Data Systems Project

The Data Systems Project was initiated at the 2019 CMP Member Retreat, resulting from the workshop "How do we get the systems we need?".   This workshop recognized that we all share the task of managing information associated with planning, implementing, and tracking conservation projects. Independent of what systems we use (if any), decisions are being made regarding what actions & monitoring to implement, who is leading the work, who else is helping, when the work needs to be done, and how much it’s going to cost. We all face the need of assessing, in some way, whether we are doing what we said we would do, and whether the intended results are being achieved. 

We hypothesize that if we pool some of our intellectual and financial resources together then we can expand and substantially improve our current systems so that in future we can spend much less time wrangling and collating information. 

In the initial phase, we built on the experiences of several member orgs who have recently been through a systems analysis exercise.   The result is a collective view of the user-tasks and "personas" associated with conservation projects in our 5 targeted work streams, These results are helping us to identify and prioritize shared needs that would benefit from systems development investment. 

All working groups have completed the planned analysis exercises, and input was sought from the broader community via the CCNet listserve.  The results are available here - CMP Data Systems Broadsheet v1.0; the last page outlines our approach to tackling next steps.  The March CMP Member Call included an overview and discussion of next steps - a recording is available in the Conservation in Practice section of this website. 

The next steps are to identify the people and organisations who want to collaborate on improving the systems available to us all.   Work-planning has been identified as the initial priority.    If you are interested, or have a colleague working in this space, please get in touch with Annette Stewart (Bush Heritage Australia).