I am a #CitizenScientist at heart, and it bothers me not that #technology is prevalent and powerful (high speed, high storage capacity), but that such improvement of our technology is gatekept behind massive #paywalls.

(TL;DR: the cost of a portable genome sequencer and also data storage makes it unattainable to collaborate as a citizen scientist, and that makes me big mad !! I know we can do something about it.)

I dream of an internet #infrastructure that would enable me, and others, to #democratize data, storage space, and processing power. Such would bolster research and study across many fields of knowledge.

Allow me to set the scene.

- A #PublicCommons #CommunityMesh #MeshNetwork interlinks public and private schools, weather broadcast stations, public government buildings, medical facilities, public transit centers, large housing complexes, and observation towers in public parks for civil and public academic use. Low-power Radio Wide Area Networks (#LoRaWAN) might prove useful here for environmental sensors.

- #FreedomBox or no-assembly-required #SelfHosting #cloudlet solutions bring #FaultTolerance to the hands of #WebService architects.

- #NetworkAttachedStorage (#NAS) equips locations connected to the network an opportunity to share _some_ data storage capacity as a cache for the functions of the greater network. (In my opinion, altruistic features should be opt-out conditions.) Such might confer a cache of operable @wikifunctions representations.

- #UniformResourceName (#URN) resolvers (e.g., such as for #DOI, #ARC, #ISBN, #IPFS) give us what we need to collaborate as communities to organize our #DataSets and to distribute amongst our community the load of resolving names of data to their resources.

- the #ResourceDescriptionFramework, or #RDF, lets us claim to properties, attributes and metainformation of a resource. This is useful for cataloging and searching through datasets to find pertinent information. (E.g., by category: music, video, lectures; photos, figures, charts, diagrams; databases, manifests, ledgers, logs; etc.)

- #Peer2Peer clients create a distributed #ComputeFabric for domains of interest.

Major hubs of the network publish off-loadable functions in "initiatives" to: collect, clean, stage, process, recollect, and report sets of data for research within their pertinet areas of interest. (E.g., universities or parks might produce functions to operationalize a project to collect and study evidence of climate change.)

Client-Devices subscribe to the initiatives that their owner finds worthwhile and commit to serving requests they receive for such functions.

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The scene is set. Now we imagine:

You subscribe to a citizen science initiative and travel anywhere with your portable sensor(s): a #GenomeSequencer or #Spectrometer, a #SchumannResonance or #Radiation detector, a #Barometer or #Thermometer or #Hygrometer or #Decibellometer.

You take #measurements, name them and fill in whatever #metadata about them you can. When you submit your dataset to the network, the publishers of every #initiative of which you are part are notified so that others can search for it through them via the metadata you ascribed to the dataset. When others search for and find your dataset, they, too, can process it according the functions within the network.

By this our internet would become a virtual meta-machine; this could assist in the symbiotization of #civilian #academy and #inventive #altruism.

(TL;DR: the cost of portable genome sequencers and data storage makes it hard to collaborate as a citizen scientist, and that makes me big mad !! I know we can do something about it.)