Open-the-North

Making ecological community and fish consumption data more accessible to the indigenous communities of the Far North

Welcome

Welcome to the Open the North repository. This document (README.md) details the focus of our project and how you can get involved.

Table of Contents

• What are we doing?
  • The problem
  • The solution
• Who are we?
• What do we need?

What are we doing?

The problem

• Ecological data from the Far North is not readily available to resident communities
• Critical fish consumption data is not available in a mobile-friendly, low bandwidth format
• Indigenous communities not proportionally represented at the open science table

The solution

With Open the North we seek to

1. GEOF Mobile App Build a mobile app for the Guide to the Guide to Eating Ontario Fish The Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change (MOECC) publishes guidelines on how many fish of (a given subset of sportfish) is safe to eat. While this information is available in a printed guide and on their website, the information is displayed not displayed in a user-friendly format and is inaccessible to individuals living in remote regions of the province (. We are building a mobile app version of the guide using open data available through the MOECC.

2. OTN Repository Create a open repository that stores open data from the Far North of Ontario. This virtual storage space will allow anyone to contribute open data collected from the Far North with a user friendly interface. The repository welcomes data from the federal and provincial governments, NGO's, conservation groups and encourages contributions from citizen scientists. This mobile friendly platform not only allows the addition of data but also the ability to download data.

Who are we?

Monica is a post-doctoral fellow at the Univeristy of Guelph and the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada and the lead of Open the North. You can contact Monica at monica.granados AT alumni.utoronto.ca. This project is a part of the Mozilla Open Leadership Training series. Brie Edwards is a Research Scientist at the MOECC and provides project support for Open the North. Jacob Ritchie is the lead developer of the GEOF mobile app.

What do we need?

We are delighted you are interested in helping out. When you join us we ask that you follow our code of conduct in all interactions both on and offline. Can find all the participation guidelines at out CODE OF CONDUCT

You can find information on how to contribute in CONTRIBUTING but generally for the two themes of the project:

GEOF Mobile App

We now have a working beta version of the mobile app! But we want to make it as funcitonal as possible. We need:

1. Designers to create the mobile app interface
2. Developer to add a localization fucntion
3. Translators to translate the Guide text from English to Cree and Ojibway

Have a look at our Roadmap for our timelines and progress!

OTN repository

1. Upload open data from the Far North
2. Identify open data that we can extract and add to the repository

Glossary

• ecological data: Data on the number or size of animals and plants and the associated data of the environment they live in
• README file: a document that introduces an open project to the public and any potential contributors
• repository: a collection of documents related to your project, in which you create and save new code or content