This paper explores three cases of Do-It-Yourself, open-source technologies developed within the diverse array of topics and themes in the communities around the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab). These cases focus on aerial mapping, water quality monitoring and civic science practices. The techniques discussed have in common the use of accessible, community-built technologies for acquiring data. They are also concerned with embedding collaborative and open source principles into the objects, tools, social formations and data sharing practices that emerge from these inquiries. The focus is on developing processes of collaborative design and experimentation through material engagement with technology and issues of concern. Problem-solving, here, is a tactic, while the strategy is an ongoing engagement with the problem of participation in its technological, social and political dimensions especially considering the increasing centralization and specialization of scientific and technological expertise. The authors also discuss and reflect on the Public Lab's approach to civic science in light of ideas and practices of citizen/civic veillance, or "sousveillance", by emphasizing people before data, and by investigating the new ways of seeing and doing that this shift in perspective might provide.
In this paper, I examine the kind of testimony enabled by do-it-yourself aerial photography with kites or balloons in situations of political and spatial conflict, and how this plays on the surface of proliferating uses of geospatial technologies in a human rights context. The case study presented here concerns the use of do-it-yourself aerial photography in the context of discriminatory urban planning policies and practices against the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem. Its analysis shows that the political potentials of do-it-yourself aerial photography go further than just enabling the independent production of high-resolution aerial evidence in near real-time settings. It brings forth a distinctive kind of testimony, which I term a “spatial testimony,” that pushes against a certain threshold of participation in human rights truth production and sheds light on the political role embodiment may play in such processes. The “spatial testimony” denotes not only the visual image or the speech act related to the testimony but also the whole process of experimentation with a self-built instrument that unsettles and reconfigures the political space of relations between human rights, human bodies, and technoscientific objects.
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