I wrote all the way back in 2024 (it was a great break, so it feels like a long time ago!):
“2025 promises to be an interesting year - we’re wrapping up some more big projects, starting some new ones and there are lots of new avenues for us to explore, right alongside our clients. So stay tuned for more blogs and updates from us in the new year.”
So now we’re back, refreshed and recharged, let’s charge into this year and look at what we’re looking forward to this year - the year we turn 21!
Some of the things we’re most looking forward to include the continuation of our work with clients that we’ve worked with for quite a while, such as our work with the Queensland State Archives (QSA). This year sees us working again with our close colleagues at Hudson Molonglo on the open source Archival Management System and Digital Preservation Systems at QSA where we’ll be doing some updates of the systems to ensure that they remain current.
Similarly we will continue to work with the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) on the Biodiversity Data Repository (BDR) project. We are working this year on more self-sufficiency approaches for DCCEEW, where we are looking to assist them in in-housing the systems within the Department, and building their capacity to manage them. It will be a really proud moment (and fraught with the usual parental angst) to see our baby grow up and move out!
New projects will be arriving soon of course - and some have started already! We’re starting a new phase of work with the Western Australian Biodiversity Science Institute on the Shared Environmental Analytics Facility (SEAF) that will be really interesting. The computing infrastructure behind SEAF is really novel and helps WABSI to deliver a really robust, secure service to the different organisations that want to use it - and we’ll be part of that, starting to implement a range of environmental models within SEAF to solve some real world problems around environmental data and the Environmental Impact Assessment process.
There are a range of other projects that we’ll also reveal soon through our project portfolios (both our Collections and Environment ones) and through little announcements in social media when new ones go up. As one of the changes we won’t be announcing these in newsletters any more in 2025, as they were wound down in 2024 - simply moving with the times, as they say!
There’s some really interesting conferences also coming up in 2025 in our region - including the big ones we went to in 2024 like the Australian Society of Archivists conference (this year in Sydney, Australia), and the International Conference on Digital Preservation (this year in Wellington, NZ). A few might be a bit further away this year like Living Data 2025 (in Colombia) and Fantastic Futures (in London) - they might be more of a stretch to get to!
Along the way in 2025, we hope to improve even more - there’s a lot for us to be doing to make Gaia Resources work even better than it does now, and we keep learning and improving as fast as we can - that’s the fun of consulting!
We hope to see you in 2025 - if you have an idea for a project you want to discuss, just want to chat about something that is of interest to you or want to know more about what we do - feel free to start a conversation with us on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, drop us an email or pick up the phone and call us on +61 8 9227 7309.
See you in 2025!
Piers
P.S. Other things to look forward to in 2025 apparently include “a smart speaker with a floating head and implanted microchips -https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjdn10yk0k1o