We are excited to launch OpenTEK, the LICCI citizen science online platform.
The main purpose of the platform is to encourage participation in climate research by allowing anyone in the world to document and classify observations of climate change impacts in order to make them more visible and get a more complete picture of climate change’s effects on daily situations.
By documenting concrete impacts of climate change throughout diverse communities worldwide, we can help make better policies and develop and share better adaptation measures.
Next to creating and viewing local observations, there are other sources and types of information that will be made available with time. For instance, in this first release, we include an archive of more than 100 scientific publications, which report local observations that have been reviewed and classified by a research team. We also hope to add a part to document traditional ecological knowledge in general.
We are still prototyping the user-interface to work for Indigenous people, the general public and scientists likewise, so that the OpenTEK platform can become a tool for cooperation. In this line, one of the main pending developments is to make the platform usable in as many languages as possible. Although this first release is only in English, we are currently working on translating the page interface while allowing users to create entries in their desired language. In that sense OpenTEK would be similar to a wiki, with entries in as many languages as contributors wanting to create them.
All the platform parts are developed in open source, and we encourage reusability and of course welcome software developer contributions. The source code can be found here: https://gitlab.com/licci Please get in touch if you want to try it out!
If you are a researcher, developer, practitioner, educator or local community member, we encourage you to register. If you have any feedback, in terms of ideas or problems you encountered feel free to get in touch with us: .