citizen science

Unleash The Amateurs: Lessons From The Early Days Of Radio

Unleash The Amateurs: Lessons From The Early Days Of Radio

Guglielmo Marconi’s early experiments in wireless communication, particularly his radio transmission during the 1899 America’s Cup yacht races, had sparked broad interest in the nascent technology. The press was closely covering these developments, which helped Marconi’s popularity but also tantalized others who longed to try and re-create his tests. They got their wish when American Electrician published detailed […]

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Plane Spotting (And More!): Put your spare gear to use as a feeder for community-based data exchanges

Plane Spotting (And More!): Put your spare gear to use as a feeder for community-based data exchanges

If you’ve ever used a flight-tracking app or looked up local weather on Weather Underground, you’ve likely accessed data supplied, in part, by volunteer contributors. Crowd-sourced data exchanges collect this information and share the pooled results online via interactive maps. The data ranges from radio-signal telemetry for airplanes, ships, weather balloons, or satellites, to seismic measurements, to air […]

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Public Lab Community Spotlights: 4 Projects

Public Lab Community Spotlights: 4 Projects

Public Lab’s contributions come from all over the globe. Here are a few of the members that are providing tools for all to use. ROCKETS.XIA, co-founder of Mushroom Cloud Makerspace Location: Shanghai, China Our project, Knowflow, is a water quality monitoring project funded by the Green Seed foundation and Mushroom Cloud Maker Space, with contributions from Shan […]

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Build Yourself Some Science: Inside Public Lab’s Open Source Tools

Build Yourself Some Science: Inside Public Lab’s Open Source Tools

In the summer of 2012, I came across an event listing for a kite building workshop and the next thing I knew I was on a loading dock in Brooklyn, NY, building kites and solar balloons with two of Public Lab’s founders. Seven years later, I am Public Lab’s Open Hardware Community Manager — one […]

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How Public Lab Enables Environmental Mapping Through Collaborative Science

How Public Lab Enables Environmental Mapping Through Collaborative Science

    In May 2010 I set out early one morning with a small group of concerned Gulf Coast residents, headed to meet a boat captain who would take us to the Chandeleur Islands, a chain of barrier islands in southeast Louisiana. Within minutes of leaving the harbor and navigating out into the Gulf of Mexico, […]

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Tune into Public Lab’s Community Science Tool-Building Workshops This Month

Tune into Public Lab’s Community Science Tool-Building Workshops This Month

Make: vol. 71 is on its way to mailboxes right now, and inside the issue we have a wonderful profile of community science advocacy group Public Lab, including a tear-out insert of their paper spectroscope. To further augment the article and help guide people into building and using open-source tools to measure environmental conditions and […]

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5 Projects and a Contest to Inspire Your Environmental Awareness

Low-cost advanced technologies, especially the open source hardware & software, enable almost everyone to get involved to show support for environmental protection. To celebrate Earth Day 2018, Seeed and hackster.io have launched an Earth Day contest to encourage the community to make & share projects that benefit the planet! The contest will give away 15 awesome […]

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