The Art of Rolling Your Own Radiation Mapping
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, April 12 2011
RDTN.orgYesterday, the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal profiled a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for equipping "citizen scientists" in Japan with personal Geiger counters to measure the radiation coming out of the Fukushima nuclear plant.
The fundraising drive is part of a project called RDTN.org. Started by the Portland, Oregon firm Uncorked Studies and taken from conception to launch in 72 hours, the site represents an interesting moment. Sure, there's the geewhiz factor of people being able to get their own nuclear detectors for thirty bucks on Amazon. But it's also a situation where tech-savvy people who want to do something are figuring out what that something best is.
Just this morning, I happened to be interviewing Eric Gunderson, a major figure in the political mapping world who runs the firm Development Seed. "Mapping has always been expensive," said Gunderson during our conversation. "The dudes that had the maps had the money." With the RDTN project, there's a struggle to figure out how to change that dynamic.
One way RDTN is trying to do that is by figuring out how to pull together various data threads. "In our discussions, we realized we needed more than crowdsourced data," wrote Uncorked Studios founder Marcelino Alvarez. "We needed to pull in feeds of data already being generated. Others out there were doing this, but not in a centralized fashion. Pivot point. It wasn’t about crowdsourcing. It was about aggregating, validating, and analyzing."
That, though, was several days ago. This Kickstarter campaign looks like an attempt to figure out how, with a few bucks, citizens can indeed stand up where established institutions, like governments, have fallen down. "In looking at a map of radiation detection in Japan, there are many holes where no data is being captured whatsoever," reads the Kickstarter project description. "Some of those are very close to Fukushima while others are well outside of Tokyo."
Do you provide a check on the government by aggregating official data? Go out and help people collect their own data? Both? Something else? Worth keeping an eye on the RTN project to see how they handle it.
Relatedly, you might want to check out Pachube, an open-source platform for capturing readings on personal monitors and the like, all part of creating an Internet of Things.