PLOTS is an open community -- you're welcome to simply sign up and start contributing in a variety of ways. We are also open to more formal collaborations, just ask staff@publiclaboratory.org

Some ways to be a part of the community:

• Email the list to say hello and describe your interests, reach out for collaborators, or look for somewhere you can help out
• Ask for help with a public science issuse
• add to existing pages (most are editable by any registered user, wiki-style)
• co-author articles & papers (in research journals, newspaper op-eds, magazines, etc) with other community members
• co-author grants for research and for working with specific communities
• contribute to better documentation (tutorials, diagrams, even just offering critique) of the tools we all use
• organize a local group to investigate environmental, social, and other issues in a participatory way
• adopt and contribute to units of our curriculum (mainly the mapping curriculum at this point) in universities, schools, and public workshops -- use some of our resources and add your own. Also see the guides we're starting to develop for our tools.

Feel free to just jump in and start adding content to our site (it's a wiki), but a great place to start is to sign up for an account on this site.

Areas we need specific help in:

• organizing meetups with residents in our partner communities to test new tools and gather data with proven ones
• developing better and more comprehensive documentation & tutorials around our existing tools
• archiving and publishing consistent data sets (from spreadsheets and geotiffs to interviews with community members)
• outreach to research, policy, and legal institutions (Environmental Law Clinics, for example) to get our data adopted and used