If you are twittering the cleanup, add the #coastalcleanup to your tweet and allow the international community to hear about your morning’s work – see the Twitter search results.

We introduced this during the Site Buddy Briefing yesterday in LT25 and I just did a screen grab of the search results, from when Dy Coordinator Chek Kee was presenting, fresh out of his reservist duty stint and sounding very army like!

More than 100 volunteers are at the ICC Singapore Site Buddy Briefing
at Lecture Theatre 25 at the National University of Singapore. It was
nice to see them bright and alert when we started!
 

Photos on Flickr – Album 1, Album 2. Also a blog post by Yiu Yan, attending his 3rd Site Buddy Briefing! [link]

Posted via email from International Coastal Cleanup Singapore

We will be conducting briefing session on Saturday 5th September 2009 at NUS.

This is meant for anyone who is unfamiliar with the ICC programme, first timers who want to know more, team leaders and site buddies nominated by organisers, or individual participants.

To register, see: http://coastalcleanup.wordpress.com/briefing-2009/

Hope to see you soon. Closing date for registration (so we can pick the right venue) is 31 Aug 2009.

This drizzly Saturday morning saw the ICCS Otters address participants and Site Buddies about various aspects of ICCS operations which will take place next week.

This session was put together by the ICCS education team led by Zhang Dongrong and Marcus Tay. This follows the earlier engagement session, the Organiser’s Workshop (or simply ICCS Workshop) which dealt mainly with the raising the knowledge level of organiser’s about background issues of the ICC such as marine life and human impact.

I kicked off with some background to the ICC and ICCS while Lim Chen Kee covered operations, Marcus Tay dealt with the role of Site Buddies, Anand Ramchand discussed data collation and submission and the ICCS webpage and I rounded up the session which ended by 11.30am.

Each of the presenters injected humour from their experiences from past years of the ICCS so it was relevant as well as funny.

During the Q&A, the other ICCS Otters – Oi Yee, Kai Scene, Dinesh, Dongrong and Dewi joined in to discuss operational issues with the Site Buddies and participants who had joined us in LT25.

We surmised it as a fruitful session despite the mix of roles in the audience and saw many taking notes during the two and a half hour session. So we were glad we put it together in such a hurry despite our tough schedules. Sure we can do a lot to improve but even n this form, it’s usefulness has cemented itself into an annual offering along with the Organiser’s Briefing.

Photos on Flickr

I have closed off all sites except Pulau Ubin for individual registration. Zone Captain Andy Dinesh has asked for help at Ubin and so I’ve been directing individual signups there and no longer offering any options elsewhere – we are too swamped to worry about allocations any longer. Also if all of them it a site together, it’ll be fun.

Most other sites are full as well, anyway. See the ICCS2008 Site Status Sheet.

The other thing we’ll be up to this week is the Site Buddy Briefing – the number of registrants is creeping towards 100 so I have maintained our LT booking. It should be a short but really useful session for he potential Site Buddies!

After that workshop I will head out to Pandan mangroves for a recce with the organisers and our new Zone Captain, Kelly Ong. It will be the first time we conduct a cleanup there and its sorely needed.

Site Buddies play an important role during the coastal cleanup in assisting Organisers to run operations and motivate and assist volunteers on the shores. In order to help enhance Site Buddies preparation for the ICCS2008 cleanup, we are conducting a briefing at NUS.

Who is this briefing session for?
This workshop is for individuals who are assisting organisers in briefing, leading and working alongside other volunteers on the cleanup day. If you are new to the task, would like to know more about the background of the ICCS and would like to meet other Site Buddies who will be working at other sites, do come for the briefing. Individual participants who are not with an organisation are welcome to join us as well.

Who is conducting this briefing
The briefing will be conducted by the national coordinators – the ICCS Otters. We have decades of practical experience coordinating, organising and cleanups as well as sweating it out on the shores alongside volunteers every year! So we are eager to share with you useful tips that will make the cleanup smoother operationally and even more meaningful!

Objectives

1. To provide a clear understanding about the main objective of the ICC.
2. To provide an appreciation of the background of the ICCS and 2008 updates to how the exercise is managed and communicated.
3. To illustrate how to play an effective role as a Site Buddy, with practical tips about about briefing and working on site with cleanup volunteers.
4. To introduce the new data card and data collation operations as well as how to see the first data and photo galleries posted online.

To register for the briefing session, please click here.