In terms of community engagement, the fellows took a user-centred design approach reaching out to citizen scientists, Parks Victoria rangers and other contributors to find their pain points and inviting them to contribute to the design process. A historical lack of openness around IT projects had established a lack of trust and engagement between DELWP and the biodiversity community. The fellows focused on building trust and connection with users by holding testing sessions, interviewing users and incorporating their feedback into an iterative design.

The fellows also introduced new technology platforms to the team at DELWP. Using tools like Slack and Trello, the fellows were able to demonstrate the value of cloud-based platforms, and highlight best practices for using them to achieve transparency, collaboration and clarity. The DELWP uses Trello as an interactive way for sharing ideas across the team and keeping on everyone on track with what we’re doing.

The fellows built a mobile web application that has reduced the average time taken to record biodiversity data from 4 minutes and 12 seconds, to just under 2 minutes - making the process 225% faster than before. The mobile nature of the tool means citizen scientists are able to participate in data collection efforts from almost anywhere in Victoria. The fellowship has also been extended to continue work on a feature that allow users to more easily access recorded data from the area they are visiting.

The fellows brought their skills and understanding of leading web development processes from the private sector. Working alongside the DELWP staff, who brought insights and knowledge of the department, and citizen scientists who gave insights and feedback into ways to contribute to the database, the team built a solution that met the needs of the users, engaged the community and streamlined the process for biodiversity data collection.

Parks Victoria and citizen scientists were also key actors in the program, alongside Code for Australia Fellows and the DELWP team

The project allowed DELWP to experience a completely new way of breaking down a problem, and experimenting to find a solution. One employee found that it “opened up our eyes on better ways of dealing with innovation and technology, whereas our old approach... gets quite heavy, this process is light.”

The team implemented an iterative approach, which rapidly gathered feedback and used it to shape their next steps of the design process. This required DELWP to work in the open and engage users in the design approach, necessitating a radical shift in thinking about failure and how it is measured. We had to shift from seeing failure as a catastrophe to seeing it as an opportunity to learn or explore a new direction.

The project has brought renewed vigour and enthusiasm to biodiversity. From the stakeholder’s end, the contributing scientists are excited about the application we’re delivering, which has injected more warmth and more engagement around the sharing of wildlife data.

To enable innovation projects, government needs to have a welcoming space in which people can start interacting and playing with technology rather than it being all the red tape and procedures, where you can go six months without a project being finished.

Interacting with the biodiversity community in a way that was honest was a vulnerable experience for DELWP. Building connections with users and seeing the fellows use feedback, both good and bad, helped to emphasise the value of engagement.

We are working with records from the 1970s, so there’s thousands of records. Redefining the expectations of those from a non-technical background of the power required to process that data was overcome with time and a lot of discussion.

We've found these conditions create a good working environment for fellowships:

* Endorsement from Senior staff

* An appetite for doing something different

* A project owner within the government agency - one who is passionate about learning something new, prepared to license code under open source and has the authority to make decisions on the project.

* If data may be required, the data should be available immediately or obtainable within 6 weeks.

* The hosting team should be able to provide staff time to support the team, workspaces for the fellows and tools (systems logins / profiles, building access).

* The hosting team are willing to follow an Agile/Lean approach, focusing on delivering working software regularly, and fast feedback loops between team members and between building software and the users using it

* The hosting team has a plan for long-term support, including an internal tech team with the capacity to run another modern web service.

The solution was created for the Victorian environment department (DELWP), but because it is open source, it has the ability to be replicated across other states in Australia and around the world.

Empathy with citizens will be the hardest part of your work because our fears can get in the way of our ability to be confronted with another reality. You will learn from your users and will have to educate your stakeholders, particularly with concepts they’re not familiar with. Make sure you have a backup plan because, as Murphy’s Law states, it helps your preparedness to assume that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

It is also important to not forget what brought your team together. Public Service involves actors who are dreamers who want to do things for the common good.