Join us for the first WILDLABS Open Source Solutions Community Meeting!

Hi everybody!

The WILDLABS Open Source Solutions group is hosting a community meeting on December 4th at 1 pm EST / 6 pm UTC, with featured presentations from organizations such as the Open Environmental Data Project, Creative Commons, and the University of Bristol.

The meeting will focus on some key underlying themes within the open science movement, precisely that of collaborative, community-based approaches to solving environmental problems and the role of open source technologies in climatic and ecological research.

We invite you to join this one-hour meeting to learn more about the role of open source in studying the natural world!

Register for the meeting here!

Meet the presenters

We are excited to host the following three presenters as part of our inaugural community meeting:

Katie Hoeberling, Open Environmental Data Project

I am the Director of Policy Initiatives at the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP), which works at the intersection of environmental justice (EJ), collaborative science, and governance. I bring together communities, researchers, and government actors to redesign environmental data systems to strengthen policy and civic participation. At this meeting, I’ll share the challenges communities and researchers face in open and collaborative EJ research and how “commoning” approaches can build trust, accountability, and ultimately more impactful science.

Dr. Monica Granados, Director of Open Science at Creative Commons

It’s important to consider that a necessary condition to addressing the climate crisis is having access to the knowledge about it. Yet, only half of research papers on climate change are open access. While open access is often and unfortunately equated with Article Processing Charges there are many free tools you can employ to make your research open. I’ll speak about Creative Commons’ Paper Pledge for the Planet an initiative leveraging open and free infrastructure to make climate research open.

Dr. Pen-Yuan Hsing, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Open source solutions are increasingly being adopted across many fields of research. They are often touted as a great way for collaborative development or to save on costs. That’s true, but there are deeper reasons for adopting open source technologies. In this talk, I will use open source hardware as an example to highlight how open source technologies safeguard the agency/autonomy of its users and enable more equitable distributions of power in a world increasingly mediated by technology. As a bonus, I will argue that open source doesn’t mean non-commercial, and show examples of successful business models built on selling open source technology.

About the Open Source Solutions group

The Open Source Solutions group is for anyone interested in open-source technologies for ecology and conservation. We welcome contributions from both makers and users, whether active or prospective. Here, we believe in the need for open-source hardware and software to do good science and research. It is a place to share novel or existing technologies, exchange resources, discuss new projects, ask for advice, find collaborators, and advocate for adopting open-source technologies.