Grassroots Mapping is a series of participatory mapping projects involving communities in cartographic dispute. Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, the grassroots mappers used helium balloons and kites to loft their own “community satellites” made with inexpensive digital cameras.
At Public Lab, we've grown the Grassroots Mapping community into a broader effort to enable communities to understand and respond to environmental threats with DIY techniques.
A couple updates: we’re now deep in the stitching process. Above is a preview; we hope to post one or two finished stitches today.
Kris Ansin of Tulane and Louisiana Bucket Brigade is coordinating mapping teams on the ground. (He’s leading a trip today). We’ve had some donations but if you’re able to, please donate to support our efforts. Even $50 will buy us a tank of helium. $100 buys us a new kite.
In the meantime we’ve had some great support from Kristian Hansen of TungstenMonkey, a local production company. Kristian documented our training session last Saturday and has posted an intro video to our project which gets across a lot of information in a very short time. Thanks Kristian!
On Sunday May 9, Stewart Long, Shannon and Mariko from Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and several other volunteers made it to the Chandeleur islands on a boat and in 9mph winds were able to image the slick making its way through the island chain. There appeared to be no booms in place at that location. In the above image you can see their boat and the tether for the balloon.
Stewart and others from LABB are scheduled to be out on a boat today down in Port Fourchon, and we may have more imagery for you then. For now, the full dataset from today is available here, and is in the public domain:
Many birds were congregating on the islands; in coming weeks we’ll be looking out for tarred and/or dead birds and other wildlife. One advantage to the high resolution we’re working at is that we hope to be able to pick out individual animals and plants, and thus better quantify the damage wreaked by the British Petroleum spill.
UPDATE: Here are some notes from Stewart Long about his flight:
“The Pilot reported that the restricted airspace is located below 30 degrees north latitude, and under 3,000′. Not sure what is determining the restrictions, but on Friday we were told that the minimum was 4,000′. Visibility was pretty good. The pilot was flying VFR, and we did not encounter any other aircraft during the flight visually, or with his instruments. We did not see any booms, and only one or two boats. Lakefront airfield was pretty quiet as well. The pilot reported that the oil in the water look redder the previous day, not sure what that indicates, if anything.”
Too much wind at Waveland today to fly our balloon, and we didn’t have a kite on hand. Can anyone donate big kites like the Sutton Flowform 16? Anyone do KAP and willing to come map with us? Contact the mailing list please!
On foot we found some weird stuff, some certainly petroleum… iridescent and leaving orange streaks. Other stuff was a kind of putty of orange claylike substance which was washed up with the orange streaks. Could this be oil all the way over at Waveland? It’s the same color as the stuff the mainstream press is photographing.
A bit of an update – on Thursday we went down to Grand Isle and met up with folks from Priority5 and the Greater Lafourche Port Commission who fed us delicious food and managed to get us out on a boat near sunset. We focused on testing the theory (suggested on the mailing list at some point) that we could tow a kite even in low winds… and amazingly it worked. The light was failing however and we did not get a lot of imagery. That stuff was posted this morning (gosh it seems like a million years ago).
We met this morning with a whole lot of volunteers (want to volunteer?) at the LA Bucket Brigade to plan a teaching strategy to increase the number of mappers and to make sure local folks were able to do balloon/kite mapping.
Tomorrow, we’re conducting a training session:
May 8 Training Session
10:00AM This Saturday we are meeting at City Park, New Orleans. Meet on the Southeast side of the Art Museum, look for us out on the lawn. The session will examine the field mapping setup, and how to train others to follow the same model. Come out to see how it is done, and learn how to do it yourself. Google Map link to City Park:
The focus is not on signing up a zillion people (yet!), but in finding local potential mapping leaders, who can organize teams of volunteers to go out to beaches and coasts to map the spill. We’ll try to schedule a mapping trip for you in the next day or two so you’ll have the experience to bring others out as well.
Hi, all – Oliver Yeh and I are down in New Orleans now trying to meet up with local organizers to begin an independent, grassroots ground-truthing/mapping of the spill.
To be clear – we’re not trying to duplicate the satellite imagery or the flyover data (though we’re helping to coordinate some of the flyovers and trying to make sure the data is publicly accessible). We believe it’s possible for citizens to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own documentation of the spill… and that such imagery will be essential for environmental and legal reasons in coming years.
To learn more, check out our organization page in the Grassroots Mapping wiki.
Please, if you’re involved in the response, and live near the spill, call me at 415 508 6769, email me at warren@mit.edu, and tell us where to come to help you document what’s going on!
To join in the discussion or make contact with us, the mailing list is a great place to start.
Sam Kronick (read his awesome page, esp. pictures at the bottom) created a micro-nation called the Microdot on the MIT campus, on the large circle of grass known to students there as ‘the Dot’. He briefly seceded from the US (or MIT, I wasn’t sure), and we managed to make a map of the tiny nation late on its second and last day of existence.
Grassroots balloon mapping is a great way to capture temporary events and document brief invasions of public space… even protests, as we did in the West Bank last December.
Are you embroiled in an cartographic dispute? Do you disagree with the official version of your geography? Contact us through the public mailing list.
Grassroots Mapping is part of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, founded by a group of activists, educators, technologists, and community organizers interested in new ways to promote action, intervention, and awareness through a participatory research model.
Purchase the Grassroots Mapping Forum, our new community research journal/archive/zine/map, where we hope to share ideas, techniques, and stories from the Grassroots Mapping community. It is printed on a single 22.75x35" newsprint sheet, folded down to just over letter size, and includes a full color reproduction of a grassroots map along with essays, illustrated guides, and interviews on the reverse.
We're helping citizens to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming yeas.We believe in complete open access to spill imagery and are releasing all imagery into the public domain.
Techniques and tools for people who want to make maps, on the Public Laboratory wiki. Includes readings and case studies on grassroots mapping projects.
