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This transcript was exported on Mar 01, 2021 - view latest version here. Lindsay Starke: Cool. Let's give people a couple more minutes to come in, and if it's something that you are currently able to do, I would love folks to in the chat introduce yourself with your name, where you are, including the traditional denizens of the land that you're on, and we can share Native Land where you can find that if you are not already aware, as well as what you teach, and just why you're interested in FieldKit. Thanks, Jer. (silence) Jer Thorp: We'll just give everybody about another two minutes to get in here, and then we'll get started and people can always catch up with us a little later. Lindsay Starke: Yeah, so just to get some housekeeping stuff out there, we do have a pretty lovely group of folks, so lovely and large. So, if possible, if you could either type questions you have in the chat, or we're going to do a pretty hefty Q&A portion toward the end so you can ask stuff then, raise hand, all the good meeting hygiene so that we don't descend into pure chaos. (silence) All right. Beautiful. All right. I think we can go ahead and start getting things moving. Oh, more people are filtering in. That's awesome. I'll go ahead and share my screen. Jer Thorp: Yeah, and let me just say while Lindsay is talking that if anybody has any issues or questions that you don't want to put into the public feed, or if you're having tech issues or whatever, you can ping any of us with FieldKit and our names, and we'll do our best to help you out. Lindsay Starke: Yep. All right, so can everybody see the lovely blue screen? Speaker 3: Yes. Lindsay Starke: Excellent. Thank you. Cool. So, thank you everyone for coming. This is the first of these open houses that we are doing, so we are going to be learning as we go. But so far, all the conversations I've had with a lot of you have been really great, super excited to have you here, and we really want this to be a dialogue versus us just talking at you for a while. So, please, we want to get your feedback on stuff. That's why it's an open house, and I don't know. Shah [inaudible] guys you want to say before we get this party started? Jer Thorp: I mean, we wish we had canapés, but we don't. So, you'll have to provide your own canapés for now, but we promise when we see you in person that we will provide them. Lindsay Starke: Have some appropriate fresh baked cookies in the oven to entice sounds good. Awesome. All right. So, for those of you who don't already know who we are, FieldKit is really... Daniel Kinzer: Lindsay, your audio cut out for me. Did it cut out for others too? Sorry. Jim Bentley: Yeah. No, it's okay. FieldKit Open House for Educators (Completed 02/27/21) Page 1 of 23 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Mar 01, 2021 - view latest version here. Male: It did for me too. Lindsay Starke: Going without headset. Daniel Kinzer: Yay. Loud and clear. Jim Bentley: There we go. Thank you. Lindsay Starke: It's on its last legs, I think. Okay. Thank you for letting me know that. So, as I was saying, FieldKit is really about making an accessible open-source high-quality environmental sensing tool that can be used by everyone, not just field scientists, not just organizations with large endowments but really for everybody. What we have built is a software and hardware platform, and we're going to go through the different pieces of that. Shah will do a demo, and then we will chat about stuff. FieldKit is a project of Conservify. So, those of you who [inaudible] maybe saw that in my email signature. We are a conservation- focused not-for-profit, and yeah, this is our baby. The team that's going to be talking to you today, we have Shah and Jer, our co- founders, and then myself, community manager here, but we have a few of our other team members paying attention listening in and here to hear your feedback. So, Shah and Jer, I don't know if you want to share anything about your backgrounds while we have a second? Jer Thorp: Yeah, I would just say real quickly I think I know a few people on the call from National Geographic, Shah and I met as emerging explorers at National Geographic, and this project really came out of that relationship. I'm an artist and an educator and a writer, and my entire life is focused on how we can make data more accessible and how we can make it something that connects into our lives in a way that isn't irritating/painful. Shah Selbe: Yeah, and I'll add on that. I know many of you. I'm a conservation technologist. I started Conservify and Jer and I founded this FieldKit idea together to try and make environmental sensing easy for everyone, scientists in other parts of the country, educators such as all everybody who's on this call, and just anybody who wants to be able to do these sorts of things, and I think we've done a pretty good job at it, and I'm really eager to hear what some of you have to say. One thing I'll say just to start is we're really open and all the work, the technology we do have is open source. So, if there's ever anything that you think we should be doing better or something you'd rather have, like literally everyone, all the whole FieldKit team on the call today is just all ears, and we really appreciate the input that you have and the expertise that you have, and we want to build something that makes you teaching our next generation much easier and more effective and more engaged. So, thank you. Jer Thorp: I promise I'll be quiet after this, but there's a reason why we're doing teacher open house first, and that's because Shah and I and the rest of the team have FieldKit Open House for Educators (Completed 02/27/21) Page 2 of 23 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Mar 01, 2021 - view latest version here. always had teachers in the front of our mind when we've been building this project. So, I hope you see some of that shine through, but yeah. I want to say that you all are really, really important to what we're doing now and what we have been doing for the last, oh, God, eight years now. Lindsay Starke: And then myself as the community manager, I'm just here to really facilitate relationships, help with conversations, ensure everybody has the best possible experience they can with FieldKit and so that really smart interesting person over here and really smart interesting person over there can talk to one another and share ideas, and ultimately, we're all better and happier through collaboration. So, going through just the basics of FieldKit, FieldKit lets everyone everywhere monitor the world around them with low-cost reliable sensors and easy-to-use tools for storing, sharing, and telling stories with data. Our sensors are designed to be accurate, durable, and extensible. Our mobile app makes configuration testing and deployment easy for amateurs and professionals alike. Our low per unit cost makes deploying networks of several dozens even hundreds of sensors possible no matter how small the budget. Our platform securely stores and manages data and lets you share and tell stories with it, and really, FieldKit is for everyone. We're building this because we believe everyone should be able to understand and advocate for the world that they live in. It's a tool for field scientists, environmental advocates, naturalists, students, teachers, and for you. Just to get a sense for the landscape that we're working in, there's a lot of custom-built one-off scientific equipment that is not really accessible to a lot of people but is very reliable and then people building all sorts of different homebrew open-source products. We're trying to hit the sweet spot in here providing regular folks with access to research-grade environmental sensors and to make this kind of data access and management and sharing more accessible to everyone so that we can all ultimately improve the environment that we live in. We have really lots of groups in this, everyone, so that's field scientists, that's conservationists, students, citizen scientists, educators, people working in environmental justice, makers and hardware folks, as well as working with indigenous activists, people working to better their communities, and also just folks who are really interested in understanding the world around them. The ecosystem in which we're working is we have three parts. So, there is the FieldKit station hardware which actually goes out into the field, pulls in the data, utilizing sensors, and then an app that you can use to talk to the station, pull the data off of it in a way that is easy for just about anyone and then the FieldKit.org site where you can then go and explore your data, share it, do things with it and ultimately turn these numbers into something that tells a story.