New Partnership!

Posted on by Kat Kavanagh

We are happy to announce that we’ll be working with Mobile Baykeepers over the next two months to work on a pollution reporting component to our app! Thank you so much to Casi, Cade, Jason and the rest of the team for your enthusiasm and support. Now we have a lot of work to do!

Pollution Reporting

Many citizen science groups are manually collecting pollution reports. It’s time intensive and requires a lot of people power to get the details right. While we don’t think that our new tool will eliminate the need for human contact, it will solve a lot of problems inherent in the current process:

  • How to determine their exact coordinates so you know where to look (We use GPS)
  • How to ask them the right questions while they are on-site so that they observe what is around them
  • How to make it easy for them to take photos, record details
  • How to make it easier for organizations to learn about issues (we plan on building a simple notification system)
  • How to make it easier for citizens and organizations to keep track of their conversation
  • How to see at a glance where issues are (a more holistic view)
  • How to allow citizens to remain anonymous to the public if they wish

We will be working with a few different groups, including Mobile Baykeeper, Ottawa Riverkeeper, Rideau Valley Conservation Authority and Association de la Rivière Magog to make sure that the new system remains flexible enough to accommodate the different needs of various citizen groups.  We’re always thinking ahead too: this will be phase 1, which we will test over the summer. In the fall and winter of this coming year, we’ll be looking at phase 2 which includes rewarding citizens who helped resolve issues, more robust admin tools and more.

Is your group interested in helping out?

We want the system to work for as many groups as possible, so if your group is already collecting pollution and issue reports (via email, phone, web form etc), please get it touch so that we can use your needs as part of our test process! We are looking at launching this feature for sometime in June.