Design and Implementation Experience of an Australian Prototype Catchment Information Exchange Program: Fid-Bau Portal

Design and Implementation Experience of an Australian Prototype Catchment Information Exchange Program

Hooper, Bruce P.

Information access and exchange for catchment management is problematic. There are problems about how people use information in decision-making, who makes the decisions, and how information should be organized, located, and accessed to help decision makers. There is uncertainty about how catchment management organizations access, use, exchange, and spread information to people in their catchment. This paper outlines a solution to this problem. It is the second of two papers and presents the results of a research project reported earlier in Water International. This paper discusses how a prototype Catchment Information Exchange Program (CIEP) was developed as a result of the needs articulated by stakeholders and the outcomes of the research undertaken in two Australian field sites. The CIEP includes a Catchment Information System (CIS) which includes relational databases located on the Internet and CD-ROM. The paper also discusses issues and the lessons learned in the process of prototype design, field testing, and implementation. Implementation issues included: lack of coordination mechanisms, lack of long term funding, lack of leadership to build regional information exchange protocols and processes, institutional lethargy, and the scepticism by government of farmers' best practices, loss of scientific ownership of project results by researchers, and unwillingness to handle co-managed, co-owned information management systems. However, in the catchments where the program was piloted, there was considerable enthusiasm for the CIEP. A critical issue is to get a long-term sustained funding mechanism in place to enable expansion of the program.