Getting started

Welcome to the PLOTS research community

By signing up, you've joined a diverse group of community researchers and tapped into a lot of grassroots expertise. We're excited to have your contributions! Feel free to introduce yourself and reach out to others in the community for collaborations or advice.

We also hope that you will help to build our growing online research literature by posting informal research notes or adding documentation to our wiki. See below for more on posting to the website.

Mailing lists

If you did not opt-out when you signed up, you have been subscribed to the Public Laboratory mailing list, as well as the Grassroots Mapping mailing list. These are open discussion lists.

publiclaboratory@googlegroups.com is a general civic science community mailing list. Feel free to post ideas, ask questions, call for collaborations, or offer help to others.

grassrootsmapping@googlegroups.com is a mapping-specific list, and tends to be focused on balloon mapping, the related tools and software, and is often used to organize mapping trips or ask for advice or collaboration in mapping projects.

Using and contributing to PublicLaboratory.org

The Public Laboratory website is where our community is developing open-source documentation and literature around our DIY civic science research. Post a research note about your work or to keep track of links and research documents. Create a wiki page to add to our growing body of open source science documentation.

Editing the wiki

To make a wiki page, you can just create a link to a new page in the URL format "http://publiclaboratory.org/wiki/your-page-name-here" and visit that page while logged in. It will prompt you to create a new page. You can also use the link in the left-hand sidebar: http://publiclaboratory.org/page/add. Tips for adding images to pages is here.

You can also edit any wiki page by clicking the "Edit" tab above the title. You'll only be able to see this tab if you are logged in.

Here's our overall sitemap.
Here's a list of useful pages in this site. Welcome!