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

Open Climate

What does "openness" have to do with climate action? The Open Climate community aims to address this question by discussing the parallels, contrasts, and disconnects between the "open movement" and environmental activism to recast the question of knowledge commons for advancing action research for the climate. Since March 2021, we’ve organized "Open Climate Calls" to bring together activists, researchers, and technologists from various projects to discuss how we can collectively respond to climate change and support environmental activism. Coming up in 2022 we’ll be building out the second season of Open Climate community calls amongst a number of other exciting projects. Stay tuned and follow along at #OpenClimate.

Image: Meander Map of the Mississippi River by Harold Fisk (1944). Source: Public Domain Review

Climate Justice x Digital Rights

Climate justice has expanded into every part of the environmental movement in the last several years. Digital technologies could play a significant role in shifting the way coordinated political, social, economic, and cultural action to address climate change can happen. However, the rhetoric of environmental activism often frames digital technologies as a luxury or contributor to the crisis, leaving digital rights activists unsure of how to engage. Likewise, when digital rights communities signal there are problems with using digital platforms for protest and organizing, such as privacy, climate activists don’t always connect these concerns with problems they must solve. There is room for collaboration: both spaces are grounded in a basic desire to address human rights and economic justice through building better social systems for a livable future. Coming in late Fall 2021, we’ll be producing two issue briefs on the topics of 1) Defining Environmental Justice and Climate Justice for digital rights funders and 2) The open source ethos and Climate Justice. Read more here.

Image: Climate Protest by Victoria Pickering, Source

Civic Science Stories

As a new generation of the civic science community assembles and works to create a compass towards longer-term plans, if it is to live up to its civic intent, civic science must center diverse articulations of what it will look like to reach this goal, and also what it looks like when that doesn’t happen. In this first series, hear from twenty-six people as they collectively ask for and acknowledge the places where science can be done differently.