It is week 7, and our work to review and advance information about oil and gas water monitoring is well under way. Here are a few projects that are currently in the works:

• OpenHour: November's OpenHour, on Tuesday, Nov 12 at 8pm EST, will focus on our research area. We're emailing out invitations to some leaders in the oil and gas water field, and would love for anyone from the Public Lab community to join, too.
• We'll be hosting another event in New Orleans in a couple of weeks. This time, we'll drill down into some of our testing methods and practice predicting water quality test outcomes with qualitative observations. We may try out some Arduino sensors, cheap handheld sensors, spectrometry, and chromatography. We'll also talk about uses for Hanby kits. Students, educators, and citizen scientists all welcome -- more details to come.
• I am continuing to build connections for interviews about this work, including with folks in Environment America and Environment Pennsylvania, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Fractracker, Healthy Gulf, Nunez CC Coastal Studies Department, and a couple of Waterkeepers. More to come, and always open to connecting with more people in the field.
• The Coalition Against Death Alley's march ended this week, so I've been thinking a lot about the intersection of advocacy with science and policy. What is the role of scientists in supporting advocacy? If our goal is to obtain data for political or legal change, what is the best data to collect? And how rigorous do our methods need to be? I came across this great guide from Tulane's Environmental Law Clinic. I'll post more thoughts and information in a research note this week.