This page collects tips, guides, and documentation about using the Public Lab website. As a collaborative community, we are always refining our collaboration infrastructure. Please read on to learn how, and leave a comment if you'd like to help out -- thank you!

Basic workflows

• On this website, people can browse, sign up, follow some topics, post a note, leave a comment.
• More advanced users can create new topics, host discussions and knowledge bases around them, post activities, tutorials and events, and create Q&As.
• Public Lab's Moderators guide community interactions according to our Code of Conduct.

Overview

PublicLab.org is a content management system for the Public Lab research community. The website hosts a collection of forum-like groups of people, posts, and wiki pages, each focused on a topic like water-quality or disaster-response. It includes a variety of features that help the Public Lab community collaborate on environmental activism, research, technology design and documentation, as well as community organizing.

Audience & accessibility

The code is organized and structured around inclusive and welcoming community values, as part of our efforts to ensure that historically excluded groups are centered and supported in the crafting of this software project. Designed for a general audience with no particular familiarity with web conventions, priority is given to very low barrier interaction — low floor and wide walls over high ceiling.

Key features

• Rich text authoring environment with image upload for creating posts and wiki pages
• Subscriptions and notifications for followed content
• Dynamic inline collections, maps, and tables using short-code-style inline power tags
• Embeddable interactive listings of activities, posts, questions on external sites
• Geographic tagging of posts and profiles for place-based organizing, with location privacy
• A Q&A portal for peer-based problem solving
• Content moderation systems and dashboard for comments and posts
• Print, screen reader, and mobile display accessibility
• Usage statistics system with graphing per-timeframe analytics
• Threaded comments, emoji reactions, and reply-by-email
• OAuth-based login with Twitter, Facebook, GitHub and Google accounts, and OpenID-based unified Single-Sign-On (SSO) for MapKnitter and Spectral Workbench
• Customizable profile pages, posting templates, internationalization, translation into 10+ languages, standard API

Subtopics

Authoring

These pages provide documentation on creating content on this website:

Utility pages

Questions

---

Activities

Add an activity or request an activity guide you don't see listed

---

More pages related to the website