Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I was just able to attend an exciting conference in Vancouver, ConEx, the Conservation Learning Exchange . It was organized by The Nature Conservancy, but had folks from many of the other leading groups. For me, it was a chance to meet practitioners using our Miradi conservation project management software. Right before I went to the conference I received a copy of the Proceedings of the Appalachian Salamander Conservation Workshop, held this past May. And sprinkled throughout the report were graphics clearly from our Miradi software! While at ConEx, I had the chance to talk about our approach to agile, user-centered development. Jim Patell of Stanford's Business School (and the d.school there) gave his pitch for similar principles in his extreme design for affordability class: it was cool to see an academic approach so grounded in reality and making a difference! At the end of the day, I was part of a meeting of leading conservation techies talking about how to share infor...

We're piloting our new Miradi.org website, which is our environmental project management software. Miradi (the new name of what we used to call the e-Adaptive Management software) has been in beta test for a while and we've gotten great feedback from all over the world from environmental practitioners. We've just put Google Analytics on the site, and are playing with it. So, feel free to visit and check it out. Google Grants (Google.org) also did a lot of work on our Google Adwords, and searching for "Miradi" on Google brings up our ad, too. We had a summer MBA intern from Haas Business School (at UC Berkeley), Jeff Rauenhorst, and he wrote a draft launch plan which we're just putting the finishing touches on. Next step is to review it with our partners in developing Miradi: groups like The Nature Conservancy, WCS and WWF. So, we're rolling forward towards getting version 1 out there!