Public Lab Wiki documentation



Website Basics

This is a revision from November 29, 2017 18:58. View all revisions
3 | 15 | | #15264

This page collects some basic introduction and guidance to using the Public Lab website. There are many ways to use the site, but this page focuses on supporting newcomers.

Purpose

The Public Lab website is being continuously refined, but it's purpose is to:

support a diverse range of people to exchange knowledge about environmental issues that affect people, and collaborate on ways of monitoring them, organizing around them, and supporting one another in these activities.


diagram.png

(Draft diagram from this post)

Organization

The website is organized into several areas, including:

Questions and Answers

All questions are collected on PublicLab.org/questions, and also displayed by topic across many parts of the site. There are no "bad" questions -- if you don't understand something, or can't find something, please ask! Newcomers have a unique ability to see things that have been overlooked, so we need your help to ask these kinds of questions.

Methods

This word means different things to different people, but our Methods page collects many different approaches to monitoring environmental problems, from off-the-shelf commercial tools to in-progress Do-It-Yourself techniques, to community organizing and advocacy tactics.

It's not a comprehensive list, so please ask a question if you can think of one you want to see on there, or have related resources to share!

Blog

The Public Lab Blog is a place where we share stories from across our networks and communities -- a place to stay updated as well as to remember the people and communities working every day to drive all of these efforts forward. See our main Blog page to learn more and to submit an article.

Screenshot_2017-11-29_at_1.38.01_PM.png

Dashboard

Your dashboard is where you can see all the latest activity on Public Lab, for a sense of what's going on across the site in the past week. It features updates and new posts, whether they're activities, events, or questions.


Profiles

Each person with a Public Lab account has a profile page -- for example, see @hagitkeysar, @zengirl2, or @nedhorning -- which shows:

  • activities and notes they've authored or co-authored
  • questions and answers they've posted
  • comments they've made
  • their optional photo and bio

You can add tags to your own profile page to add information -- more on this coming soon!


Topic pages

Topic pages, or tag pages, collect all the activity around a given topic name, as represented by the "tags" each page is annotated with. See the tags section of this page for an example of tags.

To get to a Topic page, click on the tag. You'll be directed to a page like this one, for the topic "Sampling":

https://publiclab.org/tag/sampling

This page collects:

  • activities and notes
  • questions
  • contributors
  • other content

and displays it, most recent first. It's a good way to get a "snapshot" view of what's happening on a topic. But it relies on people adding the related tags (using the tag input form, which you must be logged in to see) to each page.


Questions

If you have questions about the website, please ask here!

Title Author Updated Likes Comments
Spectral Workbench: Can't search (502 Bad Gateway) @dlwilson1a about 3 years ago 4
We are having trouble with our map knitting @jerejack0507 over 3 years ago 3
How can the account be deleted? @tupaschoal over 3 years ago 0
Problem with Photo Monitoring Plugin on Fiji @SamWolfe about 4 years ago 3
Is our error reporting adequate? @icarito over 4 years ago 7
How do you write and post in the public lab community? Asking for our developers! @emash over 4 years ago 4
Changing my username @sam_ettenborough over 4 years ago 1
How can I create and work on my own issue in Github? @bsugar over 5 years ago 4
How are the Q&A's tied together in the website database? @bsugar over 5 years ago 3
How can I delete a User Account? @niklasjordan over 5 years ago 3
How do I interpret the relationship between the schema.rb file and the models? @bsugar almost 6 years ago 4
Uploaded pictures always stays vertical @aemilius89 almost 6 years ago 6
Link to notes tagged not working @asnow over 6 years ago 1
Moderate questions with machine learning. @Aleksi12358 over 6 years ago 3
It is impossible to connect to our pad: http://pad.publiclab.org/p/atuqueetva PLEASE HELP @urijosa over 6 years ago 2
Search function operating strangely? @gretchengehrke over 6 years ago 2
How do we address the issue of people posting the same or very similar questions? @stevie over 6 years ago 5
Social Integration of Public Labs with FB @bansal_sidharth2996 over 6 years ago 3
Error with showing contributors for a tag? @gretchengehrke almost 7 years ago 1
How are the questions sorted on the 'Unanswered' tab? @stevie almost 7 years ago 1
How can we get hashtags on research notes so they are found on Twitter? @zengirl2 almost 7 years ago 2
Is it possible to generate a word cloud based on a tag's related tags? @pdhixenbaugh about 8 years ago 2
Activity Grids formatting - what will be their final form? @pdhixenbaugh about 8 years ago 10
What goes into choosing a topic name? @liz about 8 years ago 2