BOP Digital Platform Vision - BillionOysterProject/digital-platform-beta GitHub Wiki

The Billion Oyster Project Education team’s vision for the Digital Platform is to provide our participants with the data and skills to advocate for the changes they want to see in their communities, at their waterfront, and for their harbor. We are actively working to achieve this in multiple ways:

• Supporting the collection of oyster monitoring, biodiversity, water quality, and other environmental data by students, educators, and community scientists as a part of BOP’s Oyster Research Station and Community Reefs programs.

• Supporting teaching and learning about New York Harbor and environmental justice issues through curriculum and research publishing systems that actively encourage collaboration among participants.

• Making data collected by BOP staff scientists publicly accessible (“open data”).

• Integrating relevant local open datasets into the platform from an array of disciplines so the community can access multiple sources of data on a topic and draw connections between all the factors that impact the harbor, waterfront, and their communities.

• Supporting partner organizations to publish relevant but previously closed datasets via the platform.

• Providing framing, context, and visualization methods for all datasets on the platform to make the data understandable to a broad audience.

• Facilitating co-creation of the platform with the community by maintaining a friendly and accessible open source project in Github and a set of processes designed to encourage community participation.

• Creating a digital space for hyperlocal information and resources about each site through the creation of “site guides.” These site guides will pull in useful open data (like accessibility information) and support the contribution of more qualitative information from the community.

• Creating digital communications spaces- “hubs”- to help develop in-person communities tied to a specific waterfront site. These smaller groups of participants can regularly support each other in monitoring oyster research sites and advocating for local waterfront and community issues. But the hubs can also serve as vital communication and support networks in response to emergencies like storms and flooding.