From field activities to boundary surveys, each with its own view.
What a team enters appears in the dashboard minutes later, without anyone exporting anything.
Coverage of the park is collected automatically, sorted by theme and tone.
From the owner to read-only viewers, each sees what their role allows.
The use
A national park the size of Virunga generates information in many places at once: a field team records an awareness activity, another receives a delegation, the communications team produces a video, a journalist publishes an article, the land office updates a title, a survey team records a boundary marker.
The platform brings all of it into one application. Each team keeps entering information the way it already does, and the platform turns those entries into a dashboard, a searchable history, briefs written for non-specialists, and reports ready to share with partners.
Teams keep working the way they already do. The platform does the gathering, the counting and the first draft.
The modules
Each module has its own view, its own charts and its own filters by period, and all of them can be combined in a report.
What each module follows. The descriptions are of the modules, not of their content.
Keeping it current
A dashboard that depends on someone remembering to update it is out of date within a week. This one updates itself: what the teams enter appears a few minutes later, press coverage is collected several times a day, and the briefs are prepared in advance so they open instantly.
The source spreadsheets were not designed for a database: some have their real column names on the second line, section titles in the middle of the data, or the same survey spread over several tabs. The platform reads them as they are, so nobody had to change the way they work for the dashboard to exist.
What goes in, and what comes out.
The press
The platform watches 54 news sites and search results, collects the articles that mention the park, finds their real publication date, removes duplicates, and classifies each one by theme and by tone.
The press review can be read over any period, a week, several months, or custom dates, and summarised as a short note: what was said about the park, where, and in what tone.
What's Up?
Most people in the organisation will never open a dashboard. For them, the platform writes What's Up?: a short article about the period, in plain language, that cites the concrete facts, the articles published, the delegations received, the content produced, rather than tables of figures.
The brief is written with the help of AI, under one strict rule: the AI can improve the style, never the facts. No number or quotation can be added, and none can be lost. A version that breaks the rule is discarded, and the brief is shown in its plain form instead. Every article mentioned links to its source, and every section links to the dashboard view that holds the raw data.
Access is open to every role, including read-only viewers, because a brief that only managers can read defeats its purpose.
The assistant
Ora, the platform's assistant, answers questions in plain French: how many activities in a sector this quarter, what the press said last month, how many visitors came in a given period. It answers from the platform's own data, module by module, and can adapt its tone, more formal for a report, lighter for a quick question.
It is there for the people who know what they want to know but not where to click.
The reports
A report is built by choosing the modules and the period it should cover. The platform assembles the figures, the charts and a written analysis in an institutional style, and delivers it as a PDF to circulate or a Word document to edit.
As in the brief, the figures come from the data, never from the writing, so a report cannot say something the dashboard does not show.
The limits
It does not replace the teams' own records. It reads what they enter; if an activity is not entered, it does not exist for the dashboard. The quality of the platform is the quality of what the teams record.
Press monitoring finds what is published online and indexed. Radio, print-only and word-of-mouth coverage stay out of reach, and a quiet week in the press review does not mean nobody talked about the park.
To close
The most important design decision was not technical. It was to leave the teams' way of working untouched, and to make the platform adapt to their spreadsheets rather than asking them to adopt a new tool.
What I take from it is that adoption is a design constraint, not an afterthought: a platform nobody has to learn is a platform that stays in use.
Method
Confidentiality. No record from the platform appears on this page: no land title, amount, coordinate, name or screenshot. The diagrams describe what the platform does, not its data.
Detail. The platform is an internal tool of the park. A demonstration can be arranged on request, within what the park allows.