Done and Done!

Ken has begun the transition from full-time student to tax-paying citizen! On Thursday all of the students in his program had an open house at Fleming College in Lindsay. The open house provided them the opportunity to showcase their work on their co-op projects. This year's open house was the best attended open house in several years.

For Ken's project his team designed a notification system, to let industry and Aboriginal groups know when industry projects may effect Native land use areas. A company may submit information about a project to find out if it may potentially effect sensitive Aboriginal areas. If a conflict exists both parties are provided with information to begin a negotiation process before any large commitment of resources is made by the company. This also benefits the Aboriginal communities because they now better equipped to be proactive in managing their lands. The present area that employs this system is the Foothills west of Edmonton, but it may soon effect the entire Foothills region of Alberta. Ken's group's part of the process is facilitating data collection from industry partners (via a website designed by Ken) and the automated process of determining potential conflicts and the generation of reports for industry and Aboriginal participants. Doing this process manually would require too many resources on an ongoing basis for it to work in the long term. Because the process is sped up from more than half an hour to five minutes and simplified greatly for the user, the office will be able to handle up to 100 requests per day, with only one full-time employee running the program.

When I listened to Ken explain his project I was touched by his explanation of the potential benefits. Imagine if such a system was in place in many areas in Canada and beyond. Most native groups have no access to this level of technical ability, and by the time they are made aware of impending threats to their way of life, the stakes have already been raised by extensive investment in a plot of land. Until native peoples are involved in the planning stages of resource management, conflicts will continue to arise.















Kei, Ken, and Chia - KYM Group! The hats were from the "Foothills Research Institute", the group they did the work for.















Their posterboard display.















Ken giving an overview of their project - a non-technical one that I could understand!