As a field, environmental science has not yet had the impact it needs to have on the general public, mostly due to limited amount of exposure to information. A powerful visualization tool would help bring all types environmental causes to the forefront and help the general population understand how the environment influences their day to day lives. This project seeks to achieve that goal by creating an open source environmental data visualization suite for researchers and data scientists. The tool set will be especially tailored toward geographical and energy related data; however, the end project will create a much more versatile set of abilities. This tool would make it incredibly simple for researchers to submit any kind of geographic data and create meaningful visualizations of that data, without the need for much technical knowledge on the part of the researchers.
Track: Open Data for Development
Visualizing the Invisible
This project seeks to develop an experiential learning tool that allows users to personally feel what it is like to be censored. The site would feature a highly visual and interactive system that allows users to see what content from their own document would be censored in China. The need for this project is twofold: there is a strong need to raise awareness among Americans about censorship in China to encourage citizen participation and engagement in free speech, and to collect more data for researchers to understand American’s perception and understanding of censorship in China. This visualization will allow users to submit their own content and then visually see words and phrases that are censored being removed from their document. The project will educate them of potential reasons for each removal, provide related articles that are censored in China and create an interactive and engaging narrative for users to recognize the importance of Internet freedom.
Impact Evaluation Made Easy and Affordable
Impact evaluation is increasingly being used to determine the effectiveness and success of development interventions. This project develops an impact evaluation software kit that allows small organizations to evaluate themselves, measure impact and collect data, to meet their targets, and stay competitive for funding among larger, more mature organizations. This project will increase the effectiveness of NGOs by easing the design, implementation, and analysis of meaningful impact evaluation through a streamlined, easy-to-use, e-tool that includes impact evaluation design, data collection, and data analysis functions. This will be achieved through software that combines two innovations: an easy-to-use interface that guides the impact evaluation design and the integration of tools into a single platform.
Transparent Living: Using Data to Bring Transparency
The goal is to build an intuitive website that will use public and crowd sourced data to depict the real willingness to pay for housing by city/street/zip and in real time. The system will allow property owners to electronically collect short profiles of prospective renters, including their monthly income, credit score, references and willingness to pay. Once a property owner has accepted a submission, the remaining submissions would receive a summarized feedback loop of how their submission varied and an eventual recommendation of where to focus their search based on overall area trends.
Sight 4 Everyone (e-Liiso)
Doctors and optometrists using e-liiso will be able to check patients’ abilities by just taking a flash picture from a phone camera to see color, test for long and short-sightedness, and also detect the presence of cataracts and other eye conditions. The app uses smartphones’ cameras, flashlights and display to check how the eyes react to stimuli, while doctors can also track the progress of individual patients and easily keep a record of their geo-location.
Open Data for Developing Communities
The project’s goal is to create a collaborative platform to promote open data literacy. This platform will provide a curriculum that is focused on making open data more accessible and usable to students, policymakers, civil society organizations, journalists, and researchers. The team will distribute these materials to a network of partners who already have boots on the ground, who can teach the material while also implementing their own mapping projects, and who have a focus on development and developing countries. In addition, the curriculum will be hosted on an interactive online platform offering content, data, tools, and learning materials for public access. A goal of the project is to increase the availability of this data on mobile devices, since their far exceeds that of personal computers in developing countries.
Mapping Waterways
Mapping Waterways will create a participatory mapping system that involves all aspects of the mapping process: from data collection, to map input, to visualization and organization. The mapping project will incorporate government and community-collected data to bridge current water mapping endeavors. This meets the need to integrate data analysis with community participation and improves access to water-quality information, which communities can then use for political projects. The project will require a collaborative process to implement participatory mapping, and to generate the necessary data to launch the online organizational interface. The team will visit three communities in the summer of 2014 to train and pilot the community data collection process. The data will then be uploaded to a web interface to add local context and community control to the mapping process. This will provide community groups with information on water quality and its impact on local areas that otherwise might require funding for specialists. This web interface stands to save groups in underserved areas funding and time in their efforts secure water rights.
KnowPrivacy
This project aims to increase interest in the current state of data collection practices and privacy concerns by demonstrating greater salience of the types of data collected by commercial websites and the potential risks involved, along with the uses and value for those collecting it. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Science, Technology, and Engineering Policy” category.)