The Origins of Conserve.org

Hello.

This is where we start.

A bit about me. My name is Haley Mellin and I have been working in the arts for years. During that time I have been always drawn to helping the environment.

I started getting involved with people that were in the conservation field. I noticed it was hard for people to get started in making a difference in land conservation. You had to really have a lot of money to get involved.

I thought that there had to be something we could do to make conservation, which enables the protection of species, our watersheds, and our climate, to be a household term.

What about having a site where anyone could conserve and acre or give an acre to a friend?

In talking to people, it turns out a lot of people had come up with the idea but it just hadn’t happened.

So, I asked my brother if he would make it with me.

He said no.

So, I said “Are you not interested in saving the environment.. or not interested in helping your only sister?”

And then 10 months later, we kept talking and decided to create the site.

We started with this sticky note. Then made a storyboard.

Joe came back east for a one week visit, it was our first week staying together since we were in high school. We made a story board and he taught me about wire frames.

The idea with the site was to make it really easy for people to conserve land, and what is more, give them a bit of an experience of being on the land themselves.

We asked ourselves the question, how can we help people experience the land they are conserving from across the world. From that we came up with what are are now building.

It would be a website where people could come and see land that could be conserved. They could then visit each acre of land and see an immersive 360 degree image taken on that very acre of land.

This would mean that we would not only need a website but have to figure out the logistics of getting people with cameras to visit each acre of the land we are conservince and somehow put that all together in one great experience for our users.

So we started, with the wireframes and then began to build the site.

In December 2017, we got the basics of a site going with a menu structure and then started building from there.

There were a lot of decisions to be made: Do we want it to be really pretty? Do we want it to be functional?

We decided to get started with a site that was very functional and clean.

Next we got into the process of actually getting the photos taken and making a website that could take them in and show them to users on a grid. To do that we had to first start with making our first forest into a grid of acres.

We select a forest in Guatemala as our first site. We could partner with Global Wildlife Conservation as our partner and Fundaeco who I had been inspired by and building a relationship with.

We started by collaborating with them on creating the grid and also doing test runs for how to go into a forest and take photos in a way where we could later put them into our website and know that the picture was taken from a specific acre.

This is a simple thing in most cities in the world. But in the cloud forest in Guatemala, there is no cell reception. Also, 360 cameras at this time are not normally equipped with GPS.

After quite a few back and forths with the great Fundaeco staff in Guatemala and some more months working on our website, we were set and ready to go.

Next ups is our great friends at Fundaeco are now in the process of taking pictures on each of the 111 acres for our first location.

Once that is done we will be launching our site!

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