Challenge 1: Social media meets citizen science
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How can we use all our extraordinary innovation in culture and technology to participate more meaningfully with stuff that truly matters e.g the health of the biosphere that supports us and all life?
Stimulus
The NIU's most resourceful officers have been gathering intelligence for this brief. Check out their intel below...
Inspiration: Most #cloudspotting posts appreciating beautiful sky-scapes and sunsets rather than noting any particular weather patterns.
“I don’t think it needs to be an app. I think there are too many apps that are a pain to download. I think it needs to be a tweet...or there needs to be a mission. This bird is dying out so when you see one it can be a really important data point.”
Inspiration: Place-based coastal project with 7 hubs. Experts provide training and volunteers can go out to capture data using different tools around the UK.
“What’s great about digital and Twitter and Instagram is that there are these passion photographers, sort of amateur scientists, who have made nature sexy and taken it out of that granola world”
Inspiration: Project Splatter Collates data on UK wildlife roadkill reported by the public using social media.
Inspiration: instagram competition. Individuals tag their photos, the account chooses winners and invites other users to congratulate them.
“The Twitter thing is for the other nature followers. I follow writers as well but predominantly its other lovers of nature. I like the interaction that you get from people you know just saying nice photo or have you thought of going here.”
“We’d take a picture of a heron and go, ooh, hashtag heron or we take pictures of the canal and the sunset if it looks pretty. Things like Instagram are about beauty, they’re about curating your history with your surroundings, like this is a really perfect or unusual scene and I want to save it for posterity, for example when it snows, or is misty.”
Inspiration: People take a photo of a piece of litter, use the hashtag #litterati and then recycle or throw the litter away. The pictures fill the digital landfill at litterati.org.
Inspiration: Twitter and Instagram led movement to encourage people to take two minutes to do a beach clean and then to share it with the world.
“The Twitter thing is for the other nature followers. I follow writers as well but predominantly its other lovers of nature. I like the interaction that you get from people you know just saying nice photo or have you thought of going here”
Inspiration: Focus of #noticenature posts is on small details and moments of contemplation.
Inspiration: UK Snow Map uses crowd-sourced #uksnow tweets to draw an up-to-the-minute map of where it is currently snowing in the UK.
Inspiration: This map shows Twitter users tweeting the word 'Sunrise' in the world's most-spoken languages on a typical day this month.
Ideas
In February 2016, nature intelligence officers Swarmed around this challenge for 48 hours. Here are the initial ideas...
Idea: Wildfullness. The Wildfullness app guides you through the simple technique of being present and noticing what's going on around you through the practice of a 10 minute 'sit spot'.
Idea: Picture pollinator. A way to turn every day posts about nature on social media into useful scientific data.
Idea: Natural photographer. An exhibition of nature photos, shot by amateur photographers, displayed in a park.
Idea: Nature on tab. See a local photo of nature in your browser every time you open a new tab.
What's next?
The NIU is working on a plan to hatch the ideas with the most potential to get us humans noticing nature. We'd love to hear from you if you have more ideas to add to the mix. Please leave your thoughts in the comments box below.
