Triple Helix

by Kirk Jalbert

During the development of the RPI sensor in collaboration with the MDL team Chris, Louis and I ran into a rather serious problem over differing opinions on how copyright should be applied to the completed software and hardware. While the Statement of Work stated that the project would be fully open source as seen in the excerpt (below), the MDL administration decided all creations exiting the MDL lab were property of the lab…

3.0 Objectives
We will create a prototype environmental sensor system, using mixtures of proprietary and non-proprietary components.  This sensor system will operate as a generic platform from which a larger infrastructure can be built.  Designers of custom sensor technology, such as Sawyer/Shing and others will then be able to utilize this infrastructure to deploy their technologies into the SOOS sensor community.

The MDL team will be primarily responsible for developing the sensor system/hardware and device interface with the end goal of launching a stable prototype by end of Spring semester 2011.  During this time Gutierrez will be developing the software infrastructure for the SOOS online community. While much of the basic online structure will be built on available Open Source technology, some special-purpose utilities will be developed in partnership with the MDL team to support the sensor device.  The MDL team will also work in collaboration with the oversight team to create supporting documents and educational tools for the community of users (e.g. circuit diagrams, instruction modules, physical layouts and other documents not normally part of open source but critical to the SOOS community).

The crux of the problem was a core disagreement over what “open source” implied as an educational directive in research projects. As far as we were concerned, if the project was developed with open source principles and the parties agreed to the language in the contractual SOW all was well. Various offices across campus, however, each had their own definition of what constituted our intellectual property vs. the inherent right of the school to claim ownership over work done in their facilities. Ultimately, the ruling decision was made by the “Office of Technology Commercialization” that the SOW was indeed a binding contract and the Open Source agreement had to stand.

Interestingly, the MDL administration agreed to this mediation by justifying it as a financial argument:

In this regard, our general policy and stated objective in the Design Lab has been to identify sustainable funding sources for service oriented projects that will facilitate our working for charitable causes in to the future.  As an exception to this general policy and in the interest of promoting entrepreneurial initiatives on the part of the Navajo and Ghanaian people, I’m proposing that we (i.e., RPI and the Design Lab) do not claim IP protection on either of these two projects.

Nevertheless, this is a far more complicated story than I can tell in this blog entry. If you’d like to see the full version go see the 2-part presentation I gave to the Rensselaer Center for Open Source in July of 2011 here:

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by Kirk Jalbert

After much effort negotiating open copyright with the MDL administration in Spring of 2011, the RPI sensor team was ultimately faced with a more difficult challenge…their technology didn’t work. This may be only a partial truth – certain parts of the MDL sensor design worked according to specifications, but many aspects of the hardware and software were riddled with bugs and design curves we simply didn’t have the resources to sort out in time for our field tests in Summer of 2011. Since the MDL built their platform on an Arduino architecture, we were able to switch the core processing components over to off the shelf hardware and build around this accordingly. In the end we came up with a hybrid solution to bring into the field.

The end device was capable of sensing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide (CO), temperature, relative humidity, and soil moisture. Louis and Chris also tried to get a dust particle sensor working to no avail, but it was a valiant effort. To be truthful, the VOC and CO sensors didn’t work to our satisfaction in this first model, but it did give us relative values for some educational comparison purposes. You can read the full user manual for the sensor device here.

Here are some photos of the RPI Sensor model 1.0…

Photos credit: Kirk Jalbert

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by Kirk Jalbert

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Photos Credit: Kirk Jalbert

In early July 2011 I visited the first of two field sites to conduct educational workshops using the RPI Community Sensor systems at DEI. The Diné Environmental Institute is an NSF funded research group at Diné College on the Navajo Reservation. Diné College is a tribal university system with reservation locations throughout NM and AZ. In attendance were a dozen summer environmental monitoring interns who had been trained on using more sophisticated instruments and GIS mapping. Our contribution was to downscale these ideas to emphasize their foundational importance.

By this time our project had evolved into not only the devices themselves, but also a stripped down equivalent of a GIS system developed by Louis using Google Maps APIs. For my part I had spent May and June developing a series of workshop booklets to serve as guides for participants. These were intended as a series of worksheets and instructions for the daily activities, but also meant to solicit conversation around communal responsibility and social justice issues related to environmental monitoring. Much of this focused on community mapping projects and “Participatory GIS” whereby the group uses the sensor technology to not only collect data but also create a local resource map contextualizing their findings.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) defines participatory mapping as: “A growing toolbox of techniques that can help communities make land use decisions. These maps go beyond the physical features portrayed in traditional maps; nearly everything valued by the community can be expressed in spatial terms and represented on a participatory map, including social, cultural, and economic features. The process used to create these maps is as valuable as the maps themselves. Participatory mapping is used for many reasons: to represent resources, health hazards, and community values; to gather traditional knowledge and practices; to collect information for environmental monitoring, or to find gaps in current data; to assist in conducting surveys or interviews; and to educate the community about local issues that affect their daily lives.”

On this particular trip I was resident in Shiprock NM (alternatively, in Summer 2010 the Pathways conference was held at Tsailé campus in AZ). Below is a brief outline of our activities and some photos from the workshops. (Download the full DEI workshop booklet).

First Workshop – Preparations (classroom based)
Activities: Introduction to participatory mapping and using basic sensors.
Purpose: Determining the objectives of the workshop, the purposes of community resource mapping in environmental study, and the role sensing can play in this process. Build a basic temperature sensor circuit.

First Workshop – Fieldwork (field visit)
Activities: Surveying and documenting field sites, gather temperature sensor data.
Purpose: Participants visit sites to gather detailed information and begin to understand the scope and environmental parameters of their community.

First Workshop – Wrap Up (classroom based)
Activities: Build the community resource map using data from first field site visit, sketching to build our use-case scenarios.
Purpose: Transcribe data onto physical maps. This begins to flesh out significant land features, social and cultural resources, and areas of interest in environmental surveying.

Second Workshop – Preparation (classroom based)
Activities: Discussion of air pollution, introduction to the RPI Community Sensor.
Purpose: Training on the portable RPI sensor units then allows participants to build their intended “use case” based on the constructed community resource map.

Second Workshop – Fieldwork (field visit)
Activities: Surveying and documenting “use case” field sites, deploying RPI sensors and collecting data.
Purpose: Participants return to their community sites having constructed the draft map. The more robust sensors offer environmental data and begin to stimulate and answer questions as well as fill in gaps from initial field site visits. This provides the opportunity to take a more critical look at the community resource map created in the second workshop.

Second Workshop – Wrap Up (computer-lab based)
Activities: Upload data from sensors to the RPI online system as well as site survey information. Conduct data analysis using online tools and finish by revisiting the community resource map.
Purpose: The online RPI system allows participants to view their findings in relation with other field sites as well as enable technical application of the sensor data. By revisiting the community resource map constructed in prior workshops participants develop broader understanding of the relationship between surveying, sensing, and environmental study.

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