What Open Source, Ontario and Fish Have in Common
#mozsprint 2017 Interview Series
Monica (@monsauce) is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph and the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. I first met Monica at #mozsprint 2016 in Toronto where she contributed to ecology projects and gave me Lego (she’s also a Brick Specialist at Lego!). Since then, she’s continued to combine open science and design in the most recent cohort of Mozilla Open Leaders with her project Open the North.
I interviewed Monica to learn more about Open the North and how you can help June 1–2 at #mozsprint.
What is Open the North?
Open the North is a an initiative that uses open source tools to make open data more accessible to remote communities, particularly those in the Far North of Ontario. We are using the collaborative working platform GitHub to build an open source mobile application for the “Guide to eating Ontario Fish” — fish consumption advisory data for lakes and rivers in Ontario, Canada. We are also gathering open data sets into a repository of ecological data from the North to facilitate the exchange of data between communities and the south.
Why did you start Open the North?
There are still many places in Canada inaccessible by roads. This geographical barrier divides the north from resources in the south meaning many remote communities rely on country foods like fish from rivers and streams for their primary food source. Large fish that appear on many dinner tables are vulnerable to the bioaccumulation of contaminants because they eat fish that eat other fish. As fish eat other fish, contaminants have the tendency to concentrate as you move to larger and larger fish. Scientists collect data to determine how many of these large fish are safe to eat but accessing that data can be difficult in print or over the web when you live in a remote community. Recognizing a need to make this open data more accessible, Open the North is working to build tools to increase the accessibility of this crucial data.
How does your project address issues like digital inclusion and open access?
More and more governments, public and private institutions are moving to towards making their data open. However, open data does not always necessitate accessibility as often these data are only available as raw data frames. Our project is working to make open data more accessible by building an interface that lets the public interact with the data.
What problems have you run into while working on this project?
Unfortunately, my data coding skills are not immediately transferable to mobile application development. We have been having difficulties recruiting a contributor with javascript skills to code the mobile application.
What kind of skills do I need to help you?
Open the North needs mobile application developers that can code code in Javascript so that we can make a product that can be used on a large breadth of mobile platforms. We are also looking for UX designers that would like to work on the front end of the application.
How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2017?
Check the Open the North GitHub page and fork our repository! The fish consumption data is in a query friendly format. We simply need contributors to build code to query the data for the closest entry based on the latitude and longitude of the user, a binary user demographic question and the species of fish. Want to work on the user interface instead? We’d welcome your contributions too!
Questions before the sprint? Open an issue on the Open the North GitHub page or tweet me @monsauce.
What meme or gif best represents your project?
Join us wherever you are June 1–2 at the Mozilla Global Sprint to work on Open the North and many other projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Get your tickets now!
