Version 2 of the Billion Oyster Project Digital Platform (in beta, soon to be released!).
The Billion Oyster Project (BOP) is an ecosystem restoration and education project whose mission is to restore oyster reefs to New York Harbor through public education initiatives. (Learn more at bop.nyc.)
The BOP Digital Platform is an open source, open data web application that NYC students, educators, and community scientists use to submit and analyze restoration science data, create curriculum, and present original student research. We believe that open source projects are an excellent tool for environmental justice- they allow a community to collect and use data in a way that’s best for them, based on their evolving needs, in a process that emphasizes collaboration over competition. And we are especially interested in engaging students in this process once the beta goes live!
Since Billion Oyster Project is committed to restoration through education, the platform is designed to give participants the resources they need to collect and analyze oyster restoration data. We use the platform to:
- Map our oyster restoration sites so participants can find BOP in their communities
- Train educators and students on how to collect and analyze data by presenting curriculum (80+ STEM lessons!) and educational resources
- Submit data through user-friendly, accessible forms
- View data, both in a more narrative form as a "field report," and in aggregate in tables and .csv and .tsv downloads
- Visualize data in different graphs
- Open our data via an API
- Present student research
Because we're an education-focused project, we have a longer guide to getting started than most Github projects, which you can read in our wiki: Getting Started for Newer Programmers
Please take a look at our Code of Conduct and Contributing guides before submitting issues or pull requests. We want to create an inclusive community that is welcoming and friendly to people of all ages, skill levels, and identities, especially for the students who participate in our programming.
If you’re new to programming but interested in contributing to open source projects like the BOP Digital Platform, Github has a set of helpful guides, including one on best practices for contributing. There are lots of ways to contribute to an open source project- even if you're not a coder (yet!)- so we would love for you to help us make the BOP Digital Platform the best it can be!