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The MIE LAB is a rethink of the Living Lab idea, it takes the Living Lab notion and provides a pathway for community engagement and growth.
The notion of a “Living Lab” has been tried all around the world with varying degrees of success. Of the ones that are not reaching their desired outcomes, community engagement has been a missing price of the puzzle.
There is a real danger that a Living Lab ends up as a stand alone piece of infrastructure managed by the central provider, the sensors and network is all fixed and locked away in an “ivory tower”. The information is made available to the public but lacks engagement as they didn’t ask for it and don’t feel they can influence the information that is available.
A MIE LAB describes a process to provide a model that transforms the Living Lab “Ivory Tower” into an open access network that can grow and change as the community desires. It provides a pathway that gets the community able to add new information sources to the Living Lab model, breaking down the ivory tower and driving engagement.
The Ultimate goal of a MIE LAB is to get community members, ideally school students, working with the information they have helped generate.
Having community members getting experience with manipulating information provides skills that opens pathways to further education and research. At the most basic level, every form of academic pursuit involves the manipulation of data, from Bio-Informatics to Sociology, they all start from a knowledge of how to manipulate information.
The first part of the pathway involves enabling the community to “make” their devices, this is a tactile exercise that gets the community plugging things together. An ideal focus for this step is School Students using a STEM linkage.
There are two key factors underpinning this part of the pathway;
1) Affordable kits with all the parts required, sub $40 each
2) Community education provided by facilitators that are visiting schools and community groups to enable people to build the kits.
University students doing education (pre-service teachers) form an ideal cohort to undertake this exercise as it forms a “win-win” scenario for the pre-service teachers and the community and is very scalable.
These devices don’t need to be “laboratory grade”, the idea is to get as many devices out as possible, the data is “eventually accurate”.
The next step is to connect the devices to the MIE LAB network and get the information going somewhere, depending upon the information there may be many locations that it may end up.
At a minimum the MIE LAB should supply;
1) Power and Network connections for free or very low cost
2) A low friction way to “sign up”
3) A standard method to be sent the information (api)
4) Storage for the information for a period of time
5) A standard method to access the information (api)
6) A method to handle device rights to connect to the network
This step introduces the notions of structured information and information repositories which underpins all academic pursuits.
Arguably the most important step, this completes the journey that started out as a tactile, plugging things together exercise. This step takes the finished information and allows the community to manipulate it and compare with other information sources, it could be a school group comparing the outputs from their sensors with official government sensors.
This step also starts the cycle again, as the community enquire in the information they may want to make a new sensor or grow the number of sensors, the MIE LAB allows this to happen.
While every MIE LAB will be different the problems that need to be solved are the same.
The biggest issue that sensors have is getting power, if there one thing to consider when planning the MIE LAB it is how are you going to provide power. "Smart" street poles provide an ideal solution but things like solar panels and batteries may be needed.
From a governance perspective we need to make sure we are not make a large BotNet, the devices that will be connected are inherently untrustworthy.
Numerous technologies exist that can help, things like 802.1x for wired of Personal pre-shared key (PPSK) for wifi can help identify who is sending traffic where. Depending upon the circumstances, the simplest way may be to only provide connection to central datalake with no direct connection to the internet. This way all data is accessible and any compromised devices only affect the local MIE LAB and not the broader internet.
There is no limit as to the sorts of devices thst can be connected to an MIE LAB but Adruino type devices form a good balance between cost and processing power. An ideal target for the MIE LAB is high school students and the Adruino platform fits nicely with this cohort
The ultimate goal of an MIE LAB is for for students and community members to be able to point to sensors that they have built and say “I built that” and to be able to look at the data and say “I made that”. This “ownership” is what separates an MIE LAB from the standard Living Labs.
The MIE LAB uses inexpensive parts to enable students to make their own sensors and provides the “I built that” moment.
This is a “gateway” into the data manipulation “I made that” moment, which in turn provides a direct pathway into futher studies and learning. At the most fundamental level every academic endeavour, from sociology to bioinformatics, builds on data manipulation.
The MIE LAB fits into a larger scale Living Lab that can encompas a whole community;
An initiative that builds on a Living Lab to provide school and community engagement and real pathways for students into the IoT future
These provide the bulk of the data, there is no requirement for the data to be 100% accurate, the sheer bulk of the data provides accuracy
Overlays the entire precinct
A key connection point for large scale components such as Solar Farms and buildings
Provide high quality calibrated equipment that can be used to give a base line to the MIE LAB
Located at key infrastructure points
A landscaped area that the community can use to engage with the Living Lab
Has; seating, additional wifi, security, community use power and displays
Located at key community points
A central hub that draws all the experience into a single location
Has; collaboration spaces, building spaces, equipment vending machines, displays