Projects
Public Lab
Public Lab pursues environmental justice through the use of community science and open technology. Public Lab is rooted in the belief that the best ideas and solutions come from partnerships between on-the-ground communities with deep knowledge of local issues in close, equitable, and sustainable partnerships with networks that bring skills, capacity, science, and technology to bear. We use science and inquiry to shift power structures so that anyone can be a change agent in addressing environmental health issues, and work to raise awareness about health impacts, improve scientific agency, build new scientific and technological skills, and mitigate certain exposures. When people can easily and reliably track local effects associated with environmental injustices they can make better-informed decisions and take action.
Image: Public Lab’s aerial photography rig. Crowd & the Cloud
Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH)
From microscopes to microfluidics and water quality test equipment, hardware is a vital part of science. However, the current supply chain for science hardware limits access for many groups of people and impedes creativity and customization. Open Science Hardware (OScH) means sharing designs for scientific hardware openly online that anyone is freely able to use, modify and even commercialize. This approach could drastically reduce the costs of research while enabling people to collaborate and learn in new ways. GOSH is a community and home for this work.
Image: GOSH 2017, Santiago Chile
Open Environmental Data Project
The places where we live determine our health, yet worldwide we continue to see those most marginalized be ground zero for the literal dumping of our world’s toxins. The increasing politicization of scientific data combined with the inaccessibility of environmental research creates an astoundingly difficult context for a community to make important decisions within. The vision of Open Environmental Data Project is to build systems that will move us towards data interoperability and create easier inroads for how reports can be verified and used. With work managed by an independent collective, we will aim to change the way we share and build verifiable evidence into decision-making processes.
Funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation