Digital Democracy is thrilled to welcome you to our new Lab website!

If you’re new to Digital Democracy, you might be interested to read about our work building drones with indigenous peoples in the Amazon to map oil spills. That would help explain why we’re obsessed with making mapping and monitoring tools that are easy to use way off the grid.

A big part of our work is writing apps and software that can be downloaded quickly, because for our partner communities, Internet connections are often poor or nonexistent. This means resizing images to serve only what’s needed and nothing more. We also make tools that visualize all this preciously collected data, and allow someone who is savvy but inexperienced with tech to tell a quick visual story. We do a lot of listening and observing. We try a lot of things, and share our lessons and products freely. This experimentation, and contribution back to the community, is why we call this site our Lab.

We’re glad you found us, and hope you can make use of what you find here. If you do, please tell us, we’d love to hear about it. If you like what we’re doing and want to contribute time or code, we’re always looking for volunteers, and will be running a series of code sprints and meetups in 2016. Get in touch to learn more.