Issue Briefs on Public Lab
(Wondering how to add your blog posts to this blog? Have a look here: Get involved)
Short introduction to the feature & how it works
Public Lab aims to empower people to address environmental justice issues through community science and open technology. They focus on the collaborative development, sharing, reuse and adaption of DIY scientific tools. To help people getting started with their projects, they have different specific content types, for example “Issue Briefs”. This artifact is thought to help people formulate their concern and reach out for ideas on how to address their issue. Issue briefs are basically blog posts with a specific template, as follows:
Introduction:
Replace this text with some context for what you are sharing. For example, you can provide a brief introduction to your community, and give some context for the issue you’re posting about.
Our main concern:
Replace this text with one or two sentences on the main concern.
Obstacles and supporting information:
Are there known obstacles you have in understanding more about this issue right now? Do you have more information you would like to share for example, if you have any information about how the issue is currently regulated that could be helpful. You can replace this text and add text or links here to help explain.
Who is engaged in this concern?
Are there people you know of who are currently working on this? Delete this text and explain who’s currently working on what aspects of the issue.
What are the initial questions?
Delete this text and replace “tagname” below with the unique project tag you’d like to use to follow your issue. _Note: the tag is how the material posted after you share this post will be organized. Tags need to be one word, or a couple words separated by a hyphen for example “dredge” or “lake-dredge”. Any questions with that tag will populate this grid. If you want to keep out broad questions related to the topic, choose a tag that could be unique to your issue for example: “Madison-Lake-Dredge”
A tutorial on how to write issue briefs can be found here: Write an Issue Brief - publiclab.org. Here you can find an exemplary issue brief on Benzene monitoring.
Thoughts
This is a great feature to encourage people to approach their problem and get community input by reporting their case in a structured way. Similar features could be an appropriate solution for all kinds of projects in which people design their own research projects.
References
https://publiclab.org/post?n=15139&title=Your%20issue%20name%20here template
