Star Wars & the Origin of the Conservation Reference Project

I've been interested in a global registry of Conservation GIS professionals, and their work and talks, ever since the mid 1980's when Bettina & I were living in Gland, Switzerland and volunteering at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. I was working with Dr. J. Keith Rennie on how computers were going to be essential to making conservation and sustainable development effective. Dr. Rennie was working then on a new "IUCN Registry" project, designed to be a global computerized database of conservation expertise so that governments working on biodiversity or sustainable development plans could find professionals to help them. The Registry was based in part on the "Naturalists Directory International", a hardcopy volume published annually from 1877 into the 1970's. I used a recent version of this wonderful book myself in reaching out to fellow naturalists around the world when I first began planning my decade of volunteer service in 1981. After joining Esri in 1989, I began collecting all of the experiences and lessons from that decade, and in 1992, I began writing more formal reports on what the new Esri Conservation Program should do. Towards the bottom of my first report, I included a design for a new global directory of Conservation GIS groups and experts, to be called "C-3PO", short for "Conservation People, Papers, Projects & Organizations". This first proposal, modelled upon the IUCN registry, is reprinted below from the Sept 1992 Ecp Report. It's more of a data model than a proposal, because data models were all the rage in 1992, but it does still include many of the basic concepts that helped form the Scgis International Program and now the Conservation Reference Project.

"2. Build user database of conservation groups using GIS who work with ESRI:

DESIGN FOR CONSERVATION DATABASE: C3P-O (Conservation People, Projects, Papers and Organizations)

4 tables related many-many as follows:

People: keep track of individuals though they may change organizations and projects. Name, Permanent Address, current title, history of involvement with ECP, Languages, GIS skills, Volunteer availability, org affiliations (organizations), project involvement (projects)

Organizations: Name, address with general phone/fax, mandate, Key words, Funding sources and budget, outbound donation history, history of inbound ESRI donations and related donations from other sponsors, GIS achievements history, reference to supplemental materials, list of contacts (people), list of projects administered (projects)

Projects: Name, start and end dates, goal, Key words, administering agency (orgainzations) director (people) , in-country administration (organizations), Funding agency, total funding, current year funding, GIS allocation, GIS expenditure, Running total dollar amounts of ESRI donations and related donations from other vendors.

Papers/Presentations: bibliography of important papers/presentations in conservation and GIS, including all ever presented in the conservation program User Conference sessions. Date, Format (video, film, broadcast, paper, article, etc), Title, presenter (people), Keywords, abstract, proceedings year or journal/publisher.

Purpose will be:

To help manage the network of interrelationships, skills and resources sharing of the ECP.

To monitor donations activity by subject, country, sector, etc.

To monitor actions/publications resulting from donations activity

To make information on ECP activities more accessible

To facilitate regular publication of non-confidential information about the entire ECP network to all of it's members, to support them in further building the network themselves."

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