Versión castellana (en desarrollo)
A room to share with nature: a network of people & their outdoor spaces improving human-nature collaborations and biodiversity.
Thank you so much for visiting the Balconnect repository & showing interest to get Balconnected!
Please read on to find the most important information about this project, and the countless ways to get involved.
Balconnect is a green initiative addressing the biodiversity crisis and our growing disconnection from nature in metropolitan areas, by highlighting the ecological importance of ornamental plants raised on urban balconies, windowsills, terraces and backyards.
The project aims at building knowledge-based people-plant interactions using open, community-focused practices and augmented collaborative learning, while mapping and building a structured network of metropolitan outdoor ornamental plants.
As the open database is being built, participants could gradually:
- Document and visualise their personal eco-legacy by learning and sharing nature with their communities (through data, experiences, plants, cultural products, etc.).
- Increase market demand for locally cultivated and native plants.
- Consciously create biodiverse green patches in private outdoor areas.
- Collect valuable data and conduct open research for science.
- Make cities more liveable, reducing urban green inequalities.
- Influence local government decisions on city planning, green infrastructure and nature-based solutions.
The founder of this project is me, Adel Sarvary, a transdisciplinary creative communications & digital collaborations professional and systemic designer.
The birth & initial development of Balconnect took place during my 'Design for Emergent Futures' Master's course (MDEF), in 2020, under the caring wings of the wonderful teaching staff at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalunya (IaaC) & at Elisava School of Design and Engineering in Barcelona, Spain.
Balconnect has since been growing into an Open Science project, thanks to the amazing help of my mentor Emma Karoune, and the founders and community of Open Life Science.
For further information about the growing list of people and communities I am greatly thankful for, please see Acknowledgements.
In case you are interested in hopping in the front seat with me, please do reach out!
As much as natural ecosystems need diversity of masses to function well, so is this project: collaborators and contributors of all kinds - the more, the merrier.
If you think you can help in any ways, please check out the contributor's guidelines and the roadmap (see the Find out more section of this document).
Please feel free to get in touch
- by email: [email protected]
- or on Twitter: @balconnect
- The original Balconnect project site made as the final project presentation for the MDEF course, including a short concept video and Adel's Master's thesis.
- Contributors guidelines - currently in development, so please get in touch with Adel for more details.
- Roadmap
- Code of Conduct - Please note that it’s very important to maintain a positive and supportive environment for everyone who wants to participate. When you join as a collaborator, you must follow the code of conduct in all interactions both on and offline.
Thanks for taking the time to read this project page. I would love you to get involved!
A separate document currently in development.
- Issue: the GitHub term for tasks, enhancements, and bugs for your projects.
- Milestone: an event or state marking a specific stage in development on the project.
- Open access: the practice through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.
- Open Science: the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) transparent and accessible to all
- README file: a document that introduces an open project to the public and any potential contributors.
- Repository or repo: a collection of documents related to your project, in which you create and save new code or content.
- Roadmap: a document outlining the schedule of work to be done on a project.
Shield:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
