citizen power rules!
Jan. 13th, 2012 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_e
A bunch of people have decided that the BP oil spill is not being mapped properly so they did something about it.They got together equipment to run cheap digital cameras up on helium balloons to photograph the spill from the air then stitch together the results. Their maps are much better than the ones the newsmedia have access to and 10,000 times greater resolution than NASA's satellite maps. This will help fishermen, cleanup, and law suits against BP.
They used crowdsourcing via KickStarter to get funding for the equipment:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jywarren/grassroots-mapping-the-gulf-oil-spill-with-balloon
The world is changing under our feet. It used to be that big organisations had all the power and had everything their way, but the internet has changed many of the rules, and now individuals can stand up to governments and corporations. Yay!
Incidentally, they are now offering the same tools for anybody to map stuff cheaply using the expertise they gained, and once again, production of the kit is being funded via crowdsourcing:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1775485688/balloon-mapping-kits