Fellow Biodiversity Professional,
You don’t want any unwanted emails cluttering your inbox! So I hope you’ll forgive this rare message from me as founder of the Biodiversity Professionals group on Linkedin. It’s the first I’ve sent since I started the group less than a year ago.
I’m writing to report an important group milestone. Yesterday the group added its 1000th member! I am excited and humbled by your interest and dedication. I hope you will take a few minutes from your busy schedule to contribute your expertise and enthusiasm to the group’s lively discussions, report your own news or post job opportunities as they arise.
In the meantime, I’d very much appreciate if you’d consider for a moment my vision for this group. I have registered the domain name biodiversityprofessionals.org (and .com) and I hope you can offer some thoughts and ideas about how we might use this resource. Linkedin is great, but I wonder if we will outgrow it, and if our own space online might be a worthwhile endeavor. I’m not sure what would work best. Perhaps a forum or community blog might work. In any case your opinion would be most welcome.
Another thought that occurred to me was that we could create an online Global Institute of Biodiversity. I know that this is an ambitious endeavor, but it strikes me that bricks and mortar institutions, while very useful, have their limitations. A Global Institute of Biodiversity would be an advocacy and support organization for biodiversity professionals around the world, perhaps serving as a licensing organization, clearing house for granting agencies and perhaps an online journal. Of course, other organizations serve these purposes in one way or another, but perhaps the time has come to gather these disparate functions under one (virtual) roof. I surveyed all the significant biodiversity related organizations (published in a recent blog post) and to my mind, they’re not meeting the needs of our global community. This is just the embryo of an idea, so I’d welcome any feedback, whether you consider it worth pursuing or not.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and thank you again for dedicating your life to the most worthy cause of today — studying and working for the beauty and wonder of the life on this Earth that we call biodiversity.
Sincerely,
Roger Harris
Founder, Biodiversity Professionals Linkedin Group
Link to original post: http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=3667510&type=member&item=77726137
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