A simple community conservation system based on an electronic diary
Produced by the ‘Going Green Directorate*’ to help community groups make and operate a
community conservation system
What is a community conservation system?
A community conservation system is essentially a diary in which work (a project) is scheduled
for a particular day or period. When the start date arrives, the work is either done or skipped.
In the first case the results of the work are entered for that date. In the second case the
reasons why the work was not done are recorded for that date.
After the work is done a monitoring project is scheduled. This is in order to record the
outcome of the work (a performance indicator) in relation to the target condition (objective) set
for the desirable state of the feature being managed.
A paper diary or a collection of ‘To Do’ lists can be used to record a simple sequence of
management and monitoring. However, an electronic diary is essential for a situation where
several features on more than one site are being managed. This is because each site requires a
diary and each day may have to support more than one entry. Furthermore, a flexible
hypertext function is required so that links can be made from each management task to its
monitoring project and from projects to photographs, maps and support documents, such as
job descriptions.
Example of an electronic diary
SoftLabs Advanced Diary fulfils the aforementioned requirements. It supports multiple diaries
and multiple entries for a single day. This is a unique product, because no other diary software
is capable of keeping multiple diaries in a single database file. This makes it easy to operate a
management plan in several compartments, as for a village with several greens, woods and
ponds.
The diary is clearly structured and easily searched. Interlinking one entry to another is possible
as well. Individual entries or all entries can be extracted for communication as html files or
archived in an RTF format. There is a comprehensive built-in Help System.
The following picture is a screen shot of a date page in which a coppicing task was scheduled
and monitored. This is just about the simplest entry that could be made for a community action
plan. It records when a wood was coppiced (5
th October, 2005) and what its outcome was in
the form of a linked photograph.
The underlying concept of the diary is that each page is actually a multipurpose document which
supports rich text formatting, backgrounds, diary templates, images, tables, hyperlinks to the
Internet or local files, as well as any records in the database. You can export your data to
RTF
or HTML files, a built-in Print option allows you to
EDIT reports before printing, and saving it
as RTF or HTML files. Moreover the diary supports voice recording, files attachment and
much more… A page icon in the left hand page is initially labelled with the date it was created
but this can be replaced by a name. The heading of the page in the right hand pane is always
the date it was created.
Adding pages
There are two ways to add pages.
The calendar mode, as the name implies, shows a calendar (e.g. Fig 1). In this mode any
number of diaries may be added. They appear in the left hand pane. A page is added by
simply highlighting a diary and clicking on a date in its calendar. The new page is automatically
linked to that date and a user can access it by simply clicking on that date in the calendar or on
its icon in the left hand pane.
The document mode displays a ‘file tree’. In this mode ‘file pages’ can be added to the tree
for each of its diaries but they do not show up on the calendar. From the file tree a desired file
page can be opened immediately without reference to the date it was produced. No calendar
is shown in the document mode but when a page is opened the date it was created appears at
the top in the right hand window. Pages added in the calendar mode also appear in the
appropriate diary in the document tree.
Either mode can be accessed from the ‘View’ menu. Since both modes are useful in their own
unique ways, it's smart to switch between them, depending on the situation.
A village community conservation system
The use of multiple diaries is illustrated in Fig 2, which is a screen shot of a mock- up of a
document mode for a village community conservation plan. All its elements are revealed as a
file tree. There are separate diaries for the action plan, and its projects for habitats and
species. The latest action plan was added to a diary page on 16
th January 2007 and is open in
the right hand window. In the diary for the action plan there are two other documents. These
are templates for setting out projects and monitoring their outcomes. The templates (Appendix
1 and 2) can be added to a page, modifying them if necessary, to schedule a project for
management or for monitoring.
Fig 2 Screen shot of a page of in the document mode of a village biodiversity action plan.
The habitats to be managed are hedgerows, road verges, village greens and trees. The diary
for the Mill Green habitat has been ‘opened’ to reveal three projects that were scheduled for
2006.
Additional operations
You can install the diary on a tiny little portable
USB jump or thumb drive and carry it so that
you can write wherever you happen to be.
There is no limit on the information that can be added or attached to each day’s page. If there
was a bird count, there could be a hot link from this page to an Excel spread sheet. If there was
an accident, the report on it could be attached to the day it happened. You can also get at
attached information from a list of all attachments. The diary can therefore be regarded the
community's multimedia archive of its plans, actions and outcomes, day-by-day, year on year,
for communication or audit.
Because of its short learning curve, and intuitive structure, and flexibility the managers can
customise their entries according to their preferred ways of working. It can cope with a simple
‘this is what I did’ approach, or a more complex scheduling/recording/reporting system which
follows the logic of a relational database. Thus, the diary is adaptable to the manager and will
quickly become the day-to-day starting point to reach the jobs to be done, the
objectives/factors and list of prescriptions and projects tied to them, and the outcomes of work
that has already been done.
This is the home page of CSoftLab where you can download a free demonstration copy. A
license can be purchased for about £15.
