What are you thoughts on this experiment so far?

[gyaresu]

@greenpeace/open-learning

So by now you should see that my cunning plan is to just get you using and comfortable with how GitHub works.

I know many of you haven't had a lot of time to play but I think this repo should be a good onboarding process for any of our colleagues in the future that are interested in Open Source.

Can you think of how this type of distributed collaboration might be useful for Engagement purposes?

What other projects might work well for you here?

[Brianfit]

Sensors. I watched with interest the development of the "Air Quality Egg" by Sensemakers here in Amsterdam and wondered how low we might apply that model to, e.g. distributed water quality monitoring in China. Could we challenge hackers to figure out and design the cheapest way to build a user-friendly sensor -- maybe on an arduino or raspberry pi platform but ideally using recycled parts -- old cell phone screens for display, eg. -- that we could deploy to folks along the rivers where textile manufacturers are pumping effluent, monitor for heavy metals and specific toxins, give an easy visual cue to community residents so they know what's in the water, and report back aggregate data, either through on-board communications or, e.g. a qcode display that can be captured and sent by the monitorer's own smartphone. Engagement at three levels: hardware design, software design, and a riverfolk monitoring network. Lots of challenges to make something cheap, easily produced in quantity, and reliable in field conditions. But hey, I'd jump into a project like this with both feet and I'm sure many in the maker community would as well.

[gyaresu]

Sensors are quite often 'front of mind' in the conversations around 'innovation' that I've participated in.
Particularly at the Global Detox meeting.
Exactly as you say, toxins, air quality, water quality. All important and very desirable sets of information.

From speaking to the science unit and Paul in particular it is feasible that the level of accuracy can be achieved through having vast numbers of low-accuracy devices over the current high-accuracy €20K units. These types of units for air quality means there are only one or two in some of the most polluted cities in India (therefore the world).

So what are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

[Gingerdude]

I'm just reading/following along! You guys had me thinking of this project I once backed: https://rfcx.org. I'm not too much of a hardware person, but the concept seems simple and it seemed to have a fair amount of engagement all-in-all.

[Brianfit]

If anyone cares to help me with a side project as a nice way to practice, I've started a project to create a web interface that draws data from a cooperatively built google spreadsheet. (The key is Tabletop.js which does the data scrpaing)

The Story Team has been assembling creative exercises for workshops (along with mob lab and vol lab) and putting them in a "database" of sorts -- anyone can add exercises to the spreadsheet, but now at 76 entries it's a bit unwieldy and I'd like to put a nice interface on the front end and allow people to selectively display subsets of data: ice-breaker exercises only, small-group exercises, etc.

I've gotten the code to proof-of-concept stage. But I'm a hunt-and-paste Javascript coder. What takes me an hour probably takes some of you ten minutes. Any help welcome, I'll toodle along on my own on this one quite happily but thought it might be a fun cooperative project to work on together and to practice a cooperative build with a real world application goal. The Git is here.

[gyaresu]

👍 Pull request submitted.

Linking here so other folks can follow it: Brianfit/WorkshopInABox#1

[Brianfit]

Woot! Added the challenge label. Gareth has added amazingly to the html/javascript front end of the Workshop in a Box Exercise Catalogue. The project is nearly ready for prime time! We in the story team will be taking this out to audiences in the Vol Lab, Mob Lab, Global Engagement Department, and other places where creative facilitation is done. I'd like to use it to promote open source development within the organisation and point to it as a living, working example of how projects go faster and get better when you develop this way. Be great to expand the contributors beyond me and Gareth! Come play, any of you. Fork the code! Improve my HTML! Move that search box from the left of the nav bar to the right with your awesome Bootstrap/CSS skills. Update Gareth's old skool use of the

  <b>  

tag to

   <strong>   

Seriously, I'd love to see this simple page become the product of many. And I'm really stuck on why the bottom right graphic is mobile-unfriendly to IOS/Safari. Even if all you do is improve a couple lines of code, be great to have you as part of this project.

[gyaresu]

👍