Idea Lab

Public Lab's Community-Created Maps Land on Google Earth

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've just announced that community-generated open-source maps from the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) -- captured from kites and balloons -- have been added to Google Earth. The 45-plus maps are the first aerial maps produced by citizens to be featured on the site, and are highlighted on the Google Lat Long Blog. The Public Laboratory is an expansion of the Grassroots Mapping community. During an initial project mapping the BP oil spill, local residents used helium-filled balloons and digital cameras to generate high-resolution DIY "satellite" maps documenting the extent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in...

• April 19, 2012
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The Faces Behind Public Lab's Grassroots Research Community

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was co-authored by Sara Wylie, a a Public Laboratory co-founder. Public Laboratory is an open-source software and hardware development community dedicated to producing low-cost tools for environmental research. The nonprofit portion of Public Lab grew out of using aerial mapping to address the BP Oil Spill. Since then, we've grown enormously as a community, expanding to more than 400 contributors. As part of a series, we'll be discussing contributions to open hardware projects by people other than the initial seven founders of Public Lab who write for the PBS IdeaLab blog. We're focusing on these individuals as Public...

• March 12, 2012
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Public Lab Helps Communities Do 'Civic Science' Investigations

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently, a resident of Plaquemines Parish, La., made a striking comment to me about the importance of local involvement and knowledge in post-disaster projects: Listen to the people that have been down here, lived here, fished here, and camped here their whole entire lives and even their parents' lives, for generations. Because they know how these waters are, they know how the tides come and go, they know how the storms affect this area, they provide a lot of valuable information and a lot of valuable ways that people can accomplish what they want to do without destroying the things...

• August 17, 2011
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