Snout Social Objectives

One of the required outcomes of Snout is to prepare means by which local communities and non-expert people can become capable of investigating their environments, in order to take necessary steps for improving the public and community health.

The concept of media scavenging is explored in this project; meaning finding free and easy to use resources on the internet to build what would normally require an experienced software developer to create. For example to build a customised website which would analyse or display gathered data requires a fair amount of work by a software developer however already built systems like this are offered on the internet which not only are free but also provide an easy to use interface or configuration panel for integration with other websites. Also a number of online services offer the creation of groups, forums and mailing lists together with WYSIWYG interfaces to build content pages. Such free and easy to use services means non-expert users can benefit from improved electronic means for communication at no extra cost and therefore are able to collaborate more efficiently on a project.

It is important to note, that the target users are not expected to have the necessary knowledge for developing equipment intended for environmental monitoring or creating the necessary website for analysis and visualization of the gathered data. Hence Snout aims to provide an easy to adapt framework for development and publications of such environmental observation projects. A guide to such a framework can act as a recipe for local communities to organize and develop environmental observation campaigns more accurately targeted at their concerns in the immediate locality.