Glorious bustards

He began his career with Procter & Gamble (P&G); built a 300-strong analytics firm—Marketics Technologies India—in Bangalore; and exited it successfully in four years, when WNS Global acquired it for $63 million (then Rs 280 crore). He sits on the board of non-profit Rang De, and a green LED lighting company, Innovlite. But 41-year-old Ramakrishnan Sreenivasan, or Ramki, an entrepreneur at heart, hardly has the airs. He says Marketics was only a break he took from a passion he has nurtured since his teens—wildlife.

Anyone who knows Ramki will say he has the penchant for sensing possibilities around technologies and managing workflow. In 2012, he applied these as well as his P&G lessons in consumer marketing and brands, to indulge his passion. With Shekar Dattatri, wildlife photographer and filmmaker, he co-founded Conservation India (CI)—a social network of sorts for the wildlife conservation community. The cohort includes scientists, activists, NGOs, and general enthusiasts. Ramki manages the backend: user-generated content, expert inputs, and overall participation. Dattatri leads the activism.

CI was launched on a bootstrapped budget—just a few lakhs of rupees. The founding principles were derived from Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams’s bestselling book, Wikinomics, published in 2006. “The art and science of wikinomics is based on four powerful new ideas—openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally ... tap the torrent of human knowledge and translate it into new and useful applications,” wrote Tapscott and Williams. Ramki applied these tenets to institutionalise and codify best practices, open up to users with limited knowledge of conservation, create a process to manage new information, and build a body of case studies.

In two years, CI has built a registered user base of 10,000 people, and 360,000 unique visitors a month (see graphic). In contrast, in the same period, Facebook raised over $40 million to grow a following of 12 million users; Twitter used $20 million to scale its following to 25 million; and Quora, a network where questions are posted, answered, edited, and organised by a community of users, scaled to 500,000 users raising $11 million.

RAMKI CALLS CI USERS the ‘wise crowd’. “While a crowd is critical for a social network, the kind of content we put out needs to be authoritative, peer reviewed, and accurate. There has to be expertise, and the quality to ensure expertise.” He adds that it needs technical skill, understanding the law, and the right people, which is why he ushered in researchers and NGOs on CI. Users have already started escalating wildlife conflict issues (roadkill, poaching, and tree cutting) on the website, backed by photos or tip-offs and leads from the ground. It gets a monthly AdWords advertising grant of $10,000 from Google for Nonprofits.

CI has codified its strategy: Identify the right issue, take it to as many people as possible, get them to act in a particular manner, and address specific stakeholders to take specific actions. It has actively campaigned with the right authorities—politicians, the forest department, or the environment ministry. For instance, CI drew attention to the Great Indian Bustard in Rajasthan, a bird on the brink of extinction. With the help of national and local media, it got the state government to act—the project petition drew 1,020 responses. Within a week, then chief minister Ashok Gehlot visited the affected areas and declared ‘Project Bustard’. Last year, the state, which wasn’t aware of the rare bird or how to protect it, announced support to the tune of Rs 12 crore. Net impact: Poaching has dropped to zero, thanks to strict enforcement of laws.

TO DRIVE AN INTENSE mass collaboration of scale, Ramki and Dattatri had to first evangelise the cause of conservation to unite volunteers. As a wildlife filmmaker, Dattatri has been involved in conservation advocacy. “He is the conservation insider, I am an outsider,” says Ramki. He adds that he understands the web well—using social media, creating a workflow model, virtual working, and so on. “Shekar understands the vowels of conservation.”

CI discovered the value of mass collaboration when it partnered with ecologist Vidya Athreya. A research associate with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Bangalore, Athreya was studying how carnivores such as wolves, jackals, and leopards survive and thrive outside protected places. CI took this up as an outreach programme. Sachin Rai, a Mumbai-based user experience expert, helped design an independent website (www.carnivores.in). Bangalore-based online marketing firm Uberics brought its knowledge of databases, online maps, reporting, and analytics to build the website within days. All gratis.

Between January and March last year, hundreds of sightings were reported by tourists, photographers, and researchers, from every corner of the country. Uberics also managed the social media integration and helped take the programme viral. Apart from CI’s member base, various other forums collaborated to drive traffic. Ultimately, over a thousand data points were collected—something that would have taken a lot of time and effort for Athreya to collate through the usual channels available to a wildlife researcher. Uberics also enabled users to upload a picture through a smartphone app, and inscribe the name of the nearest town and village, if not the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude). “Without technology, there was no way to do such extensive, nationwide research in four months,” says Vikram Hiresavi, founder of Uberics.

However, Ramki realises that the market for volunteers is not so reliable. This has to do with ignorance about the conservation cause. “There are big skill deficiencies in the conservation sector,” he says. CI is always scouting for a variety of skills—marketing and branding to start with—which help enlist masses. It is also on the lookout for legal help because conservation action involves engaging courts at various levels. This includes advice in filing Right to Information Act queries, petitions, and PILs that are critical to conservation. There is also demand for skills such as editing research material, teaching, and medical, banking, and organisational abilities for, say, NGOs, which need advice on strategic planning and HR.

CI STARTED INVOLVING PROFESSIONALS in its activities early on. And it is now opening up to corporates with interest in wildlife, under a platform called Professionals for Conservation. Ramki believes that there are at least 100,000 professionals in India who can take conservation mainstream. “We have an intelligent way of tapping into their skills in line with what CI needs, and put that on an assembly line,” he says. (This is the Marketics-style workflow.)

It also addresses the key question: How does CI sustain itself? Though CI is primarily about philanthropy, the initial expenses have been borne by Ramki and Dattatri. To fund specific conservation initiatives, CI can apply for conservation grants. It is open to CSR donations from companies, limited to specific issues that it addresses. Such a route has to be agreeable to the CI community, which will then decide if the interested company is socially responsible.

With Professionals for Conservation, Ramki says his job is to now create a framework and pathways for CI to propagate itself. “Users benefit from the site, the site benefits from the contributors, and we all become mass collaborators. It will take a life of its own.”

The effort to build a collective of professionals is already bearing fruit. For instance, cartoonist and National Institute of Design topper Ananth Shankar has created CI’s logo—a tiger—for free. Also, when Ramki needed to invest in servers, web services, mapping, mobile, geographic information systems, and social technologies, Uberics’s Hiresavi, a wildlife enthusiast himself, hosted the CI website and shared infrastructure.

Similarly, when CI needed smart people to publish content on the website, and manage offline campaign launches, Ramki took the help of volunteer proofreaders and editors. For content syndication, CI uses more than 100 web crawlers to give it feeds. Urvashi Bachani, a financial services professional, has helped convert scientific articles into text that can be understood by general readers. Yet another volunteer partner has given free call centre support. “Professionals can participate in conservation, rather than just hitting the ground to contribute, which is not sustainable,” says Hiresavi.

Praneet Goteti, business operations manager at Intel India in Bangalore, has a supply chain management background with experience in sourcing and procurement. Goteti has been involved in conservation since 2006, volunteering time for scientific data collection in national parks of Karnataka. His negotiation skills come handy for CI. He has been instrumental in linking CI with Intel’s ‘Giving back to the community’ agenda. “Whether it’s technology or project management in conservation, the idea is to bring a sense of rigour and professionalism,” says Goteti. Professionals take up a task and deliver it to a certain standard, setting aside the emotion even if it is a difficult environment. “That is what separates a professional—almost like how an army is different from a militia.”

Diya Banerjee has been working with Oracle in Hyderabad as product strategist (health care and health sciences group) since 2008. Though she has never met Ramki in person, she connects with CI via social networks or on the phone before acting on local issues. In 2009, she brought conservation in the ambit of Oracle India’s CSR programme. This included mentoring 11 employees to participate in medical camps at the Kawal Wildlife Sanctuary in Adilabad district in what was then Andhra Pradesh, now Telangana. Oracle took up the logistics costs, and covered three camps and workshops on conflict management in Kolhara village under the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Project.

More recently, when CI got a tip-off from a contributor on poaching at Himmat Sagar, outside Hyderabad, Banerjee followed up by alerting the local forest officer; she was familiar with the locals from her prior conservation experiences. The official cordoned off the area, and Banerjee helped draw attention to CI. She’s now a regular contributor to CI’s initiative to build an NGO directory, where users will be able to see what NGOs in their vicinity are doing.

K. Anand, who works as a material scientist at GE Power & Water, is into reforestation work for JungleScapes Trust in Bangalore. Since 2009, he’s been restoring tree cover in Lokkere, a village without electricity, on the way to Bandipur National Park, Karnataka. “Many villages are in the middle of sensitive animal migratory corridors,” says Anand. “The communities are economically poor as agriculture is unviable (due to crop raids by animals and water scarcity) and employment opportunities are scarce.”

JungleScapes sought to replace the local community’s habit of cutting firewood by providing job opportunities like planting saplings. GE backed JungleScapes, and Anand was able to draw General Motors too to the project. Soon, ING Vysya Bank got involved in the same region, providing Eco-Chulhas, an energy-efficient biofuel stove. Exposure to this kind of corporate-sponsored development—the thinking, documentation and planning, and regular visits to the site—was
a learning for Anand. That is the kind of corporate conservation interface CI hopes to develop, with help from the likes of Anand. “It’s very hard to find one location where you can get a complete flavour of what is going on in India from a conservation standpoint. At CI there are articles for amateurs, as well as hardcore conservation success stories,” says Anand.

CI HAS EVOLVED MUCH like TeamBHP, a discussion group for motoring and car enthusiasts, developed and maintained by the user community. That is the future in the Internet age—a culture of wikinomics. “If Google Earth did not give its images free, it wouldn’t have scaled up as much as it has,” says Ramki. He also points to Netflix, which shares consumer data and taps users to build the best model for its products.

Mass collaboration has had other successes. In April 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico went out of control, BP did a public callout for solutions. The environment team at The Guardian called for solutions too, creating a Google doc for readers to post their suggestions on how to cap the oil spill. Ideas came from professional divers, marine engineers, physicists, biochemists, mechanical engineers, petrochemical and mining workers, and pipe work experts. BP may not have implemented these solutions, but the fact is that, “It was an incredibly rich and deep piece of work, made possible because of the people formerly known as the ‘audience’,” recalled Katharine Viner, deputy editor of The Guardian, at a lecture in Melbourne last October.

The big idea is to create a space for special interests online, and then work it to further a cause. That’s what CI has done by building a systematic and managed destination for conservation in the country. It could only be possible because of the Internet. Back in 2011, Ramki and Dattatri agreed that activism was not scalable, but knowledge-based action was. That’s what spawned CI. “It is now a platform for collaboration, a brand. We are neutral, and don’t represent one organisation or another,” says Ramki. “These dynamics make it scalable. We are not going to stop where the web stops, but the web has become our point of connect.”