Posted on Mar 23, 2016Living Lake Plans started out of my personal necessity – I was the President of Big Clear Lake Association in Arden, Ontario and had been for most of 20 years. It was difficult to get people to volunteer to be on the executive so I ended up doing most of the administrative tasks.
It was a lot of work.
I knew I could automate a lot of the day to day tasks and make it much easier to track membership, finances, send out emails and get feedback from members via surveys.
I also saw patterns,
in the lake plans that were being developed, leading me to believe that a common template or starting point would save a lot of time.
Clock is running.
One immediate shortcoming I saw was one particular lake plan that, when it was finally published, contained water quality data that was already 2 years old.
Initial Focus
About the same time the large lake associations were starting to focus on creating lake plans and some were getting huge amounts of money from granting agencies like Trillium. I knew that the smaller lakes would never get the same opportunities nor would they have the people resources.
Huge Undertaking
There were also huge amounts of data to be collected, both in the past and ongoing.
Snapshot
That was a big problem – a lake plan document is a snapshot in time!