Some of the communities protecting our oceans are almost invisible to the people who could fund their work.
There is no shared register showing where they are, what they need or how funders can support them. The Oxford Marine Protection Project (OMPP), housed at the University of Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment, has partnered with Actonomy to change that.
In a few weeks, Actonomy designed and built a working register, powered by Actonomy's own AI technology. It brings together community stories, local scientific evidence and unmet funding needs on a global map.
We designed it around a practical consideration: the register will only stay useful if communities can keep it current without it becoming a burden that pulls them away from the conservation work itself. They own their pages and can contribute through text, photos, video or spoken updates, in their own language, with an offline workflow where connectivity is limited.
For funders, the same information needs to support a different task: understanding what a community needs, how ready it is for funding and what evidence supports its request. Designing for both sides was central to the work.
The register is hosted on Azure. OpenAI LLMs via Microsoft Foundry support the AI-enrichment workflow and plain-language answers. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) connects those answers to relevant source material, while speech recognition and multilingual capabilities support contributions across languages.
Communities can ask about marine law, climate threats and relevant grants. Funders can explore needs and readiness through grounded, cited answers, with location-specific science alongside each community's account of its work.
OMPP now has something governments, NGOs and funders can use to understand the proposal and help shape its development. Its work starts with a pilot in Palawan, Philippines, alongside WWF Philippines; the ambition is global.
Getting to this point in weeks meant working through product design, community participation, scientific information and AI engineering together. That is the capability Actonomy brought to the project, and the foundation we've helped OMPP establish for what comes next.
If your organisation is considering an AI product and needs to work through what it would take to scale it, we'd welcome a conversation.