collaboration. We work together to preserve land, parks, trails, farms, ranches, forests, watersheds, and other open spaces. We have been around since 1990. This is our blog.
Do you care about parks, trails, farms, forests, ranches and other kinds of open space? Are you curious about how parks are preserved, what jobs are out there, and what's happening in the field? Would you like to learn more about Bay Area nonprofits, public agencies, and companies who work on land conservation?
Photo Annie Burke.
You're invited to attend the Open Space Conference on May 10 at a discounted rate of $40. That’s less than half off of the regularly priced ticket! Because of generous sponsorships from Canogle and Sempervirens Fund, we now have 10 spots available. More information about the conference, including logistics and speakers, can be found here.
Photo Rob Brodman.
Next Generation Scholarships are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. High school students must provide a letter from their teacher allowing them to attend.
Welcome to Wednesday! Here's a round up of news about land, parks, trails and other amazing things in the Bay Area since our last Happenings last Friday.
Produced by New America Media, part of East Bay Regional Park District's Get Active Contest.
Open space rift. While farmers fault preservation district's move away from agricultural roots, officials say land access essential for public support. (Press Democrat)
Diversity in the Outdoors, Part III. This is the third and final part in a three part series around diversity in the outdoors stemming from a panel discussion on diversity hosted by Sierra Magazine at the Outdoor Retailer Winter event. Part I and Part II are available here and here. (Huffington Post)
Every Wednesday we post a list of news - with some art, videos and fun thrown in - related to the members, partners, supporters, and friends of the Open Space Council. Scroll through all of these posts here. And let us know if we should include anything in next week's Happenings.
Photo by Lech Naumovich from the 2011 ride. Rolling golden hills is definitely so Bay Area.
Riders!
Join us for an epic ride up Mt Hamilton, Mt Tamalpais and Mt Diablo using Caltrain, Golden Gate Ferry, and BART to get between the base of the three peaks. It's 128 miles and 12,000+ in elevation gain. The ride starts Friday, June 15 at 5:00pm at the San Jose Caltrain Station. Riders camp out at Joseph Grant Campground and wake up at 4:00am to start riding at 4:30am. The ride concludes at the Pleasant Hill BART station at about 9:00pm.
Space is limited because of the complicated logistics and tight timelines.
Riding a bike for 128 miles isn't for everyone. But the parks and transit the riders visit and use ARE for everyone. Getting outside into nature IS for everyone. Join us to:
Explore and learn about the Bay Area parks and the transit that connects us all from volunteers
Snap pictures, take video, and share your experience on altride.org and contribute to the online journal of the day
Enjoy surprises along the way that we can't tell you about (it wouldn't be a surprise, now would it?)
Happy Friday! We usually post Happenings on Wednesdays but this was a different week. On Wednesday we opened up registration for the 13th annual Open Space Conference to be held on May 10. An amazing 50 people have already signed up to attend! That's 1/6 of the way to capacity. You comin'?
At last week's Gathering on Social Media we learned some really important lessons: the most important being that talking about poop on Facebook makes people talk. Slide courtesy of Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.
Ditch Your Car, Find Adventure with Transit and Trails. My goal: to find out whether ditching my car in order to stitch together various modes of public transit to get me from my home in SF to an awesome trail would be as annoying and as tedious as it sounded. (Outside Magazine blog)
Castle Rock State Park saved from the closure list. Under a deal set to be announced Wednesday, the popular park, which sits atop the ridgeline of the Santa Cruz Mountains on the Santa Clara-Santa Cruz county line, will receive a $250,000 donation -- enough to keep it open for another year -- from the Sempervirens Fund. (Mercury News)
Penny foolish on California's parks. Officials should rethink their plan to close up to 70 parks, which probably wouldn't save any money. (LA Times)
Public pitches in to keep state parks open. Like his father who led efforts to save the land 40 years ago, Alden Olmsted has helped rescue Jug Handle from the budget ax. (SF Chronicle)
Every Wednesday (and sometimes Friday) we post a list of news - with some art, videos and fun thrown in - related to the members, partners, supporters, and friends of the Open Space Council. Scroll through all of these posts here. And let us know if we should include anything in next week's Happenings.
Do you ride a bike? Go to parks? Take public transit? Then come back to this blog on Monday for something fun.
Join us and 300 leaders in land conservation on May 10, 2012 to get inspired, make connections, and cross the bridge and create possibilities.
Speakers will share their expertise about a wide range of subjects all related to land conservation. Exhibitors will be there with their innovative and useful products and services. The food will be local and organic. It will be Bike to Work Day and you will not be alone if you choose to don a helmet. And the photo booth will be back!
Calling all students! This year we are excited to provide Next Generation Scholarships for students ages 16-25. Because of generous sponsorships from Canogle and Sempervirens Fund, we now have 10 spots available for $40 student tickets. That’s less than half off of the regularly priced ticket! Next Generation Scholarships are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. High school students must provide a letter from their teacher allowing them to attend. Registration for scholarships happens over here.
Calling all companies, consultants, writers, artists, map makers, and other big fans of land conservation! Opportunities to exhibit in one of our two Exhibit Halls are now available. Do you have a product or service that would benefit those working in land conservation? Join us and get visibility with hundreds of leaders from around the Bay Area. More information about what's included can be found here.
Photo from the photo booth at the 2011 Open Space Conference by Rob Brodman.
Will you join us?
A lot of thanks goes out to sponsors:
Ecosystem Level:
Watershed Level:
Park Level:
With HUGE thanks for all of their support:
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This isn't what our blog usually looks like on Wednesdays. Our regularly scheduled Open Space Happenings post will be here on Friday, March 23. There's a lot of good stuff happening in land conservation and we can't wait until next Wednesday to share it with you.
The 13th annual Open Space Conference will be held May 10, 2012 and we're busy behind the scenes with all kinds of plans. Registration for individuals and exhibitors will open up this Wednesday, March 21. Stay tuned to this blog, our website, and your Inbox for more information and the green light!
Whew! What a Gathering! Over 100 people braved the harsh California weather to join us at the Brower Center for the Almost Spring Gathering. Some in the audience are well versed in the world of social media while others are trying to keep up with email. Organizations with representatives in the audience ranged from Sonoma Land Trust to Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, REI to Bay Nature. A few people traveled all the way from San Jose while others were soaked from riding their bikes in the rain across town. Thanks to all who attended, no matter where you came from or how you got there!
We are so grateful for all that attended, all of you that followed along online, all that tweeted during and afterwards, and especially to all of our panelists. What interesting tips, stories, and insights they provided! The panel included:
Lance Knobel from Berkeleyside talked about social media and journalism, and also moderated the panel
Veda Banerjee and Mike Hsu from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy talked about the whole communications package (and animal poop and how popular it is on Facebook)
We blogged live here and so if you scroll down and read bottom to top, you'll get a sense of what happened today.
Our next big event is the Open Space Conference on May 10. You can learn all about it, see our fabulous sponsors, and register yourself to come over here on our website. And our next Gathering will be in July. Stay tuned for all kinds of details about that.
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12:15pm: Lunch!
12:03pm: We're discussing the value of relationships, control, the lack of control, just doing something vs waiting for something flashy, and building a sense of community. Lunch is being set up in the back of the room and we're almost ready to break. I'll post pictures and more presentations to this space later this afternoon.
11:56am: Question from the audience: how do we turn the enthusiasm for the project into activism? Garrison: that's what we're dealing with at Audubon right now. We now have a lot of tools to turn people to and bring people in. And it's a challenge to know what we do with them, but we're working on it.
Question from the audience: were there any negatives? Kathryn: there were some naysayers, which we can't or couldn't control. And there were bugs in the app - we were moving fast and little things like that happened. Garrison: some of our members thought that we shouldn't be online, we should be outside. The goal of this was to open ourselves up to a younger audience.
Mike from GGNPC jumped in about how they were worried about negative feedback and interactions. They have found that there is a self-policing that happens in an online group. Even on Facebook, they have found that people will quickly react to a post that is offensive or out of line.
11:54am: Question from the audience: what is the estimated cost of the project? Kathryn: it was around $120,000. To create these birds and the right coding, we had to work with highly specialized creative people.
11:45am: Garrison: "Birding the Net completely changed our organization."
We're watching a looped video of the internet birds on the big screen behind the panelists, including a Blue Footed Booby which, as one audience member pointed out, is just a fun name to say.
11:41am: Kathryn: The project built a new community, humanized the internet, and drove offline activity. She's handing it over to Garrison Frost of the California Audubon society. "I am not a bird geek," said Garrison. But he was told that birding is "really f*in cool" when he started at Audubon. What he's brought to the organization is some different thinking about marketing and communications.
11:38am: Kathryn: "Birding the Net was a social experiment." It found an additional 10,000 fans on Facebook for Audubon - that's a 950% increase! Goodby Silverstein and Partners worked on this project on a pro bono basis and the project had a $1.6million overall value. Amazing!
Here's another video for you:
11:35am: Did you know that birding is the second most popular hobby after gardening? We are watching a short video about Birding the Net. You can see parts of it here:
11:30am: [By the way, I'm taking pictures of today's Gathering and will share them later. Promise.] UPDATE: Pictures are here!
11:25am: Question from the audience: how do you keep people involved? Lisa: we found that by giving people quick results has made a big difference. Lance added that if you've become a verb - as in "I just iNat-ed" then you've been successful. (laughter)
Question from the audience: how do we involve youth with iNaturalist and connect them to the outdoors? Lisa: she went to a workshop at the Cal Academy of Sciences and heard that for something to be real for middle and high school students, it needs a virtual component. Going outside in real nature is so important, but to also have some kind of way of connecting that is online is so important.
11:16am: Here is Lisa's presentation. Play along with us:
11:14am: We're changing gears a bit to talk about science. Lance has introduced Lisa Micheli from Pepperwood Preserve. She's going to talk about the work that she's doing with iNaturalist founder Scott Loarie.
11:12am: There's lots of discussion about control of messages, images, etc. What if other people start Facebook pages about your park or organization? How do we get senior staff on board? How do we control our messages? What does a lack of control mean, and what are the opportunities in that?
11:07am: Question from the audience about how they measure their impact. Mike recommended Klout, which helps you measure your social media reach.
10:56am:GGNPC has an internal working group for social media. Veda highly recommends putting together a team.
Lance asked Veda and Mike about how they keep the tone and messages consistent. Mike said that Yammer has been really helpful.
An audience member asked about how they got field staff involved. Mike and Veda said that they asked for photos from the field staff and what they would like to share with their friends. They then post those pictures to their social media outlets.
10:52am: Number 4: Learn and adapt. Veda: "We posted pictures of beautiful vistas and no one liked it. Then we posted pictures of poop and we got so many new fans and likes!"
10:48am: Number 3: Encourage creativity. Our guidelines say that social media should not and cannot be controled. Micro-managing social media is the death of social media.
10:46am: Guideline Number 2: Divide and conquer. At GGNPC we have divided it up by channels. Someone is in charge of Facebook, another of Twitter.
[By the way, I plan to upload Mike and Veda's presentation later this morning. So stay tuned for that.] UPDATE: Here is Mike and Veda's presentation for your viewing pleasure:
10:44am: Mike: "Sometimes social media is dumped on a temporary worker, a summer intern or someone else who isn't fully connected to the organization. That's not what we recommend." They have a few guidelines:
The first is to set ground rules. What are the dos and don'ts? Their ground rules are to be honest, respectful, thoughtful, and ethical. Mike recommends Beth Kanter's blog for more information. She is definitely a social media guru!
10:42am: Lance introduces Veda Banerjee and Mike Hsu from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Veda and Mike are going to talk about the whole communications package. GGNPC is the nonprofit partner of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and a member of the Open Space Council.
10:40am: Lance: "We want to do this morning is to hear from the great people here to talk about the ways they've used social media. Hopefully we'll get ideas and ones that you can actually implement."
10:36am: Lance is talking about how they collect stories for Berkeleyside, including Twitter. He says that it's not a one-way thing anymore and that news and stories are a two-way conversation now. "The conversation is the most critical thing that we do. We need to embrace our community."
10:31am: Lance Knobel, a co-founder of Berkeleyside, is setting up the panel with this video from the Guarian:
10:30am: I'm sorry for the delay! I introduced the session today and couldn't figure out how to type and present at the same time. There's something tricky about being present and in front of the room, AND typing about being present and in front of the room. Now that I'm in the back of the room and away from the mic, I can tell you that I shared with the 100+ audience that our conference is coming up on May 10, the Alt. ride which will be on June 16, and how I'll be blogging today. And then I introduced Lance Knobel, a co-founder of Berkeleyside.
10:00am: Good morning! Today is March 15th and we're holding our second Gathering of the year: the Almost Spring Gathering. This is Annie Burke and I'm the Director of Development and Engagement with the Open Space Council. I'll be blogging this morning with quotes, photos, and links.
Today we're talking about social media. Land conservation and environmental organizations are using the internet to engage with people, build movements, tell their stories, and achieve their mission. How can we all use these tools in our work to preserve land and connect people to it? What are the strategies we should all have in mind? What is possible?
Our panel will include:
Lance Knobel from Berkeleyside will talk about social media and journalism, and will also moderate the panel
Rain! It's raining! Can you hear the photosynthesis happening? Can you hear the streams and creeks roaring? Plants are growing, robins are finding worms, newts are wet, and hills are turning green right as we speak. And here's what's happening in open space news this week...
We're talking about social media tomorrow. Will you join us in person, here on the blog or on Twitter?
East Oakland Park May Get a Third Act. Residents are working to transform the dead park, a symbol of the neighborhood’s struggles with drug violence, into an inviting new entrance to their community. (The Bay Citizen)
Visitors Flocking to National Parks in Bay Area. Visitors to Bay Area national parks including the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Muir Woods National Monument and Fort Point National Historic Site are up this year, according to National Park Service officials. (The Bay Citizen)
Smart Growth in the Burbs. Concord's eco-friendly, socially conscious plan for its shuttered military base may be a model for future development in the Bay Area. (East Bay Express)
Army of volunteers maintains Bay Area's backyard. The volunteers Klein leads are the foot soldiers in an effort to involve private citizens in hundreds of projects in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, an 80,000-acre national park that extends from Tomales Bay to the coastal hills of San Mateo County. (SF Chronicle)
Lynch Canyon opens Saturday. Solano Land Trust and Solano County Parks announced recently that Lynch Canyon will open to the public again on Saturday and a couple of special events have already been planned for this spring. (The Reporter)
Sebastopol-Petaluma trail proposed. A historic rail line that once took produce to market and linked Sebastopol and Petaluma is being proposed for a hiking, biking and equestrian trail. (Press Democrat)
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Every Wednesday we post a list of news - with some art, videos and fun thrown in - related to the members, partners, supporters, and friends of the Open Space Council. Scroll through all of these posts here. And let us know if we should include anything in next week's Happenings.
Tomorrow is our Almost Spring Gathering and we'll be blogging live. So come back here and refresh often to see what's happening at the Gathering. We'll also be tweeting with #OSCsocialmedia
Are you coming? Directions and more information can be found here.
On this coming Thursday, the 15th of March, we are going to hold our Almost Spring Gathering at the Brower Center in Berkeley and we're going to talk about social media. But what does that mean exactly for land conservation? How do environmentally-focused organizations fit into the social media universe? Here's something to get you thinking and to set a little context:
The Almost Spring Gathering is Almost Sold Out. There are 10 more spots! Learn about our panelists who will share a variety of perspectives on social media on our website and register before we're at capacity!
Welcome to March! Here is your weekly round up of news about land, trails, and people in the Bay Area. But first we start with something on the national scale:
Reading this by email? Click here to see a video of President Obama on March 2 talking about conservation. You can read the transcript here.
Why the Environmental Movement Is Not Winning. A searing new report says the environmental movement is not winning and lays the blame squarely on the failed policies of environmental funders. (Huffington Post)
Diversity in the Outdoors, Part 1. This is the first part in a three part series around diversity in the outdoors stemming from a panel discussion on diversity hosted by Sierra Magazineat the Outdoor Retailer Winter event. (Huffington Post)
State Parks: On the Rock. A series on KQED about the California State Parks Closure. Check out the map! (KQED)
Sempervirens Fund protects two South Coast properties. Camp Butano Creek, a Girl Scouts property near Pescadero, will be permanently protected from development under an agreement announced this week by the Sempervirens Fund. (Mercury News)
More bond money pitched for SF parks and playgrounds. Five years after asking voters to approve a $185 million bond for parks, The City once again plans to court voters with a planned November bond measure to fix up parks, playgrounds, restrooms, athletic fields and the waterfront. (SF Examiner)
Look at Nature, Get Happy. What do hospitals and Costa Rica have in common? Science says: they both benefit from beautiful natural landscapes. (KQED Quest)
Bay Area Ridge Trail faces uncertain future. The vision to create a 550-mile trail around the San Francisco Bay is threatened by state park closures scheduled for this summer, trail advocates say. (Bay Nature)
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Every Wednesday we post a list of news - with some art, videos and fun thrown in - related to the members, partners, supporters, and friends of the Open Space Council. Scroll through all of these posts here. And let us know if we should include anything in next week's Happenings.
Next week is our Almost Spring Gathering. Are you coming? Almost 80 people have signed up and we're capped at 100. It'll be on March 15 from 10am-1pm at the Brower Center in Berkeley. We have a dynamic panel to talk about social media including innovative ways of using Facebook, the whole communications package, citizen science and more. You can find more information about it over here.
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