 Okay. So, welcome everybody. Today we are lucky to have Shannon Dos-Meghan, a Bergen-Fellu and friend who I have had the pleasure to meet for her work at the Public Lab and as well for our work with the Inclusive Innovation Group here at the Center. She will talk about civic technology and community science and her experience building a model for public participation in environmental decision-making processes. Shannon is one of the founders of the Public Lab and the executive director of the non-profit and she's based in New Orleans in Cambridge. With a background in community organizing and education, Shannon has worked with environment and public health groups across the United States addressing declining freshwater resources, coastal land loss and building participatory monitoring programs with communities neighboring industrial oil facilities and impact by the BP oil spill. That said, I'm going to turn it over to Shannon. If members of the alliance have questions during their talk, please feel free to raise your hand and ask. After the presentation, we will also have more time for questions and discussion. Please join me in welcoming Shannon Dos-Meghan. And there's a couple in the corner as well. So thanks everybody for coming today. This is a really exciting group. We have Union of Concerned Scientists. We have librarians. We have law students. It's a really great mix, something that's also reflected within the work that Public Lab does. So I'm happy to have all of you here and lending your different expertise and experiences to the discussion as we move forward with it. So as Andres said, please at any point when I'm talking, if you have a comment, if you have a question, just go ahead and raise your hand or say it. Our work self-noted as well as noted by others is quite complex. There's a lot of different moving pieces to it. And so if anything is just not quite making sense to you, let's address it while we're in that moment. And so today what I want to do is break off a piece of what Public Lab works on. A couple years ago or about a year and a half ago, Open Society Foundations was generous enough to provide us funding to basically launch an advocacy initiative within Public Lab. And so we were able to bring on a wonderful person, Gretchen Gerke, who's a colleague of mine. And Gretchen and I have since been talking and thinking and working through different models and structures for how advocacy can be built into civic technology and community science models, which is what we'll talk about today. So just to give you a very quick background on Public Lab, we are a global open community. There's about 6,000 of us that are participating in various facets, whether it's through our online community or in very localized settings. There's a nonprofit, as we mentioned, and we kind of consider the nonprofit to be the portion of Public Lab that offers infrastructure and support and a backbone for the work that the rest of the community is doing. And what we're interested in working on together is creating low cost. And for us, this means hopefully about under $150 DIY. So do it yourself style tools for environmental monitoring. The nonprofit is specifically interested in working at sites of industrial pollution, where many times we see discrimination against certain groups based on not being able to advocate for themselves. So just a tiny bit about myself, my background is in community organizing. This is an image of where I found myself working in my early to mid-20s. So this is one of the number of oil refineries that lines the Mississippi River and Louisiana. And so I was working with a group called the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and some of you may know of the bucket. The bucket is modeled after an EPA summa canister, so it's literally a five-gallon bucket. There's an airbag and you use a vacuum to suck in air samples. And this type of tool allowed residents around these facilities to go out and do grab samples when there were specific emission bursts from facilities, typically in the middle of the night when nobody else would catch them. So I worked with communities next to these facilities doing things such as asset mapping, using these tools to take air samples, build order logs. And then the BP oil spill happened, as many of you will remember, in April of 2010 working on that vast disaster, vast kind of unseen disaster. And I say unseen because one of the very first things that we found was that there was a almost full media blackout because it was a heavily corporate controlled event. So within days of the spill happening, they put a 3,000-foot flight cap over the Gulf of Mexico, basically making it incredibly difficult for people, the media included to capture good images. And this is where one of the very original public lab projects and collaborations popped up. So I'm lucky enough to have Jeff Warren, who's one of the other co-founders of Public Lab, and my good friend from back in the BP spill days in the room. But we started working together, myself in the capacity at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade as an organizer, Jeff as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab at the time. And we started launching balloons and kites, so very simple kind of big devices, thousands of feet in the air with the top of a two-liter soda bottle. So imagine this magnified by like 20, 10, with basic point-and-shoot cameras in, capturing images literally from the grassroots. So we walked beaches, we were in boats capturing images that looked something like this. So we captured hundreds of thousands of images. We documented with Fisher people, with residents of the various coastal communities of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, the oil as it progressed into different areas in the region. And what this did, it helped to prompt a wider spread interest in the spill, getting documentation in the New York Times, the Globe, the BBC, and also helped to provide an alternative community-driven narrative about how the spill was progressing on the land, and giving Gulf Coast residents a way to participate and get involved in an event that was, you know, literally happening in our backyard. So taking a step back after the spill, we started to look at the landscape of environmental monitoring and found what, you know, many people know to be true, chicken and the fox. Often the Hinn House of Policy is built with a door for the fox. And so this is incredibly clear in the case of environmental monitoring, that the people doing environmental monitoring and providing, you know, the science, the people that were being contracted out to, you know, go and do, for instance, soil tests after Hurricane Katrina were many times hired by the potential corporate polluters. And otherwise they were, you know, a government agency trying to keep up with these polluters or research institutions driven by particular grants that may not have been centered on a community-identified concern. And so also the, you know, in top of this, we were also seeing tools that just were not created at a price point accessible to the people that needed to use them within communities. So this is one of our critiques of the field. The next was that we continued to look at models, pretty traditional in citizen science, where scientists are posing problems and asking for data to be given to them to support the questions that they're asking. So not thinking about the full data life cycle or how data ownership happens and how communities can actually utilize data for the questions that they have. So what we did is we took a step back and we started to think about how we could build a model to remedy some of this. And what we came up with was the process that's outlined here that works with people through the entirety of research design from asking a question that's rooted within a community, which is rooted within a particular problem that's been identified. Looking at the landscape of tools, so seeing if there's already existing low-cost tools and software analysis platforms that can be used to address that question, and if not, collaboratively building them together. Doing process and interpretation, so actually collecting the data, looking at the data, interpreting it, and then working on drawing conclusions and using the data for actionable purposes rather than just peer-reviewed papers. So in the next several slides, I want to talk through some of our framework that has helped Gretchen and I as we start to think about an approach to how we can use community collected data to advocate for the communities and the objectives that we have within our neighborhoods. So the first is really thinking about the model of science. So again, citizen science is typically the engagement of the public to participate in scientific research in a model that crowdsources data for a study led by professional researchers. The model that we're using is community science, which is community-led scientific exploration and investigation to address community-defined questions allowing for engagement in the entirety of the scientific process, ownership of and access to resultant data, and an orientation towards community goals and action. So it's kind of flipping the model on the head. The value of open space, so we all like open spaces that look like this, they're beautiful. Open space in the sense that we're using it though is what we try to create in our online communities and the way that our online community integrates with people doing very hyper-local work in different areas. So we've put a lot of effort into building a distributed network of practitioners and community researchers that are working on creating meaningful integration of technology into community activism and we do this through processes of collaboration. So coming together, building tools, ideating, thinking through the ethics of what it means to engage in different ways with community activists and also cooperation. So, you know, seeing a change that needs to happen to one of our open hardware designs, breaking it off, taking it back home with you, making some changes and then sharing it back to the community. So what we've done and Jeff has been an incredible engineer in the entirety of building our platform is that we've created an open R&D space on the Public Lab website. We use three different open licenses that help to secure this process and then also all of our analysis platforms are built around collective data sharing and knowledge sharing, not just, you know, privatizing and holding data separately for yourself. So critical making and, you know, building in a DIY ethos is also incredibly important. So relying on a participation of community practitioners in the creation of tools to understand not only how each tool works, but to better understand the process of data collection, how data can be used and also how we're going to use data towards actionable purposes. We're also doing in Public Lab a lot of work around the idea of expertise. So I have a slide up here and I call it the era of the generalist. And so scientists in the room, this is with no hate, but there really, you know, there is a place for scientists with specialties, but we are really interested in supporting the use of the internet for the emergence of generalists. You know, because of the internet, specialty knowledge has become captured, it's easily accessible to access. And we're really interested in seeing a future, you know, that kind of harks back to the makers and the scientists of old who flukeites to figure out electricity, right? So we're in support of expertise, but we want to find expertise in all of us and figure out how we can mesh that together to strengthen our projects and strengthen the questions and ideas that we all have. So participatory democracy. So we embed this in all the processes of Public Lab, and we see this as really central to the way that tool development happens within Public Lab, where there's not one centralized person that's making decisions and creating new versions, but it happens in a collaborative fashion. Also the way that community science happens is modeled after a participatory democracy. So, for instance, collectively deciding what location to go and map, the type of flying apparatus you're going to use, if it's a kite, if it's a balloon, if it's, you know, a soda bottle top or not, the appropriate angle for collecting different images, it helps to create a social and technological process in which questioning and discussing and drawing and collecting conclusions leads to actual better results. And then finally, thinking about public participation through this communicative technology, and really providing space and time to be able to go out into the world and engage with people where they are, to create with people where they are. So restoring the human to the center of the discussion, focusing on the user experience, you know, again in this full data lifecycle, is incredibly important because the data first and foremost impacts the people who should be using it or having it used for decisions that are directly affecting their communities. All right, so this gets into the more experimental part of everything. So Gretchen and I have been working on developing a, basically a tiered chart, and we're doing this because we've gotten to a point that we realize a lot of the work that's happening in the community science space is, again, hyper-local. I mean, you know, within Wisconsin, your first step of action might be going to a county board, whereas in Louisiana to have any type of environmental decisions made, you have to go to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. So very different decision-making structures happening all over the place. And that's just two domestic examples. And then we start looking at our global community, and we add on so many more layers. So we're interested in building this kind of tiered approach to help communities think through the research design that might be most applicable for their communities to use when approaching problems. So just to go through this real quick, and then I'm going to kind of go into some of the examples that we have. The three separate tiers that we've broken out into are tier one, which is performative use of community science, tier two, a community project, and tier three, a partner project. The first two columns are the two metric indicators. So this is the role of community science in the process, and then what the scope of the outcomes that the community wants would be. The next two columns are the people who are involved in conducting the projects, and then the different tracks. So within each of these tiers, there's a couple different directions and a couple different pathways that people might use, different types of partnerships. So I also just want to put out a couple of questions here that as I go through the rest of the talk, you all might kind of ponder on, and maybe we could talk about afterwards. So these are really great examples of how people that are in geographic proximity to one another can interact. So we have also, though, this really robust, large group of people that interacts in the online space and, you know, it's kind of as a knowledge base. But how else can that community fit into support these very hyper-local projects that are happening? The other question is how to start bringing in, I guess, professional fields. So we have a lot of people that are, we have tons of scientists. We have, you know, social scientists, organizers, we have a very large population of librarians, actually, technologists, artists, hackers. But we don't have a lot of lawyers, people who are engaged in the public health fields, medical doctors, which would really strengthen the work that groups are doing. So what might be a structure to help engage those groups? And then also, how do we scale lessons learned and best practices that are driven by these very local and person examples and help them be used by other communities when they're trying to replicate similar processes? So those are some of the things that we're still thinking through and would love your thoughts on. Okay, so the first tier, the performative aspects of community science. And I think a lot of people from Berkman, I think we had a conversation way back. As an activist, I've had a lot of trouble thinking about the performance of data collection, because I'm very, you know, used data for specific results. But I now see that there is a particular place for the use of open hardware software and data in a performative sense. So we've seen this happen a lot in our community through learning, teaching, prototyping, and exploration. And typically, when people are acting in a performative manner, they're looking at a non-specific environmental research question. So it's more broadly, what would this look like in a body of water, not what specific contaminant might be found in this body of water? Again, thinking about exploratory learning. So how can we engage students? Or how can we engage the general public in this kind of beautiful data visualization that we're seeing? And then also focusing on the tool as a visualizing process. So the use of a big balloon or the use of, this is a thermal fishing bob, so it's a device that you can drop into the body of water and basically paint the water with because there's an LED emitting. So thinking about how visual the tool is rather than the actual data that's being collected and how to visualize that data. And a couple of the strong points in this we see are that it can be valuable for environmental communications, so helping to bring in conversations with the media, and then also in general bringing new people to the process of community science and open hardware software development practices. And just as an example of this specifically in Public Lab, this is a tool called the Co-Key. The data resolution is generally lost within the process of using the Co-Key. It's a tool that you can dip in water and it emits the frequency, so it's about experiencing what the different conductivity might sound like. And this was specifically developed as a performative piece to teach people with. The next here is the Community Project. And Community Projects are really predicated on disrupting institutionalized hierarchies of production and access to knowledge. So this is a way for people to say, within our community, we have the tools and we have the ability, we have the understanding of methods to be able to do our own projects. So it does require tools, the ability to use and interpret data. So the non-profit of Public Lab sees a lot of our focus within here and creating methodology that can be brought in and strongly utilized so that as a staff member or another potential partner in a project won't always have to be present that communities can do things on their own. The other part of this is that these projects are entirely conceived and created done by the communities specifically looking at community focus goals. There's a couple of different tracks that we've identified. One of them is the unique individual issue and the second is pervasive or endemic issue. So the first example might be the BP oil spill. So major disaster happening very quickly. The example of the second might be continuing issues with a community that's neighboring a hog farm in North Carolina. So what we see coming from Community Projects, outcomes might be community knowledge production, data literacy, media engagement, stakeholder engagement, ecosystem management, behavior changes, and then general civic participation. So as an example, and the last side was also a picture, there's a group in the Burj al-Shamali refugee camp in southern Lebanon. It's a camp that's been around since 1948 and originally Palestinian refugees went to this camp. It has kind of bloomed in size to about 20,000 people in the camp. Members of the camp are residents of the camp were interested in using the aerial mapping tool. So going back to the BP spill, those same kites and balloons, to start thinking about the distribution of space and resources in the camp so that they can plan community enriching green spaces. So the three objectives that they had in mind were creating visibility and awareness, creating dialogues amongst residents of the camp that might have different opinions about where and how to use green spaces, and then working on improving camp conditions based on the dialogues that they created using this community collected data. All right, so the third one, near and dear to my heart, this is the tier three partner project, and this example is in Plakman's Parish, Louisiana. So this is the United Bulk Terminal just to give you a sense of what you're looking at. It's a terminal that there's been a wonderful coalition that's been working on issues surrounding. You can see coal dumping directly into the Mississippi River. That would be an issue. So the partnership project is usually a basis for further investigation using community science. So there's impacts both within the community and also beyond the communities that are directly adjacent to, for instance, this facility. And the three things that we see within community projects, or I'm sorry, partner projects, is that there's still a community ID objective at the center of the work that's happening. So in this instance, the communities neighboring this facility, they were having issues with air quality and then also the dumping directly into the Mississippi River. Community science can play a pivotal role. It can be used as both an indicator or a screening method to help call for larger systematic studies, for instance. And third, still in the community science model, the community always invites partners. So there isn't a researcher coming in and saying, you know, we need to do something about this area. There's a direct invitation from the people that are being affected by the polluting source. And then outcomes of this Tier 3 partner project might be things such as permit enforcement or revision, environmental remediation, litigation, investigative media, policy adaptations, things such as that. So just to get a bit more into this example, so this is United Bulk that's situated on the Mississippi and Plaquemines Parish, which is one of the most southern parishes in Louisiana. And there's a coalition, the Clean Golf Commerce Coalition that's a number of different groups that began working with the communities in proximity to this facility. So this is an image that two members stood on the levee and captured using a kite, which shows direct dumping from the conveyor belt of the bulk terminal into the Mississippi on what's called a good weather day. So a good weather day means that, you know, it's sunny. There's no storm conditions, so you don't actually have a reason to be dumping, whereas I guess you're allowed to on a bad weather day. So using this image and images such as this, the coalition was able to obtain a consent decree from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, and it would have come with a $16,000 fine. This was not acceptable to the coalition. They didn't think that that was, you know, a harsh enough response. And so they then partnered using this data with the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic, and they were able to sue under a citizen's supervision of the Clean Water Act. And they ended up settling in August of 2015, so this past year. But there was $75,000 in fines. And the settlement included that they would have to engage with the coalition. And so the coalition was able to, will be able to do community monitoring going forward. And if they have specific complaints, they can leverage fines against United Bulk. And it also required the very specific cleanup that's been needed since, I think, 1984. So this is an example of that Tier 3 partner projects, taking community science, civic technology, and building it out into a larger impact. All right. So that's what I have for y'all. Thanks for listening. And I'd love to, I guess, open it up for questions, discussion. What have you? Do you have any issues about, like, our sensor calibration? Or what do you do if there's, like, lots of people, lots of people using these open source tools? And with a photo, it's, you know, a photo is a photo, and it might be out of focus or whatnot, but you can usually hold a picture of it. But if it's, like, a sensor measuring something, then how do you know if the sensor data is accurate from some person? Right. So we've recently, kind of up until the last couple years ago, we were primarily doing analog tools. So we've recently started building sensors. One of them is a PM sensor in the sand frack area of Wisconsin. And one of the techniques that we're using is pairing it against different sensing devices that do PM sensing, and then also working with the EPA in their research and development triangle and Durham to pair against the sensors that they have to start looking at calibration. Can you talk a little bit more about what happened with the refugee camp using the balloons and tights for aerial imaging? Well, it's still very active. It's a project that I think just started in August-ish of this year. So the objective is that they want to be able to, once they've finished compiling the images and doing the mapping that they want to have completed, to be able to go back and call community meetings and begin working on plotting out the green space as they want to see it. Yeah, it's updated constantly on the website, so I'll point you to it. Yes. I'm not a conservative, but my comment or my question is about, you know, talk about BP. And it would seem to me that the rules regarding commercial access to public lands have needed to change for quite some time. You know, the scenario that you talked about, I mean, is outrageous. I mean, I'm a conservative. I don't have, you know, but this is just, you know, and this has been going on for quite some time. So I think that you mean why the hell was BP allowed to get away with that? I heard the story on, you know, I heard the story on the radio, you know, and all of a sudden it was a complete PR campaign, you know, but, you know, we were talking about public land, I mean, we're just like half the West, and, you know, it's a big issue. Right. Yeah, I mean, in Louisiana, I would say, like as an environmentalist, which I really actually don't consider myself, we are always approaching these issues as one of public health rather than as conserving environments, because the oil and gas industry has basically taken over the entire, well, the majority of Louisiana, but, you know, specifically the southern half. And it's a, I mean, it's a highly contested issue. And I, you know, I completely agree with you. And that's what we're The contract would say, this is ours, and not yours. Right. Mary, did you have a question? I did. This is a great work. So let me just start with that. This is like so cool. I have a question and it's informed by, I've been doing some work with Edith Law and Alex Williams who studies citizen science and scientist resistance to it. And so I had some thoughts about that I can share with you offline. But I wondered if you've done any projects that maybe for the folks who are at a distance who want to help, I'm kind of air quoting now, but is there a way to engage them through maybe creating DIY kits, so kind of care packages? We do. Sweet. I think that's brilliant. Yeah. We, at the end of 2012, so we've part of our model to fund our work during the BP spill. We did a Kickstarter raise $8,000. And that was kind of a model that we sort of nascently built in. And then the end of 2012, we did one for our DIY spectrometer. And not only raise a substantial amount of money to, you know, kind of kidify and like launch this tool off the ground, but also, you know, attracted 1600 people that would not have known about Public Lab previously. So we've used crowdfunding as a way to garner support. But in doing that specific campaign, we also then launched a kits program. So that's kind of an arm of Public Lab. The earned revenue supports the non-profit, but it also helps to take versions of our kits that are being developed within the community. Put them into, you know, literally a box that comes with, you know, hand illustrated guides, tutorials that you can visit online, and the tools that you put together yourself. So it still comes in pieces because we want people really to be able to experience what it's like to, you know, know the tool intimately. Questions? Have you had any, have you thought about or had any luck in maybe redirecting people who are, again, in a distance to make them hyper-local? Like to see is there a way for them to look around their region or their... Yeah, we do. So we have a matching of sorts. Yeah. I mean, I think we love suggestions from people on how to do this, but built into our model is, we have a group of organizers. So I think there's about 70, 75 of them. So these are people that are kind of deeply engaged in community science or in working with public lab that are spread globally. And then we also support kind of it ranges from like 15 to 20 different chapters. So that's a model we see as incredibly beneficial and has been really the keystone of what has sustained the projects in local spaces. But, you know, things like, can we put up a community map and you like link into somebody that is, you know, within 10 miles of you. Those are things that we've kind of brainstormed, but would love, you know, more suggestions on as well. So thank you for the great work. We had actually spoken with Jeff ahead of a program we just put together on scientists, connecting scientists to communities kind of forum with some of the ideas, the questions that you pose, trying to explore some of them thinking about how do you scale up something which is so local and also because every location has so many different dimensions to it that this is not usually very translatable. So one question is, you know, is scalability the right model to even think about this? And maybe there is no good way to scale it. And secondly, given that there are so many pockets of where there is complete environmental abuse or people are being exposed to pollution for decades and hundreds of years, and this happens all the time in all parts of the country and the world, is there a way where we are seeing things, conditions on the ground and bringing about change that we can, but also using that to elevate attention to how we need reform at the national federal level because beyond the local politics of it, there's also, you know, there are laws on the books which are not functioning the way they should. I mean, I always say that using the very general case of climate change, you know, if we don't start those conversations locally and engage people where they can see it directly happening and then leverage that to change the policies that we have that are specifically related to climate change, we're not going to make leeway, you know? So I think that that's a, I love your comment though also about can we replicate and scale because that's, I mean, that's what I've been coming up against is like this brick wall that I, you know, I want to like hurdle over, but it's just not happening. So yeah, and I'd love to talk more with you about these afterwards. So I'm going to grab you back there. This is really great work and thank you for all of it. I mean, on the scaling question, I mean, do you see any sort of community-based effort, say in Los Angeles with the methane leak or in Flint in Michigan with the lead poisoning? I mean, are there efforts springing up and sort of companion question, if you could clone your organization, what would you be doing there? That's a big one. So yeah, in the, in Porter Ranch, I was actually just there this past weekend in that area, which is crazy. There, we haven't had groups that have have been using, you know, community science. If there were, and if people were interested, we'd support them. But we really stick with a, you know, don't do a drop-in. That's important to the way that we function. And yeah, Flint, Michigan is, okay, we're talking about that. Yeah, it is. Thank you, Mary. I appreciate that. I can say that. Yeah. Yeah, and then if we could clone and replicate. Jeff, you want to take that question? Like if a group in an area that is affected sees what other public lab communities have done or other public lab associated communities have done and say, we can use that model, we can do something like that, we can follow, you know, we can build on that, and they adopt some of these things, they're welcome to be part of public lab. And that's the biggest way to scale, I think. And I think, I mean, personally, I'm also very interested in just digging in even more to the advocacy end of what we're doing. There's a long way to go in terms of, you know, EPA's recognition of, you know, like the question that was asked over here about calibration. There's a long way to go. A lot of work that we have to do in that sector, you know, using community data in a, in a way to, you know, push for litigation when it needs to happen or be able to be used in and prelit circumstances and then make these broader national level policy changes. We have, I mean, we're working on it, but we need more people that are doing this and interested in it. And it's, you know, it's this kind of data collection has been seen as a way to fill gaps, you know, as our government's dwindling resources or pulled away resources have taken effect. We think it's a really powerful way to start filling in some of that. And so, during the cause, yes. I really love the model and the values underlying it, but I have a historical question. I don't know, do you or others in public lab have any time to look at things like the work that Jane Adams and Florence Kelly did 100 something years ago? Because, you know, they like the whole house maps that they address spread of cholera and cocaine and population measures and all kinds of things. And it's obviously quite different situation and try different technologies. But I just wondered if you've, if you've had a chance to even think about those. Yeah, we, I mean, definitely we, one of the, there's seven co-founders of public lab. So we had a lot of different backgrounds come into the group. And one of our co-founders specifically did science and technology studies. So her background was very focused on that. So we have foundational underpinnings that look back to, to those moments. And I, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but we're really interested in thinking about how we go back to those times when science wasn't so professionalized, that it excluded the voices of people and it excluded the ability of people to understand these basic things that were happening in their communities. So definitely a kind of core tenant of who we are. Bad things like Jane Adams being excluded from University of Chicago because she wasn't part of the formal science. It would also be interesting to compare. Yeah. Just had a question about how are you measuring and reporting challenges and successes and, and sort of looping that back into your system of, of developing products and resources and things like that. Do you have a form that folks fill out? Do you have a survey? So we have 33 mailing lists. It's a large amount of conversations that happen. A lot of them are tool specific. And so that's where we try to as much as possible have very transparent conversations. So when there's an issue with a tool or there's a development hurdle, you know, that's, it's something that happens transparently in that space or as posted as a research note on public lab. So we can reference it, go back to it. And then their versions, like I said with the, the kids program. So that's really kind of a key piece of how we work together. Um, do you want to, he's our research director. He could probably say more about that as well. I mean, I guess, I'm not sure. It's a particular account that you're interested in. No, I'm just wondering in terms of, you know, what, what is community feedback, you know, and how do you bring that into your process and then make alterations or adjustments that you need to make or not? Do you have that sort of two-way dialogue or? Yeah, I think the hard part is that we're in a way, we're trying to not just get human needs feedback, but try to get the community to act to be the developers of these things. And there's no way that, you know, staff of like, you know, 10 something people can actually do the bulk of the research development. So what we try to do is make a place where people can do it and set patterns and scaffolding so that that happens. And, you know, staff are still involved in research and development, and we also make things in a kit, which is sort of a different skill set. But one thing we've been sort of refining is what we're calling open, open hardware. Basically, a lot of open hardware, open source hardware is done by companies who develop a product, release it and then also release the plans. And what we're talking about is coming up with a methodology so that a group of people who aren't formally affiliated can work on hardware designs to, you know, meet certain specs and so forth in a transparent way. And it's very hard work. I mean, this is something that is much easier in software. In hardware, it means like, whenever you run into trouble, you have to loudly complain to everyone else and ask for help. You also have to continuously document your own work, which is an enormous burden above and beyond the actual doing of, you know, actually making things. And it's a difficult case to make to people that are working really hard with all of their available time resources that they should stop and ask for and tell everyone what's going on. Because in the long game, that's going to pay off, you know, getting more people involved is the only way we're going to solve all of these problems. So, yeah, we're trying to make, you know, social systems, especially sort of redefining the asking of questions. I think that's the thing that is most underappreciated in, if you can ask a question and if you can then articulate that question and continue to iterate on asking a more and more detailed set of questions, then that's like, I mean, that's the heart of the entire matter and we need to really be building that up as a form of making, you know, the asking of questions. Because we can't just rely on people who are saying, oh, I know everything, you know, the sort of, you know, tyranny of the experts who dominate the process, as opposed to people who really know the problem and can sort of bitterly explore that problem space because that's what's really going to lead to a good solution. So I guess just one thing I'm missing is like, how do you guys define success? That's a lot to do. A recent example of that is we have this oil testing kit trying to distinguish different oil pollutants and we have been in the process of testing the oils and testing the kit at the same time. We're basically trying to do, you know, it's like a circular problem, right? So I think just, you know, breaking down into very small sections and tackling them one at a time. But at the end of the day, I think you have to look at outcomes and I think that's why Gretchen is involved. Yeah, I mean, I would also say the evaluation component is something that we've kind of been harking on for the last year because we're a new model that's pulling together a lot of kind of disparate things and trying to make it work. So we have a three-year evaluation project going right now to do, you know, a snapshot evaluation of Public Lab, you know, what the community looks like because 6,000 people, that's great, but we're more interested in how deeply engaged people are in structures rather than the numbers. And then building an evaluation framework that we can use within Public Lab to do our own metrics building and then also evaluation system that we can share out with other groups that are interested in working in this model that they can use to build into their programming. So we'll continue to share information as it comes, but we're still in those kind of early phases. Thank you. Your examples show that you have worked in situations after the disaster. Have you done any kind of work before a disaster? So preventative type work. I mean, that's the direction that we're heading. We've been around as an organization and as a group for going on six years now. The technology development portion of it. So we're, you know, our initial question around like why aren't there tools that are cost accessible for people was the first hurdle that we needed to tackle. And so we've gotten to a point now that we have, when there is an issue that we might see coming down the pipeline or that might, you know, arise, such as a, let's go back to the hog facility. I, you know, we're going to have a new facility built directly adjacent to X community. The hope is then that we have the tools that people can use to do baseline measurements and to start doing work ahead of time rather than in reaction to, which is, you know, it's really important and especially public health work. Yes, ma'am. You talked about looking at outcomes as a way to see whether your programs are working. One of the ways that you can look at outcomes is by looking at how people or behaviors change. Is this something that you would extend to monitoring people as well in addition to environments? And how would you think about that part of the process? Because obviously there are a lot of public health implications that could be beneficial, but a lot of challenges as well. Right. So I thank your question, like in our tier two with the community projects, that's a very key point where that comes in around, you know, skills lead to aptitude behavior changes. And that can be, you know, within the way that we view an area or if we're talking about, you know, air monitoring, a way that we expose ourselves or don't expose ourselves. So we see that, you know, coming in within the community project setting. Is that what you're referring to or is that? Yeah, but then if the data is available, then you're also monitoring very personal data about people. Does that go into a publicly available database? How do you think through the issues of making that kind of data available? Right. So we work kind of on a community to community basis with data. So if there's, if it's a private set of information, so I can give an example, there's a, one of our organizers has worked in Silwan, which is basically, you know, the Israeli-Palestinian border doing aerial imagery with youth in the area to document and map their community. And because it was identified by that community as being sensitive, it was not released into the public domain. So that's something that we can control. We're working on a platform right now called Where We Breathe. So this is really one of our kind of first forays into asking people for personal health data or like giving people a space to share that kind of personal health data. So we've gone through, and Jeff is one of the developers on it, so you can probably talk more about the privacy aspect. But, you know, going through an entire, like an entire privacy plan and, you know, thinking about what it would mean to like offer a place both for a study versus a place for people to share that information, what's available for others to see, how can people connect, because that's the purpose of it, is to connect people that are having similar exposure issues. Yeah, so it's a, but it's, you know, kind of per project and per community that we work with. I have a little, I have a question about a little bit of your relationship with government or more like the lawmaking process, because it seems like your work is definitely for making a change by data driven, data driven change. But realistically, in order to make a real change in the world, we need to change the law or policies. I'm not sure if you mentioned about it. I just wonder how you channel your effort, these kind of all innovative effort into the lawmaking process, or what is your relationship with the legislative body at the local or any federal level? Yeah, I think this gets back to your your comment about, you know, maybe there maybe there isn't replication or scale on a local level, but that that type of like, bigness of it can happen in that that advocacy towards policy change, or law, yeah, or changes with the law. Because right now, I mean, we, you know, any type of pre-lit or lit work, or any type of work that engages with policies is very it's incredibly local and it's incredibly issue specific. Are they accepting or kind of? What is their attitude towards your work? Of government groups? Yeah. Well, it's it's I mean Louisiana, don't get me started. You know, but, for instance, we have a really strong positive relationship with members of the EPA, especially in their research and development group. We've seen the EPA still within citizen science, like, you know, your research question, you help us collect data, but moving towards the recognition of community monitoring methods and tools to to be a part of their work. You know, so we're kind of just we're trying to figure out what kind of relationship building we can do. But it's, you know, it's always, especially in environmental policy, you get into stakeholders that are very purely business minded. And as soon as there's an issue that might affect the economic profit of a corporation, you're, you know, you're going to not make some people happy. And so, you know, I can't make a blanket statement about our relationship, especially in local areas. But it's, you know, it's rough going sometimes. Mary. I had a question. Continuing conversation on success definition of success outcome. How does the community participate in defining those and are there ways, I mean, there's clear successes like a policy change or some kind of economic, you know, decision that or but then there are also other less, have you seen other types of definitions of success being created by the community? Yeah, I mean, I think, and using community science and these kind of participatory methods, it's, it's really broad ranging. So the skills and aptitudes, you know, changes that she brought up was is one of them. So even, you know, being able to use data to have a seat as a stakeholder with, you know, the executive committee of the corporation and your local DP or DQ, that can be seen as that's that is my success. And that's what I want to achieve. Having, you know, 10 people show up to my community meeting because I'm seeing, you know, something alarming in my children. And I, you know, I want to figure out if this is something that might be a trend that's starting to happen. That could be a success. You know, media stories in Louisiana, communities, you know, push for relocation. So having a corporation, you know, pay for the entire movement of their their neighborhood to a totally different place. But those are all, you know, very community defined. And that's our goal is to support what those actions look like. We build in, we build a lot of workshop structures. And one of our very first ones that we, you know, suggest to people is like, sit down and think about like why you're why you're taking data, like why you're collecting information, because we don't want to promote information gathering without a specific purpose in mind. Mary, sorry. I was going to ask if you've had any luck or any interest in reaching out to like service learning classes or using that as a mechanism for maybe a framing that is more about participatory research and participatory action research versus community science, which unfortunately I think kind of still leaves open this idea that there's the science science, but something that would kind of break that framework, a different paradigm. And I've at least in some of the best cases, there are plenty of worst cases like service learning can create some of that. Yeah, I think that that's interesting. One of the things that I've definitely noticed is we don't so we don't do interns at all. I am part of the reason for not having those kind of formal relationships is that we find that when people like jump in and it's like here's a project for you to work on, there's not that they're not coming with that framework of like I'm in a community to collaborate, I'm leaving my expertise, I'm leaving my science, I'm leaving my engineering at the door. And you know, I'm working with a group of people. And I think we've talked about like when I injured has a really wonderful case study that she wrote about specifically engineers in service learning positions and how hard it is for them because of society's expectations of what an engineer and a scientist is to leave that behind when they're doing, you know, these like, I'm here to work and help with the community. So I definitely see it as like a really interesting place to start and to start breaking down some of those barriers. And I'd love to if you have suggestions about how to do that. And I think the two of you also seem like you're working on that as well. That'd be great. Yes, I'm fascinated in this process of knowledge production and learning that happens in this module of community science. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about like youth engagement that has happened if you have done like partnerships with the schools or youth organizations because the even the tools that you create on the kids have this playful element that is very appealing to youth. So I'm curious to hear more about that. Yeah, I mean, when we kind of conceptualized public lab, we were not thinking about youth engagement. I mean, hardly whatsoever. We, you know, when people would bring their kids and you were at their barn raising, there was kids there. But I think we would still be sort of surprised when, you know, we get a tweet that was like, Hey, my kids using your spectrometer for a science fair project. Yeah, parts and crafts and summer bill of Massachusetts. This is an early version of a spectrometer doing a children's workshop. But I think it wasn't innate because we're like environmental justice, you know, we need data that's impactful. However, especially with the development of our kids program, I mean, we've distributed something, I think it's like 28,000 kids. And a lot of them are going to different educational groups ranging from K to 12 to higher ed. And there's also especially, I mean, in the United States, specifically, this kind of shift that we're starting to see where people are interested in connecting learning, so science learning back into specific community, you know, issues that kids might experience as a way to teach science in a stronger way. And so kind of with that, we're starting to think about how can we, you know, without diverging too far and spreading our staff, you know, tooth and how can we build in a stronger support network for, you know, K to 12 education as well. Sorry, Matthew, I think, do you still have a question or just curious because you talked about the different demographics that you're engaging in some of the areas where you're having trouble, but it's just curious which demographics really took to it, were they a lot of retirees, people that are already like educated or were there a lot of like hacker types that maybe went to vocational schools and things like that? So I think it, well, it's, you know, our online community and our offline community have, I split them because that really there is a bit of a demographic difference. However, I think we lean towards with our online community and I'm just, I've looked at like our organizer group and looked at percentages of people who I would put in whatever categories. And then hoped it's been a larger reflection of, you know, those other 6000 people. This is why we're building an evaluation framework. But we, I mean, we probably have a good like 45% of people that have some type of research interest, whether they're affiliated with the institution or not. So, I mean, people who are like from a DIY bio hacker space would be included in that group. I would think about 20% are community organizers. But I would up that percentage because a lot of the people who are community organizers in public lab don't participate online. So they're, you know, that very hyper local group. And then we have a kind of DIY maker pool slash library and slash educators that makes up the the rest of the demographic. So when we have better numbers on that, I will I'll let you know, but it's a it's an interesting question and one that I think has changed over the years as well. But that we try to be very conscious of because we don't want to lean too far towards one expertise and, you know, cut out other voices. This discussion helped me. I think understand something I was sort of puzzling about the difference between citizen science and community science. And I was thinking of my own community, which is kept cut and admittedly a somewhat privileged community, but where there's less of a social divide that you might find, say in the Boston area or Louisiana. And as a result, the there are many people citizens who are themselves scientists or lawyers. And there are scientists who are part time residents or want to be. And there are there's a harbor conference every fall, and where citizens present, schoolchildren present, scientists present. And it's the lines between who comes up with the question, who controls the data, start to blur, which I think in a good way, because I think the citizen science community science is not only two different models for what to do. It's also a strong indicator of social and economic divides completely in the country. That somehow, ultimately, I guess, I would like to see us find ways to, I mean, this is a little bit further out, but like to find ways to address those divides as much as having, I mean, I love the community science model, but I just, I think we also need to think about those larger economic issues. Yeah, I mean, early, after the the BP spill, we had a group very early on, like in winter of 2011 in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, which is an EPA superfund site, pick up the, you know, kind of look at the methodologies we used and then use them in Brooklyn. And I just, I remember myself having a kind of like a personal quandary around capacity and like thinking about resources and, you know, things like money and time burden between these two different groups. And it was a, you know, my setting that I've come from is very rooted in environmental justice. I'm so looking at disproportionate effects of pollution because of lots of extenuating factors that's heavily, you know, kind of bounded in the south. And thinking about the differences and what I was seeing in the Gowanus Canal, which was a, you know, kind of like you're seeing with Cape Cod, which at the time 2011 was kind of an up and coming Brooklyn community where people had the time and the ability and some of the financial resources to spend, you know, doing this type of monitoring and, you know, question building. And so I think it's, yeah, it's definitely, you know, something that we're also very engaged in is, you know, trying to expand these definitions. So thanks for, I'm glad that that triggered something for you. We have time for one last question. Yes. So one of the other things that we struggled with quite a bit is we also have an online community of roughly 18,000 scientists and engineers broadly defined. And we're trying to figure out ways in bringing them close to their communities on projects that communities have needs for in terms of any sort of scientific and technical expertise. The problem that we run up against is it takes really a very long time for the formulation of the question itself. So I wonder if you experienced that or it's as simple as my water looks contaminated. Can you help me measure the pollutants in it or the quality of it? I'll just give you an example quickly so that it puts it in some context. We are working with a group in Houston and it's in the Greater Houston area includes Manchester and the ship channel. And we've been working with them for I think close to six months at this point trying to formulate what is, how can we bring scientists and local scientists and engineers to help address the cumulative impacts of all the polluting industries that they're exposed to have been for decades. And that's a challenge that we've seen in Houston, in Southern California, in Minnesota, actually how to define the question and then recruit help from scientists, engineers, researchers. Have you run into problems like this or how do you go about addressing them? I think maybe not exactly that problem. And it's not necessarily a problem, but I think one of the things that we have seen is that the question tends to change. You know, environmental crises can be very like slow moving and take a long time. And for instance, we've been working in Western Wisconsin around Fraxan, for the last couple of years. And the original question that community groups had was around like, what am I breathing from this fine silica dust? And there was no, the DNR was not doing any monitoring. But then, you know, like about seven, eight months into us working on that very specific thing related to their concern, it's switched over to, well, how do we know like what's coming into our water from these mining sites? And so then there's an interest and a kind of a new click that we also built on to the project in the end. But yeah, it's, you know, I think it's part of what we've done is build up resource sets that help people think through like the process to get to that question. And then staying with it, I think is like the part for us that gets a bit more complicated. But I love, I mean, I'd love to think through specific examples. I mean, Houston's a really interesting one. Oh, sorry. Okay, thank you very much. Thanks everybody for coming.