Short introduction to the feature

On Public Lab users can publish activities, which contain mostly instruction manuals on how to build and use do-it-yourself environmental monitoring tools. For example, how to build a plant-based air purifier. The platform encourages users to replicate these activities and publish their experiences, so the authors get feedback and the instructions can be improved, if necessary, or adapted to different contexts and use cases.

How does it work?

When users create an activity - which works similar to a blog post - they can add a feature at the bottom of the page that shows an “I did this”-button and a list of links to replicated activities (see Figure 1)

When users click the button, they are guided to a markdown template (see Figure 2) which helps them to structure their feedback, which will be published as a new activity linked to the original activity by a unique tag.

Thoughts

I like this feature, because it encourages other users to become active, replicate an activity and document it, so the original author and other users can profit from hands-on feedback. By automatically collecting all replications in a list using a tag system, it is easy to get an overview of how many times this activity has been tried and tested, and the content is easy to find. This feature is suitable for open ended tasks without one definite solution that benefit from qualitative feedback.

References

• Public Lab: “Build a plant-based air purifier” by user nshapiro