TO IMR Pilot Project Blog

Goondoi and ESS came together on the 22nd an 23rd of February to undertake Goondoi’s first Evaluation Workshop. The workshop was held on-country at Radiant Life College in Innisfail, with the aim of reviewing the monitoring data captured during the last 18 months in order to make ...

Related to our role in the SP-SC Pilot Project, ESS has been contracted by the GBRF to investigate how locally produced data, collected and managed by Indigenous groups involved in the TO IMR might be integrated into the regional Data Management System, being developed through RI ...

This workshop was held online on the 5th and 6th of February, after several false starts with trying to arrange an in-person session (Covid and cyclones being the main culprits...). The overall aim of the two days was to use the data that was collected over the last 12 months to ...

GBRF have agreed to recruit two additional Traditional owner groups to take part in the strong people strong country pilot project. These groups are Jabalbina Yalanji Aboriginal Corporation and Yuku Baja Muliku Lands Trust. This is because the smaller than expected number of TO g ...

Two of the three Pilot groups have struggled to appoint and/or retain their community research assistant (CRA), with only one of the three groups’ CRAs potentially completing the role as initially envisioned. This has resulted in significant disruption to the project and might limit its outcomes. We offer two factors that might have contributed to this and might be learned from (as is the purpose of this Pilot).

For a few months now, we have been exploring ways of visualising the alignment between local monitoring and evaluation programs with the strong people strong country framework. Because This is a key outcome of the project, selecting and developing an appropriate tool has been a priority.

This post explores what we put forward to be pragmatic ways that help to overcome the unintentional disconnect between non-indigenous researchers and their projects and traditional owners’ interests. We keep this topic specific to our experience in this Pilot Project, but recogni ...

Related to our previous post, this offers reflections on interactions with non-Indigenous researchers and assisting Pilot groups to request data that has been collected about their country. Last post explored an increasing awareness of the value of data among groups and increasing confidence to request and then use this data from external researchers. But exactly how this is data is requested is critical to what is returned and the the outcomes it can produce.

Groups are now much more aware of the value of the data that they collect, store, or manage within their database. Whereas data and datasets were commonly confusing and meaningless at the start of the project, groups now recognise the value of their information and what it can tell them.

The Wuthathi CRA (Yodie) has requested to be trained to use some of the more sophisticated functionality of their customised information management system (IMS). Specifically, Yodie would like to understand how to build forms (the basic data-entry components of the database), so that Wuthathi can record new types of information on-the-go, as they become needed.

ESS has responded to requests from the groups and GBRF to produce an online, accessible and secure version of the Strong People - Strong Country Survey. It is now available through each groups mobile data collection tools and through their information management systems.