Expedition Base Camp is the new digital platform for expedition and adventure planning, promotion, and participation.
Expeditions are fantastic platforms for a whole host of positive contributions to global society: expanding our knowledge and understanding of the world we live in, strengthening ties between cultures, developing the skills and characters of the people involved, and inspiring others who have shared the journey.
Some expeditions seem to achieve all of these things almost effortlessly, but as an early career expedition leader and conservationist, and mentor for first time expedition teams, the knowledge of how daunting it can be to start planning an expedition, and how difficult it is to make a good job of it, is still very fresh for me.
There are some excellent tools and resources available that help with planning, and through this project I hope to make them easier to find and access. But foremost among the aids available to expedition teams is the support and guidance of experienced experts, and the larger goal of this project is to make it easier for this generation to learn from and build on the work of those who have gone before them.
In a nutshell, I hope to achieve three things with this site:
1) Help expedition teams plan the most impactful expedition possible
We will write articles with advice and share case studies, pool existing and create new resources, develop a forum section, and create a mentor system to share knowledge and experience.
2) Make it much easier for expedition teams to promote their expedition before, during, and long after the event.
We’ll publish a write up of your expedition with maps, photographs, videos and results, with links to your own expedition website if you have one. In this way people will continue to discover your expedition long after you’ve wrapped it up and begun planning your next one. In addition, expedition teams can use Expedition Base Camp as their main platform, with a dedicated URL and great templates and support for blogging and promoting their expedition.
3) Help individuals, teams, partners and sponsors connect and collaborate
We’ll help connect potential team mates with expeditions and expeditions with potential partners or sponsors. We’ll do this by building forums, newsletters, and other tools to facilitate knowledge sharing, networking and collaboration.
I’ve been organising and leading expeditions to Borneo for the past 6 years, some small, small huge, some failures, some award-winning successes. My first expedition turned into the launch pad for the Heart of Borneo Project, and since then I’ve gone on to build a trio of organisations tentatively known as the Beyond Collective: Beyond Exploration, Beyond Media, and Beyond Conservation.
This project will be run as a not-for-profit Beyond Collective initiative. If at any point Expedition Base Camp begins to generate revenue we’ll pump the profits back into the community in the form of better services or grants for its users.
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