The PLOTS nonprofit arm received a grant from the Shpilman Institute for Photography, and has to submit updates every 3 months.

• Sept 2011: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_mQZHNR9hrq5Xr7SbRilnArKTVMQecWTNJ9jx7JZEAE/edit
• Jan 2012: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vPdY99BScAgu5-xtZJLkuKNN7m6olyXN7Wyti7HSN_Q/edit

by May 1, 2012 - the research, in the form of an article or extended essay delivered as a Word document or as a PDF entitled, in your case, “Activist Uses of Emergent Hacker Technologies for Environmental Justice: Investigating Communities of Practice.” This should be accompanied by an abstract of the text and a summary of the research process We wish to stress that The SIP encourages the publication of the research. Please make sure that in any publication of the research and/or any part of the research, The SIP's support will be acknowledged

We're going to do an article for ACME, due by April 1st, and submit that to SIP in May.

ACME: The April 1 date is when we'll expect the full paper, which ideally will incorporate/address our comments. Note that our original correspondences said March 1, but we extended the deadline since our comments came much later than expected. ACME's instructions are for papers to be between 5,000 and 8,000 words, so there's some flexibility there. If needed, more guidelines are available on their site (http://www.acme-journal.org/Author_Instructions.html).

Abstract

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tZcQp0DvVnnQRvwPFVmEtuMLsLm26q9Vsy-IJ2VlYTo/edit

Grassroots Mapping, a Public Laboratory project, began in 2010 in Lima, Peru. Using balloons and kites to launch cameras as “community satellites”, Grassroots Mapping engages in local-level, activist remote sensing -- building upon the critical cartography and participatory mapping movements to investigate local environmental and social issues with inexpensive “Do-It-Yourself” technologies. Grassroots Mapping methods have since been used during the BP oil spill, at the Gowanus Canal Superfund site in New York, in Jerusalem, Santiago, Chile, and Butte, Montana. This article discusses the ethics of data openness and ownership and the development of community participation models using three case studies -- the Gulf Coast region, Butte, MT and Brooklyn, NY. We further discuss the need for local ownership, stewardship, and long-term engagement to avoid the recent trend towards “crowdharvesting” -- that is, extractive crowdsourcing which neglects the interpretive and discursive role in creating information to which communities are entitled. We additionally explore the over-identification of “locals” and the inherent risks of treating communities as “living labs” in the wake of recent enthusiasm for “citizen science” and the use of open-source crowd-powered data gathering.

Since its inception in 2010, Public Laboratory has transformed from just Grassroots Mapping into a community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation through low cost, DIY methods. The affordable DIY tools which our open community develops has enabled hundreds of people to independently collect and interpret data, thereby bolstering their evaluative capacity and improving local access to critical information on environmental issues. Our model represents a shift in how citizens interact with data: they may engage at any level of Bloom’s taxonomy, including framing questions and interpreting results. This stands in contrast to other citizen science projects, whose participants are often limited to performing a narrow set of tasks such as categorizing data or logging observations. Through the process of first-hand data creation and analysis, PLOTS community researchers build expertise in critical thinking and technologies with broader application to their role as civic participants.

The boarder impact of PLOTS longterm is to develop and enact a model of science learning and engagement that stretches through everyday life, from an individuals home to their ability to shape their communities. We are calling this process of community based technology development and DIY environmental research ‘civic science’ in the spirit of the 2005 article "Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology" by Kim and Mike Fortun. The term ‘civic science’ has been used to describe science “that questions the state of things, rather than a science that simply serves the state” (Fortun and Fortun 2005: 50). Too often in the history of science, and particularly in environmental health science, researchers have distanced themselves from the researched. Particularly in disciplines such as toxicology, laboratory based research and epidemiology have favored the socially and economically powerful (Murphy 2006, Allen 2001, Fortun and Fortun 2005). PLOTS attempts to develop alternative dynamics and processes for research and development around environmental health issues that enable non-specialists to get involved in -- and even direct -- the questioning of ‘the state of things’. Central to refining our approach to ‘civic science’ is the need to go beyond simply finding and supporting "users" of tools, to the development of what might be termed ‘recursive publics’ -- where the community is aware of and works continually at refining the structures that bring them together (Kelty 2008).

In this paper we look at how this happens at three Public Laboratory research centers that have been incorporated for different lengths of time: the Gulf Coast that we’ve been working at for two years, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY where we have worked for the past year and Butte, Montana, where site work began in Summer 2011. In Butte, Montana, Public Laboratory research has engaged three communities in the corridor in a shared process of investigation and interpretation. In addition to the mapping events, grassroots mappers attend Butte’s Centerville neighborhood meetings, inviting residents to participate in oral history interviews to discuss what about Centerville should be documented. Through both mapping and community discussion, the Centerville PLOTS chapter developed several long-term goals -- including organizing a neighborhood association and beginning to fundraise for small improvement grants. The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York, a recently declared Superfund site, has become the center of a remarkable collaboration between technology enthusiasts and environmental activists, who are using balloon photography and spectral imaging of phytoremediation sites to challenge extant data on what is one of the most contaminated waterways in the US. Barataria Bay, Louisiana, has become a central site in the largest ongoing oil spill documentation movement involving dozens of balloon photographers across the Gulf Coast. This site highlights activists’ ability to repeatedly image a large area in order to measure environmental change as the crisis moves into a stage of remediation.

Through the work at each of these sites, we seek to support alternative models of engagement and transparency in research models where the first step is to decide together what the question is. Ideally, the inhabitants of a particular site identify the need to do research (gain deeper understanding of the phenomena in their environment) and are supported in that pursuit by professional scientists and tech developers. Plugging citizens in at higher levels of learning shifts the agency in “citizen science” projects from volunteering on someone else’s project to undertaking your own. Such initiatives, while difficult, have the potential to leverage residents’ place-based expertise gained through lived experience via long-term and up-close observation. Within this model, sensitive points to consider include “what constitutes being a local,” and “what is a non-expert?”

What if the power of modern online collaboration and affordable / accessible technology was directed to support "nature-loving" "amateurs" of the modern day akin to those in the 16th to 18th centuries (for example, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Buffon and Darwin) instead of being used to harness such people as inputs for the institutionalized science that has grown up in the resulting centuries (whose expensive tools have removed rigorous inquiry from everyday civic life)? Public Lab will discuss in this article how we seek to support civic science through democratizing tools for environmental inquiry and building a global community of support among place-based communities seeking to learn more about their immediate environment, the technical experts that can customize and calibrate the tools, and professional scientists that can add contextual information.