Exploring strategic partnerships and leveraging the skills and experience of as wide an audience as possible is critical for the future success of a charity like Epping Forest. Indeed, ‘Connect to Proper’ is The Rt Hon the Lord Mayor of London’s theme this year.
The City of London’s 111 Livery Companies are membership organisations with hundreds of thousands of experts in their respective trades. Therefore, I have been keen to collaborate with them on a range of projects of mutual interest and benefit. I have written about the visits from the Worshipful Company of Cordwainers and the Worshipful Company of Educators previously.
This week, the Deputy Chairman of the Epping Forest and Commons Committee was delighted to welcome the Master and Company of the Information Technologists. A modern livery company, but one which is an important partner as we seek to leverage technology to inform and simplify conservation activities. One such example is how we use NoFence technology to manage our longhorn cattle.
We know that the websites for our open spaces across the City of London are very hard to navigate. For years, security controls and branding guidelines have required Epping Forest to remain on the City of London’s infrastructure rather than having better local autonomy. However, we have been working with the Digital Service Committee to start to plan for a different future. So a new website is something which the Master f the Information Technologists, Kerri Mansfield, has kindly agreed to help us with.
We also have a museum full of documents and photos which have not been fully digitalised. I feel passionately that so many of these special memories of Epping Forest’s history should be more accessible and organised in a useful way rather than being locked away to protect them, seen by so few.
I believe our mapping technology could benefit from digital transformation. Our team spends an enormous amount of time working with utilities companies to manage infrastructure protects supporting the needs of local communities, but every time a piece of work is conducted, surveys and checks have to take place and maps are updated. There can be simplification here.
We also have public walking trails, but how can we embed these in things like Apple or Google maps. How can we set alerting for areas of the Forest being rested or protected or having maintenance work carried out in real-time?
We then have the never-ending demand for signage. There’s a constant battle between interested local residents requesting more signage to protect specific areas – whether it’s Bluebells or Skylarks or Adders or Birds during mating season or path lines…then we have the conservationists who want a escape life and enjoy the natural environment without artificial signage. Perhaps technology can support a more flexible, less costly solution.
Technology is also being leveraged to support so much of our operating environment and we must use the power of AI and machine learning to be more effective and more efficient in the years to come.
My thanks to the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists for the continued interest and support and I look forward to updating on some of the other livery projects we are working on later this year.
