Contribute

Public Lab is an open community -- you're welcome to simply sign up and start contributing in a variety of ways. If you are interested in a more formal collaboration, just ask staff@publiclaboratory.org.

Some ways to be a part of the community:

email the list to say hello, describe your interests, and offer your skills to existing projects
ask for help with a public science issue and reach out for collaborators
post a research note describing the starting point for your project
post a research note describing new developments in your project
add to the knowledge base in Public Lab by editing pages (most are editable by any registered user, wiki-style)
connect with or organize a local group to investigate environmental, social, and other issues in a participatory way
contribute to better documentation (tutorials, diagrams, even just offering critique) of the tools we all use
co-author articles & papers (in research journals, newspaper op-eds, magazines, etc) with other community members
co-author grants for research and for working with specific communities
adopt and contribute to units of our curriculum (mainly the mapping curriculum at this point) in universities, schools, and public workshops -- use some of our resources and add your own. Also see the guides we're starting to develop for our tools.

Areas we need specific help in:

organizing meetups with residents in our partner communities to test new tools and gather data with proven ones
developing better and more comprehensive documentation & tutorials around our existing tools
archiving and publishing consistent data sets (from spreadsheets and geotiffs to interviews with community members)
outreach to research, policy, and legal institutions (Environmental Law Clinics, for example) to get our data adopted and used