@Pat, @dswenson, @gloryaec, and a number of other people in the WI area have started a project focused on making environmental reporting of suspected permit violations around frac sand mining sites easier for people to do called the Sand Sentinel Program. For this project, about 50 people pitched in ideas and information to create a folder with materials to help people with reporting. The folder includes an incident report form, a booklet to help people fill out reports, and an incident log.
Although the Sand Sentinel materials are posted online, the main format for this program is in hard copy. There are a number of reasons for this:
1) people can keep them in their houses, or cars,
2) the ease of collect these reports in one place, and having a paper trail for when complaints are filed (the folder guides users through a step by step process for filing reports including an option to call in suspected violations to agencies).
3) there's a big digital divide in the community, access to internet is really limited and having a hard copy option for reporting is making this process easier.
One of the important next steps we see in this project is the option for people to share when they're filing suspected permit violations. We know Frac Tracker has an app that could work well as a place to host this material online, but we're struggling to figure out how to bridge this paper copy reporting to online.
Looking for ideas!
Maybe have people scan forms with a cell phone to submit? There are some cool apps that can read forms (e.g. https://www.zipgrade.com/) that might make it feasible to collect a fair amount of metadata without having to OCR all of the text.
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Good idea! What a neat app. I think part of the problem though is that a number of people don't use smart phones either.
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