[okfestival-discuss] open science, sensors, global experiments session of wonder and magic

[Greg Austic]

Ok, got your attention :)

So I am the project manager of PhotosynQ, a platform to allow people to
create global experiments about plants and plant health.  I am interested
in doing a session about a topic related to citizen based global sensor
networks (not surprisingly), of which there are many many (like air quality
egg, or publiclab.org and spectralworkbench.org, or even quick one-off ones
like the cicada tracker (http://project.wnyc.org/cicadas/).

Maybe there's other folks interested in collaborating on a session about
this topic?  Here's some session topics I think are interesting (feel free
to add/comment/change):

1) If we could crowd-source measure anything, what would it be?  Poeple are
already working on air pollution and concentrations of gases in air,
environmental pollution, plant photosynthesis, birds, the timing of plant
flowering, the contents of our food, and lots of other stuff.  But I think
it's worth imagining a world without physical limitation, what would we
choose to measure and why?  Sometimes the things we would imagine are
hardest to measure are more possible than we think!

2) There are many different projects replicating a lot of the same work
(communication protocols, methods of displaying data, etc. etc.).  Could we
create a common plaform in which anyone can connect a device, or a common
language / protocol... or common devices... or some combination?  If so,
how do you then maintain data quality?...  is that even feasible or
desirable?

3) How do you (and should you at all) motivate people to take part in these
sensor networks?  In some cases, their information is very important to
everyone (identifying environmental contaminants) or perhaps valuable to
only a single company (imagine someone uses a sensor to identify a plant
with unique characteristics which is then used by a private company to
create a new commercial cultivar), or maybe it's only important in the
broader scientific sense (a global survey of weather data)... can you give
them badges... or maybe even money, or these kinds of incentives seriously
distort the network?

Any other ideas/thoughts/takers?

Greg

-- 
Greg Austic

2198 Seminole Dr.
Okemos, MI 48864
(919) 545 1083

Work -www.photosynq.org
Personal - www.austiclabs.com
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