Building a Collaborative Participative Portal:

http://thewesternghats.in

http://indiabiodiversity.org

August 2012

Questions to Explore

• Is biodiversity information important and should it be public?

• Biodiversity and conservation information is an essential social good and should be widely, publicly, and freely available over the internet

• What is a structure to organize biodiversity information?

• Biodiversity and ecosystem data are both geo-referenced and species-referenced. Thus, map-based systems are ideal for biodiversity informatics

• How do we aggregate and publish biodiversity information?

• Biodiversity informatics should harness collective intelligence, exploit the Long Tail, and aggregate the wisdom of the crowd

• Our experiments, experiences and the way forward?

• Large scale participation and contribution is key!! But How??

Biodiversity Portal Modules

• The Species Pages: One page for species; carefully curated, standards compliant

• Map Module: Spatial distributions of biodiversity and its correlates; interactive and queries; downloadable

• Checklist Module: List of species of biodiversity rich areas

Data Policy

• Open access to information

• Information on Creative Commons License

• Choice of Creative Commons Licenses

• Clear attribution and credits

• Complete transparency and trust

Observation Module

• Crowd-source biodiversity information

• Stand up and contribute to conservation

• Build social networks for conservation

• Contribute to science

Life of an Observation

• User creates an Observation with media, location, species call and comments

• Others agree with species call, make species call, add comments and flag

• Curators use observation and notes to enrich species pages

• Over time observations aggregate to enrich distributions of species, etc.

Social Groups in Conservation

Groups Structure

• Assumptions• Social networks operate in tight groups

• Well knit social groups share and exchange better

• Social groups like to retain individuality and identity

• Groups Structure with• Groups founders

• Group experts

• Groups members

• Group Followers

• All others

Group Function

• Post Observations

• Activity Feed

• Comment and conversation

• Validate and Moderate

• Include Species pages and Map Layers

• Share documents

• … and more … events, voting, mail…

Type Join Posting Validation

Highly Controlled Groups

Members decided by Founders

Only founders and experts can post

Only founders and experts can validate

Medium Controlled Groups

Members can invite other members

Members have limited postings

Members can validate

Open Groups Any user can join Everybody can post

Everybody can validate

Roles Membership Postings Validations

Founders X X X

Experts X X X

Members X X

Followers

All Others X

Thank you!