Oak Foundation Environment Programme Evaluation: Executive Summary

This is an Executive Summary of a full evaluation conducted for the Oak Foundation in 2015. The evaluation provided an external assessment of the impact of the Oak Foundation's climate and marine philanthropy from 2009 to 2014, and the effectiveness of the strategies, internal structures, and approaches deployed. The lessons learned are also intended to guide the formation of a new strategic framework to guide grant-making to 2020. Thus, this review was intended to not only reflect on past programming and the Oak Foundation's role in environmental philanthropy, but also to update the understanding of baseline conditions, highlight important trends, needs, and opportunities, and identify ways to increase impact. The evaluation method was centered on interviews, desktop research, and a document review. The scope was not comprehensive; it focused on grants and initiatives that were of most interest to Oak leadership, and that had not been subject to a recent in-depth project evaluation. This Executive Summary is intended for external audiences, and does not include the sections covering the Foundation's internal processes and operations

Grid-enabling FIRST: Speeding up simulation applications using WinGrid

The vision of grid computing is to make computational power, storage capacity, data and applications available to users as readily as electricity and other utilities. Grid infrastructures and applications have traditionally been geared towards dedicated, centralized, high performance clusters running on UNIX flavour operating systems (commonly referred to as cluster-based grid computing). This can be contrasted with desktop-based grid computing which refers to the aggregation of non-dedicated, de-centralized, commodity PCs connected through a network and running (mostly) the Microsoft Windowstrade operating system. Large scale adoption of such Windowstrade-based grid infrastructure may be facilitated via grid-enabling existing Windows applications. This paper presents the WinGridtrade approach to grid enabling existing Windowstrade based commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs). Through the use of a case study developed in conjunction with Ford Motor Company, the paper demonstrates how experimentation with the CSP Witnesstrade and FIRST can achieve a linear speedup when WinGridtrade is used to harness idle PC computing resources. This, combined with the lessons learned from the case study, has encouraged us to develop the Web service extensions to WinGridtrade. It is hoped that this would facilitate wider acceptance of WinGridtrade among enterprises having stringent security policies in place

EcoGIS – GIS tools for ecosystem approaches to fisheries management

Executive Summary: The EcoGIS project was launched in September 2004 to investigate how Geographic Information Systems (GIS), marine data, and custom analysis tools can better enable fisheries scientists and managers to adopt Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management (EAFM). EcoGIS is a collaborative effort between NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and four regional Fishery Management Councils. The project has focused on four priority areas: Fishing Catch and Effort Analysis, Area Characterization, Bycatch Analysis, and Habitat Interactions. Of these four functional areas, the project team first focused on developing a working prototype for catch and effort analysis: the Fishery Mapper Tool. This ArcGIS extension creates time-and-area summarized maps of fishing catch and effort from logbook, observer, or fishery-independent survey data sets. Source data may come from Oracle, Microsoft Access, or other file formats. Feedback from beta-testers of the Fishery Mapper was used to debug the prototype, enhance performance, and add features. This report describes the four priority functional areas, the development of the Fishery Mapper tool, and several themes that emerged through the parallel evolution of the EcoGIS project, the concept and implementation of the broader field of Ecosystem Approaches to Management (EAM), data management practices, and other EAM toolsets. In addition, a set of six succinct recommendations are proposed on page 29. One major conclusion from this work is that there is no single “super-tool” to enable Ecosystem Approaches to Management; as such, tools should be developed for specific purposes with attention given to interoperability and automation. Future work should be coordinated with other GIS development projects in order to provide “value added” and minimize duplication of efforts. In addition to custom tools, the development of cross-cutting Regional Ecosystem Spatial Databases will enable access to quality data to support the analyses required by EAM. GIS tools will be useful in developing Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) and providing pre- and post-processing capabilities for spatially-explicit ecosystem models. Continued funding will enable the EcoGIS project to develop GIS tools that are immediately applicable to today’s needs. These tools will enable simplified and efficient data query, the ability to visualize data over time, and ways to synthesize multidimensional data from diverse sources. These capabilities will provide new information for analyzing issues from an ecosystem perspective, which will ultimately result in better understanding of fisheries and better support for decision-making. (PDF file contains 45 pages.

A review of GIS-based information sharing systems

GIS-based information sharing systems have been implemented in many of England and Wales' Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs). The information sharing role of these systems is seen as being vital to help in the review of crime, disorder and misuse of drugs; to sustain strategic objectives, to monitor interventions and initiatives; and support action plans for service delivery. This evaluation into these systems aimed to identify the lessons learned from existing systems, identify how these systems can be best used to support the business functions of CDRPs, identify common weaknesses across the systems, and produce guidelines on how these systems should be further developed. At present there are in excess of 20 major systems distributed across England and Wales. This evaluation considered a representative sample of ten systems. To date, little documented evidence has been collected by the systems that demonstrate the direct impact they are having in reducing crime and disorder, and the misuse of drugs. All point to how they are contributing to more effective partnership working, but all systems must be encouraged to record how they are contributing to improving community safety. Demonstrating this impact will help them to assure their future role in their CDRPs. By reviewing the systems wholly, several key ingredients were identified that were evident in contributing to the effectiveness of these systems. These included the need for an effective partnership business model within which the system operates, and the generation of good quality multi-agency intelligence products from the system. In helping to determine the future development of GIS-based information sharing systems, four key community safety partnership business service functions have been identified that these systems can most effectively support. These functions support the performance review requirements of CDRPs, operate a problem solving scanning and analysis role, and offer an interface with the public. By following these business service functions as a template will provide for a more effective application of these systems nationally

Staff edutainment on a corporate intranet‐lessons learned

This paper discusses the results from a case study of an intranet‐based staff education programme at the national Swedish telecommunications corporation. The programme attempts to convey the environmental benefits of telecommunication services, aiming at increased staff awareness and new business opportunities. A multidisciplinary production team packaged the factual content in a rich mixture of audio and video clips, text, images, animations, quizzes, games, tests and polls. A standard Web browser with downloadable plug‐ins is used to view the material. The self‐paced studies on the intranet are followed by a seminar, combining the advantages of individual and teacher‐assisted education. The impact of the programme has been studied partly through a questionnaire distributed to a number of users, and partly through interviews. The results show that intranet‐based ‘edutainment’ is a practicable and successful tool for organizational learning. Ease of use, interactivity, ease of distribution and renewal, flexibility in time and space, are just some of the benefits offered. However, a number of pedagogical, organizational and technical requirements must be met in order to succeed Context, pedagogical aims and standards, content, information structure, user characteristics, management commitment, technical platform, media types, the production team, user interface and user tests are just a few of the important factors that must be considered This paper attempts to identify some of the factors essential to successful staff education on the corporate intranet, discussing observations and lessons learned from the case study

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol: Letting applications talk to each other

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is a hub-based communication standard for the exchange of data and control between participating client applications. It has been developed within the context of the Virtual Observatory with the aim of enabling specialised data analysis tools to cooperate as a loosely integrated suite, and is now in use by many and varied desktop and web-based applications dealing with astronomical data. This paper reviews the requirements and design principles that led to SAMP's specification, provides a high-level description of the protocol, and discusses some of its common and possible future usage patterns, with particular attention to those factors that have aided its success in practice.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for Virtual Observatory special issue of Astronomy and Computin

Teaching practical science online using GIS: a cautionary tale of coping strategies

Strong demand for GIS and burgeoning cohorts have encouraged the delivery of GIS teaching via online distance education models. This contribution reviews a brief foray (2012–2014) into this field by the Open University, deploying open source GIS software to enable students to perform practical science investigations online. The “Remote observation” topic spanned four science disciplines in 6 weeks – an ambitious remit within an innovative overarching module. Documenting the challenges and strategies involved, this paper uses forum usage and student feedback data to derive insights into the student experience and the pitfalls and pleasures of teaching GIS at a distance