Watershed-to-Ocean Initiative
Location
The Ocean Project has begun a new initiative to develop an interactive on-line watershed-to-ocean visualization through which we expect to develop a process by which anyone can click on a virtual on-line globe to get directed to their ecological address, display the watersheds in their region, learn about their watershed's characteristics, and join local urgent or interesting conservation efforts.
About You
Section 1: You
First Name
Bruce Donald
Last Name
Campbell
Website URL
Organization
The Ocean Project
Country
Section 2: Your Organization
Organization Name
The Ocean Project
Organization Website
Organization Phone
Organization Address
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
Organization Country
Your idea
Name Your Project
Watershed-to-Ocean Initiative
Country and state your work focuses on
Describe Your Idea
The Ocean Project has begun a new initiative to develop an interactive on-line watershed-to-ocean visualization through which we expect to develop a process by which anyone can click on a virtual on-line globe to get directed to their ecological address, display the watersheds in their region, learn about their watershed's characteristics, and join local urgent or interesting conservation efforts.
Website URL
Innovation
What makes your idea unique?
We believe that maps have enticed people to travel and investigate interesting features (natural and man-made) ever since they were first used for way-finding. We believe maps have over-emphasized political boundaries and man-made structures to the disservice of our natural resources. Maps have primarily emphasized roads at scale that suggests vehicular travel. Our maps emphasize “ecological address” foremost and the connectivity of local geo-spatial features to larger geospatial phenomena. By focusing on waterways and the connectivity of local water to local estuaries, and beyond to far-away ocean currents, we hope to get people outdoors to see the water in their community and contemplate both where it has come from and where it is going.
We connect to outdoor experiential education opportunities through explicit data layers that appear in the Initiative's whole-Earth application. Each data layer is precise as to where opportunities lay geospatially and temporally in the watershed, and on the planet. By honing in on the local watershed, a Web audience can see meetings, lectures, volunteer work details, and social get-togethers as physical locations on the globe with temporal characteristics identified consistently (for example, transparency to represent proximity in time and color to represent time of day). We provide example back-end connectivity kits in order for organizations to connect their Web presence to our Initiative presented icons of opportunity. These connectivity kits will include e-mail automation and registration services to allow interested people to sign-up for available events (and manage a flow of communication between organization and the public). No one else is connecting a sense of natural place to a back-end personal action management system to track an individual's progress in making a difference locally. We believe young people will thrive with such a tool as we do ourselves.
Do you have a patent for this idea?
No
Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
What impact have you had?
We've already helped local youth attain a much better visual literacy in using a virtual globe to understand about both local and global water issues. We believe our process works well with young people and yet is ideal for older people to connect to younger people through visual literacy and civic engagement. Since virtual globes are being developed by Microsoft, Google, and NASA in a healthy competitive arena, we need to educate the masses on how to use them for conservation and awareness. Our focus is on the ocean, but we know the process can be applied to many terrestrial issues as well. So, we are training people to use a virtual globe for virtual thinking just as thirty years ago people like ourselves educated the world on how to use a spreadsheet tool for numerical thinking (and reasoning).
We expect the impact of our outreach and education through maintaining exemplary virtual globe use cases will be significant and change the way people get empowered to work in their local communities.
The Ocean Project already has a well-respected community of 1050 musuems, zoos, aquariums, and conservation organizations participating in our conservation processes. We expect to extend that reach through providing a tool our Partners can use to enable their staff, consultants, and visitors to participate in more meaningful local conservation (and communicate their efforts better through visual representations).
Problem
As stated previously, we believe that maps have enticed people to travel and investigate interesting features (natural and man-made) ever since they were first used for way-finding, but believe maps have over-emphasized political boundaries and man-made structures to the disservice of our natural resources. We wish to provide a natural perspective of the planet which will allow all citizens to see their local world as a natural place first and foremost and investigate and interact with it as such.
We have lacked the ability to see how our local watersheds work on our behalf and connect with members in our community who are like-minded in wanting to celebrate, explore, and conserve their local natural areas.
Actions
1. Provide an visual, virtual globe to promote visual literacy among world citizenry.
2. Partner with local watershed Partners to incorporate local data layers that promote conservation and watershed understanding.
3. Promote our tool within local zoos, aquariums, and science museums with focus groups among visitors who naturally come to such institutions to gain perspective.
4. Provide a Web address which visitors can use to share understanding and volunteering opportunities with family members, neighbors and greater-community members.
5. Involve youth and interested adults in the process of attaining, managing, and visualizing key data layers to track watershed health and community actions.
6. Maintain tools to track personal action and drive connectivity to other potential actors through social mediation tools (Facebook, Twitter, our volunteering management tool, etc.).
Results
We expect a long and yet fruitful path to shared visual literacy among a critical mass of citizens to improve our planet. We expect the path to be similar to the path taken to make spreadsheets a valuable productivity and communications tool for individuals. Except we are hopeful that the much lower cost to access, technological framework of the Web, systems awareness and simplicity of operating systems management, and visual beauty of a virtual globe will make our path accelerate faster than the path the spreadsheet tool to acceptance and widespread use.
What will it take for your project to be successful over the next three years? Please address each year separately, if possible.
Our project is already successful in its first year of operation as funded by the Rhode Island Foundation. We've built basic prototypes and are beginning to share those prototypes with the organizations that can introduce them to the public effectively. We just don't have any funding now to continue our marvelous work. We are working on it pro-bono as we find our next willing funder. Our process is a perfectly iterative one where volunteers and staff can work together to learn to perform necessary tasks through my unending patience and passion to share these enabling and accomplished skills to others so they can have the same daily satisfaction in their work as I get.
Our project will be successful if I can fund myself to continue this work and not give into taking on other jobs just for the pay. I lose focus when working on other tasks just to pay the bills. Currently, I can only afford to give twelve hours a week to this initiative. The project plan is ready to roll and will continue at whatever pace I can justify.
What would prevent your project from being a success?
There would have to be some very aggressive hack against the free world on the Internet to bring down all the progress we've made in building a collective social-mediated communications process on the Web. I don't expect that to happen and so I continue to build upon existing tools and look for opportunities to incorporate successful social-mediation process into our visual literacy objectives using our virtual globe with data layers approach.
We have so many potential Partners and home users who will engage with us, it is just a matter of choosing priorities properly and identifying metrics that tell us when to give up on one Partner and user group in order to focus on more engaged and success-oriented ones.
I believe we are guaranteed success as a community of virtual globe developers. I would like to see it happen in my lifetime so I can make a significant contribution to its enablement. The return on investment is such that the sooner virtual globes can be used for local conservation, the better. It will happen. Making a short-term vision be the only goal might prevent us from calling short-term steps successful, but since long-term is the goal we believe every contribution to that end should be considered a success and we will do so.
How many people will your project serve annually?
More than 10,000
What is the average monthly household income in your target community, in US Dollars?
$1000 - 4000
Does your project seek to have an impact on public policy?
Yes
Sustainability
What stage is your project in?
Operating for less than a year
In what country?
United States
Is your initiative connected to an established organization?
Yes
If yes, provide organization name.
The Ocean Project
How long has this organization been operating?
More than 5 years
Does your organization have a Board of Directors or an Advisory Board?
Yes
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with NGOs?
Yes
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with businesses?
Yes
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with government?
Yes
Please tell us more about how these partnerships are critical to the success of your innovation.
The Partner network of The Ocean Project continues to grow and evolve. Many aquariums, zoos, science and natural history museums, conservation organizations, and other groups and agencies have become Partners and are active in participating with us on our shared mission of ocean conservation through education, action, and networking. Without these Partners, we'd have a harder time reaching the general public in an impactful manner. We especially like the fact we have access to millions of visitors to our Partners' institutions who can be handheld through this concept of global visual literacy tied to local personal action.
What are the three most important actions needed to grow your initiative or organization?
1. Every key Partner globally to network with each other through our services
2. Willingness of our Partners to use and share experiences with using our on-line tools and the wide variety of on-line social-mediation tools available to us all (Facebook and Twitter being examples of two such tools right now)
3. Attaining appropriate budget that we can with good conscience direct towards this Watershed-to-Ocean Initiative.
The Story
What was the defining moment that led you to this innovation?
Curious what I would do to better the world with my PhD that would take advantage of all the wonderful experiences I was privy to through that journey.
Tell us about the social innovator behind this idea.
I am the social innovator. You can read all about me at http://bdcampbell.net/
I try to write with the passion that drives me to publish papers, teach young people, attend important conferences, collaborate with kind and thoughtful people, and search out projects that lead to betterment of mankind (seriously, it is all there on my website).
How did you first hear about Changemakers?
Friend or family member
If through another, please provide the name of the organization or company
Bill Mott of The Ocean Project
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 | Alexis Ditkowsky said: Hi Bruce, I was wondering if you plan to develop curriculum to help teachers bring the Watershed-to-Ocean Initiative into the ... about this Competition Entry. - 690 days ago read more > |
| ribells updated this Competition Entry. - 703 days ago |
| ribells submitted this idea. - 703 days ago |
