A primary characteristic of life on the Navajo Nation is the tenuous relationship to the long resident energy extraction industry. Coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, and other resources have, some contend, benefited, the Navajo people and their tribal government. Yet at the same time it has detrimentally impacted their way of life and the health …
In late July 2011 I attended the Summer Scholars workshop hosted by the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) based out of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. This was a week long workshop attended by 30 middle and high school students from across the Navajo Reservation. As a vehicle for discussing climate change, myself …
In early July 2011 I visited the first of two field sites to conduct educational workshops using the RPI Community Sensor systems at DEI. The Diné Environmental Institute is an NSF funded research group at Diné College on the Navajo Reservation. Diné College is a tribal university system with reservation locations throughout NM and AZ. …
After much effort negotiating open copyright with the MDL administration in Spring of 2011, the RPI sensor team was ultimately faced with a more difficult challenge…their technology didn’t work. This may be only a partial truth – certain parts of the MDL sensor design worked according to specifications, but many aspects of the hardware and …
During the development of the RPI sensor in collaboration with the MDL team Chris, Louis and I ran into a rather serious problem over differing opinions on how copyright should be applied to the completed software and hardware. While the Statement of Work stated that the project would be fully open source as seen in …
In the Fall of 2010 I began a collaborative project with two fellow graduate students, Louis and Chris, to design an open-source modular environmental sensing device. This would be used in educational workshops, but also to facilitate conversations about how environmental monitoring could be conducted low-cost as well as run without a base requirement of …
