As we marketing agencies look towards maximising a Brands reach or just quantifying Justin Bieber’s latest snaffu through hashtags, there are agents among us seeking to make our lives better by the very same technologies.
Nerds for Nature, are ‘bringing together technologists and environmental professionals to collaboratively build awesome tools to understand, protect, and revive the natural world’.
On September 8, 2013, 3,111 acres around the summit of Mt. Diablo went up in flames. While the charred landcape can appear alarming, fire is actually a natural part of the mountain’s ecology, and many plants actually require fire to reproduce.
Inspired by Monitor Change, Nerds For Nature have set about documenting the recovery of Mount Diablo State Park, CA from fire. Onsite, it’s an elegant and analogue solution, with no tech to monitor or support, they are turning park visitors into a remote sensor network.
How? It’s simple: they put up a sign asking people to set their cameras or phones in an angle bracket, take a photo, and post it with a hashtag to Twitter, Instagram, or Flickr. Then Nerds For Nature harvest the photos and create timelapse views of change over time.
You can watch the time-lapse footage here and view Press here.
Moving back into the cities, crowdsourcing new data can create insights that were impossible to collect just a few short years ago.
Living in London and being keen cyclist, the Cycle Atlanta project is of particular interest.
The app uses your phone’s GPS record your routes in real-time, allowing the City of Atlanta to know which routes cyclists prefer. The app also allows users to report problems along their route such as potholes, obstructed bike lanes, etc. The information collected by the app is used by the City of Atlanta to make strategic improvements to bicycle infrastructure, making cycling in Atlanta more pleasant.
Sounds great doesn’t it, the idea that we can influence infrastructure so easily? It very closely resembles the concept of Open Data, and one of it’s key strategies, that of improving governance, or simply the way government works, through sharing and analysing data. We are touched by it’s implications in our everyday lives at a local, cultural and governmental level are staggering. Open Data is the mortar that will enable us to build Smart Cities.
However, the subject is so large that I’ve only tentatively touched upon it here, but I recommend looking at both London’s Open Data Institute (ODI) and Socrata, a Seattle-based cloud software company focused exclusively on democratizing access to government data. Socrata recently released the third edition of its print and digital magazine, Open Innovation – the most recent issue features mature open data programs in Chicago and New York.
Hopefully, this will give you pause for thought, and inspire you to re-imagine how we can collectively use social media and technology to influence change.
This post first appeared on the Jack Morton Worldwide blog