Collaboration and/or Competition?
The global organizers finished the second round of planning meetings for this year's City Nature Challenge Events last week. The main event website is starting to fill out with all the cities participating around the world as is the Canadian umbrella site. We are not the only first timers here in the Prairie Provinces - Regina, Red Deer and Camrose County are also holding events for the first time. Calgary has participated twice before.
One of the questions that was on the minds of the global organizers was...Should CNC 2021 be a collaboration (like 2020) or a competition (like previous years)? Or some type of hybrid model?
Several events that have been going for a few years and that already have established rivalries with nearby events enthusiastically recommended competition."Even if the overall CNC event is a collab, competitions at whatever sub-level (region, city, school, individual) have been a real plus that really motivates some groups and individuals and add to the fun of the event"
Others were more comfortable with the collaboration model - as in this comment "I've always downplayed the competition aspect to partners and presented the CNC as the 'world's largest synchronised biodiversity monitoring project' (a bit of a mouthful but I'm working on it!) or 'a chance to showcase our amazing biodiversity on the world stage'. We've never really targeted to beat anyone (though the friendly banter/trash talking on Twitter has been fun!) yet I'm with [the previous poster] about beating our own previous records." Several of those choosing collaboration mentioned Covid as part of their motivation.
By far the largest number of events suggested hybrid was the way to go - it seemed like a way for events to make local decisions about how much to stress the competition portion of the event.
I know that organizers of previous Canadian events feel that the competition part is helpful. "It's a healthy way to bring out the competitiveness among Canadian cities. "
As a first year event we should have no difficulty adding more observations than last years event :) If we intend to set our sights on exceeding the number of observations than Calgary posted last year (5,573 observations) then we might need to make a more strategic plan. Here's the project showing all results from the Canadian cities participating last year
Feel free to let me know in the comments how you feel about the competition aspect of the event and any ideas you might have for us to make the event more enjoyable for you.
Mary Krieger
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