We reached out to Glider after seeing their work with the Lowy Institute, which demonstrated to us that they clearly had the skills and the vision we needed to develop our Reef Life Explorer tool. From our first meeting with Glider to discuss options, we were immediately excited to work with them – not only because of the skills Glider could bring to our project, but also their passion, ideas and commitment to the cause. Unlike the local developers we originally approached to scope the work, Glider brought so much more to the table than just the code, working with us to bring our data to life in a visually stunning, impactful way. From the get-go, they were more like partners on the project than simply contractors for some development work.
The Reef Life Explorer (RLE) we developed with Glider is already driving changes in the attitudes and activities of government agencies here in Australia, with national and state departments inviting us to give presentations and demos, and Marine Protected Area management agencies requesting more reef monitoring to allow their jurisdictions to be represented. But the RLE is also built to be totally scalable, and it will continue to grow in importance and impact globally, feeding on the data streams from our expanding networks of committed divers around the world.
We are very glad to have found Glider. It is difficult to effectively communicate how high our opinion of them is, but we could only start by saying we are inspired and very much admire what they do and appreciate their contribution to our organisation and growing our positive impact on marine biodiversity knowledge, management and conservation.