Hi Vance,

Great suggestions. Are there any specific tools or apps you have in mind, or are you just interested to hear about what's out there?

On case-based webinars, we’ve been discussing the potential for a few additional events that feature individual new/upcoming tools. These would be more for demos and Q&A sessions on specific tools, in contrast to the discussion-based meetups we’ve done so far. Would this be of interest?

Hi Meredith, 

Thanks for this input - I think this will be an excellent question for our speakers during the low-cost/open-source hardware meetup. In past events we've often focused on how tech folks can apply their skills in conservation, but it would be great to discuss how ecologists can approach the tech space as well to get those ideas translated.

And I'd very much like to hear about your ideas!

Mind you, it's not always the case that problem and solution sets overlap.  But the more problems and solutions one knows about, the more likely it is to make a match.

Thanks,

-harold

Hi Akiba, 

Lots of excellent ideas in here.

To give you a bit of background, the aim of the meetups is to bring leading engineers in the tech sector together with conservation practitioners to share information, identify obstacles, and discuss what’s on the horizon. We host them on Zoom, if you're curious you can watch last season's meetups here.

These meetups run for 1.5h and we're generally joined by 70-100 participatants. We open with three subject matter experts who give 10 minute presentations (one sets the scene and two discuss their specific work). We then facilitate a fairly long (~40 min) discussion around the topic at hand, calling on lots of participants who have either posted in the chat or asked questions ahead of time in the registration signup form to give them the opportunity to put their questions to the speakers. We aim for a fairly fluid back and forth discussion between the speakers and the audience. The participants very much shape the discussion, and we're very happy to led by what people want to discuss and get out of the sessions.  

Now, I think some of the topics you've raised are right to be covered somewhere the first and second meetups we're planning for this season for this season. So first up, it would be great to have you join in the meetups and raise these during the discussion.

However, so far these meetups have tended to be more about the big picture/state of play. They are a good forum to see who is doing what and talk about common challenges, emerging needs, and where the tech needs to go. This is helpful because it means that they're accessible to everyone (both conservationists and tech people), but they don't tend to be the right forum to go really deep on the technical side of things.

We're already planning a spin of series of one-off webinars focusing on specific projects where we see a lot of questions coming through about them (e.g. Wildlife Insights, Icarus). After a discussion with @Eric+Becker last week, I've also been wondering if we need another spin off series that's a bit more casual but gives regular time/space to have these detailed technical discussions some members seem to be keen on having- more workshop that virtual meetup? For example, this one you've suggested seems to fit really nicely in with that idea: Workshop series on using and interfacing sensors and communication devices in various open source hardware platforms?  

It would be great to have these as member led, if you're up for it we'd love to test this idea out with you and see how it could work? 

Steph