Innovation: Public Lab
USA and international
AAI Domains:
Independent, healthy and secure living (lifelong learning)
Participation in society (voluntary activity, social connectedness)
There are increasing opportunities for people of all ages to play an active role in their local communities by learning new skills and acting as ‘citizen scientists’ on matters of environmental health. Protecting the natural environment and detecting risks to human health from environmental sources is a globally important issue that is being enabled by socially innovative organisations such as Public Lab.
The huge oil spill from the BP Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 affected a huge swathe of coastal areas in the southern states of the USA and beyond. In response to this unfolding environmental disaster, a small group of environmental advocates combined with concerned residents to capture data on the extent of the oil spill in real time.
They used ‘community satellites’ made from balloons and kites with digital cameras to collect real time data on the oil spill. They captured over 100,000 digital images which were stitched together into a map that showed the oil spill spreading day by day that was widely used by the media to highlight the enormity of the environmental disaster. The success of this ‘civic science’ monitoring prompted Shannon Dosemagen, Jeff Warren and Stewart Long to co-found Public Lab to continue and widen the work.
Public Lab is a non-profit community organisation that aims to democratise science research by addressing environmental health issues. It is a community that is open to all citizens who can sign up online and work using an interactive wiki to address local environmental issues of concern. Public Lab provides education, training and support to enable local communities to identify, redress, remediate and create awareness about local environmental health issues.
The organisation has developed a set of simple tools that can generate reliable high quality data on the local environment. There are now 67 local volunteer organisers who have spread from the gulf coast states of the southern USA to numerous states and internationally to Mexico, Brazil, Israel, Lebanon, Australia, Spain and the UK. The core staff at Public Lab has grown to 13 highly qualified and dedicated environmental advocates due to funding from a wide variety of charitable foundations and commercial income from the sale of civic kits enabling local groups to monitor the local environment from the air.
In terms of active ageing, Public Lab provides opportunities for voluntary activity in monitoring potentially serious environmental hazards that can pose a risk to public health. It provides opportunities for individuals of all ages to learn new skills through using the civic kits to plot and map changes in the local environment. It has also fostered the growth of an online community and supported the development of numerous local groups of people who work together as citizen scientists for the environment and thus build stronger social connections.