for dealing with wildlife crisis scenarios.
No single organization, be it public or private, can hope to address all the concurrent challenges (habitat destruction, climate change, and the widespread use of pesticides and herbicides) of today. AWI’s approach is to build on existing partnerships with public and private sector businesses and academic institutions to create a gateway for sharing knowledge and resources.
One aspect of this network is to use the Web to connect with other groups and individuals. We were considering building a community using a content management system and then hiring people for data entry, but our budget was reduced this year. So a little while ago I figured that there must be a more Web 2.0 way to do this and set out to do it.
I decided to start a low-key parallel development project using free or very cheap resources and get as much data out there as possible. I opened a wordpress.com account and paid $15 for a domain name, atlanticwildlife.org, which is now live but only a shell. I also looked at what other platforms we could use for sharing. We are setting up a new Flickr Pro site (which is now free for charities), and I’ll transfer photos from my AWI set and then start uploading like crazy so we can share with the world. I also created my first Swivel data set and will get some more up. Instead of developing our own animal database, we will leverage and support the Encyclopedia of Life. We’ll connect with teachers and learners on Ning, which is in very early development. The biggest expense so far is time.
I’ll be adding information and data over the next few months and will then start the longer task of connecting to people and building a community. I’d appreciate any other recommendations for tools, applications and platforms that we could plug into the network.
