It was Day 2 on the workshop ?The Use of Social Media in Biodiversity Conservation? organized by CEE, Lucknow. Most of the experts giving presentations were cool and interesting and yet sitting throughout two days in succession had drained me a bit physically and mentally. Towards the end of the day, Shailaja Rabindranathan, Project Co-ordinater CEE, South asked us to come up with an idea, basically a rough idea to work on with. I was sharing the table with my mate Rahul Acharya, with whom I had travelled there with, Brojo Kumar Basumatry, Thing and Shiwani Thakur, all our table could come up with was a plantation program. It wasn?t innovative or different on any way and the fact that plantation program has been going on by hundreds of organization didn?t help and it didn?t seem to fit that well for an online campaign.

The ideas of other tables were also nothing new and promising as Shailaja madam rightly pointed out and God she was frustrated. In fact she had every right to get dissatisfied as for two whole days and even during lunch and dinner she and Pramod Sharma sir were tirelessly putting an effort to make us clear about the underlying concepts, things that mattered, case studies, Q &A, and everything. She asked if she had wasted her time and resources on us. This killed me, I was dying to prove otherwise. She said few other words in a way challenging us to come up with something new tomorrow, the last day of workshop. I was stirred and damn motivated.

That night we went to Ambedkar park which was majestic and it was fun roaming the city with the guys.

I slept very light that night, I had no idea to work on, how was I going to face Shailaja madam?  I asked myself.

It must have been 4 in the morning when I woke up, I couldn?t sleep. I went to the bathroom washed my face and lay back in the bed, closing my eyes and thought about the things that we could do, the presentation of Pramod sir recurred, the journey to lucknow, my study and many countless varied thoughts.

It occurred to me people in general don?t care about environment while they are online, say biodiversity and many start dozing off. If I had to draw their attention and engage them , I had to come with a gamefied approach and the notion of Selfie with Butterfly that Shailaja madam had shared yesterday came to my mind. This was a moment of a small mental triumph as I was finally getting the idea.

Then I left my bed, took a pen and a notebook and started scribbling. Selfie with Butterfly would limit participation so I thought may be Selfie with Insects and right at that moment I felt this is it. I even pumped a fist in the air.

At around 6AM, Rahul woke up and  I shared him the idea I had come up with and he was ecstatic. We brainstormed the idea for a while.

Brojo and Thang joined us for tea and we shared the idea and they were excited. This could work really well  I said as Brojo, himself is a Butterfly enthusiast and had reported over 30 endemic species of Butterflies from Assam.

Later on Shiwani and Ananya joined us and we shared them the idea of Selfie with Insects. They loved it. They came up with the word ?Keedafie? , this was good news as keedafie sounded cool and could create a serious buzz.

Then we shared the idea of Keedafie with Shailaja madam and she said, ?I like it? with her thumbs up, smiling and delightful face. I was over the moon. We discussed the approach we would be taking, called ourselves BTRAPS after the initials of team members and wrote the project proposal in the format given by CEE.

We set a target of reaching 5000 people and by the end we reached to more than 30000 people. We got 65 entries lovely entries for keedafie challenge and on June 5, 2015 CEE on their website selected top 3 projects launched from the workshop and to our delight Project Keedafie was judged the best project. The Online campaign continues.

I am grateful to Shailaja madam and Pramod sir for teaching and inspiring me. Thank you Aksana for sharing the link to the workshop.

BTRAPS, we rock!

https://www.facebook.com/keedafie.btraps/photos_stream

Read more about keedafie : https://tunza.eco-generation.org/ambassadorReportView.jsp?viewID=12357&searchType=title&searchName=keedafie&pageNumber=1