Credit: Priyadarsanan

A central principle of this portal is to create structures to facilitate large scale participation of individuals and institutions. We will reach out to researchers, amateurs, naturalists, students, institutions and the public to facilitate and enable their participation. The success and sustainability of the portal will depend upon the extent and strength of large-scale participation.
 

The data and information aggregated on the portal will be freely and openly available on the Internet. With the provision of free and public access, the portal will support a variety of licensing and sharing regimes that can be used by participants to license and share their data. The data provider, individual or institution would have the facility to choose from the available licensing regimes. We suggest and recommend that all data be licensed on the most liberal Attribution (by) license under the Creative Commons. We realize that participants may like to choose a more restrictive sharing of data under the categories of the Creative Commons, and they will be free to do so. The Creative Commons license regimes are detailed in the following section. We also understand that certain basal data sourced and provided by public agencies could be under more restrictive use and distribution. While we will strive to get a liberal policy with such data sets, we will have to restrict the distribution of certain data sets. We believe, if we get it right, the participative model has tremendous capacity and capability to aggregate, almost real time, large-scale spatially distributed and spatially referenced information on the biodiversity of the Indian sub-continent.

Soliciting participation
Our focus in the next phase of portal development will be to do road shows to solicit participation. We will evolve and build the platform for facilitating participation on themes and topics on biodiversity. We will listen to, and engage with participants and contributors to evolve a fair, respectable and sustainable policy for managing this Portal. We will set up discussion forums, blogs lists to exchange ideas and evolve participation supportive mechanisms. We are also open to craft specific partnerships and MoUs with individuals and institutions on the basis of the principles of participation outlined here. This is a public portal, working for the public good, and belongs to the civil society. If you have any ideas, comments, or suggestions on participation please contact us.