Public Lab is an open community -- you're welcome to simply sign up and start contributing in a variety of ways. If you are interested in a more formal collaboration, just ask staff@publiclab.org.

Some ways to be a part of the community:

• email the list to say hello, describe your interests, and offer your skills to existing projects
• ask for help with a public science issue and reach out for collaborators
• post a research note describing the starting point for your project
• post a research note describing new developments in your project
• add to the knowledge base in Public Lab by editing pages (most are editable by any registered user, wiki-style)
• connect with or organize a local group to investigate environmental, social, and other issues in a participatory way

• contribute to better documentation (tutorials, diagrams, even just offering critique) of the tools we all use

• 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
• 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.

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