© Copyright 2013 - The Mobile Collective
Creative collaboration + mobile innovation
Gathering developers, designers, makers and other enthusiasts, to creatively and collaboratively 'build cool stuff' on the fly, in response to challenges or opportunities
Applying mobile technologies in new ways, in fields such as Science, Education, Cultural Heritage, and Healthcare
Building teams of people from diverse fields & skill-sets - enabling real innovation at the edges, within the overlaps, & across the gaps
Drawing on diverse expertise and insight, in order to ignite creativity and develop ideas together, in an open and free-flowing event format
You bring the flip charts we’ll bring the post-its together we’ll build!
Mobile & Web DevelopmentApps, Devices & Mobile Web
We develop mobile apps, websites, tools and platforms
Read More
Strategic PartnershipsProduct Design & Development
We design, develop and launch products to market
Read More
Events & FacilitationThinkCamps & Hack Days
We design and facilitate creative collaboration events
Read More
The Mobile Collective brings people together to work on exciting new mobile and web projects. We believe in the power of collaboration. And we love Hack Days!
At our ThinkCamps, people from across industries and disciplines experience the excitement of working together to turn ideas into reality. At our Science Hack Days, citizens, scientists, and developers get together to unlock the secrets of the universe. You come with the ideas and skills – we provide the space, the buzz, and of course the post-it notes.
ThinkCamps provide an open and creative environment for developing new products and services. They are designed to support a collaborative approach to generating cross-industry solutions. The events select one area of focus (such as mHealth) and are structured to address problems, rise to challenges, and take advantage of new opportunities.
Participants are drawn from a diverse range of disciplines and skill-sets, which they apply in a creative way. The TMC team facilitates the generation of ideas during the ThinkCamp events and then provides support for the organically formed working groups to further develop and implement the solutions, both during and beyond the event.
Hack Days are all about tinkering with new technologies and materials and code – exploring their possibilities when brought together in new ways, and solving problems on the fly in order to execute a creative idea. We love doing Hack Days. We believe in the creative power of teamwork that they inspire. And we see each and every time how people of all ages (from primary school to retired), and from all places (from the Arctic Circle to CERN), and of all abilities (from high-tech to no-tech) get excited and find a way to actively contribute.
Find out more about how we can help you design and run a Hack Day or ThinkCamp.
We don’t just facilitate, we’re also full-fledged members of the team – rolling up our sleeves to design, build and launch. Drawing on our collective backgrounds in computer science, technology product & service development, and launching new businesses to market, we can ensure that the best ideas coming out of our events continue to be worked on and implemented.
We can also work with you on prototyping any tangible ideas that come out of the event, in order to assess their potential with your stakeholders for launch with end-users. We can also develop bespoke websites and apps for the event itself.
The Mobile Collective works closely with it’s partners, often forming part of a Consortium for grant-funded work.
For example, TMC was a Consortium member of the EU FP7-funded Citizen Cyberlab project. The role of TMC was to develop requirements with respect to learning & community building, to organise and execute community outreach initiatives, to support community building across all of the pilot projects (particularly via social media), and to design and run community engagement events.
A brief introduction
Margaret Gold, Director & Co-FounderMargaret is a mobile industry veteran, with many years experience as an Innovation & Business Launch specialist. She has worked with a wide range of start-ups, corporate ventures and university spin-offs. Margaret is one of the founders and organisers of Over the Air, the UK’s premier mobile developer event. She is also a Code Club volunteer, teaching Robots & Computers Club to 5 & 6 year olds.
Brian Fuchs, CTO & Co-FounderBrian has pioneered the development of e-Science tools in the US, UK, and Germany for many years. At the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, he developed an online community toolkit for analysing multi-lingual scientific texts projects for the Archimedes Project, and helped design and develop eSciDoc, the Max Planck Society’s digital library. Other projects include Inventing Europe, a collaborative on-line exhibition platform for the history of technology, and DVE, a toolkit for exploring variation in historical printed material. As Co-ordinator at the Social Computing Group at Imperial College, he helped develop several innovative projects in transport, healthcare, computing infrastructure and e-commerce (Totalcare,Libhpc,PlayShare). These days, he spends a lot of his time with Citizen Cyberlab, developing the project’s online presence and running hack days with project partners. He also develops collaborative tools for DIY science and hacks micro controllers and sensors.
View LinkedIn Profile Github CV
Julie Gould, Multimedia ProducerJulie is a qualified physicist with a passion for science communication. She gets behind the stories of science at live events via multimedia production. Julie has been filming, recording and producing many of the stories on our Citizens of Science Audioboo and YouTube channels.
Mary Dudy, Web EditorMary is an experienced editor of scholarly and creative work, published author of academic work, university teacher (in person and online instruction) with specializations in English literature and writing, conference creator and organizer, student mentor, and curriculum designer.
View LinkedIn Profile
Roy Howie, DeveloperRoy is our all-round coding guru and javascript wizz, who helps out with product development and websites, when he’s not working on his own development projects.
Stackoverflow Github
Amy Smith – Cultural HeritageAmy is curator of the Ure Museum of Classical Archaeology and Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. She acts as our advisor and industry expert for the cultural heritage sector.
Amy works at the forefront of digital museum curation, with several innovative collaborations in visualisation and open data: Ure View, Ure Discovery and Ure Move with Panoply; 3D modelling of museum objects with the Dept. of Archaeology at the University of Reading; and the award-winning Open Olympics with the Open University. Collaborations with TMC include Europeana data provision, and toponym identification for the Pelagios Project.
View LinkedIn Profile
Steve Wolak – Mobile & IoT Technologies and Big DataCurrently at the GSMA in the IOT Big Data and Mobile Identity Group, Steve is an engineer with wide experience in mobile innovation—designing, building and managing mobile projects across a wide variety of technologies and industry sectors. He’s also worked with many startups to help shape their commercial offering and get them ready to do business on a large scale.
At Vodafone, Steve created the Betavine website and the Betavine Social Exchange website for supporting NGOs. More recently, he’s been working on connected car and consumer IOT in Vodafone’s commercial innovation team, Vodafone xone, where he led the end-to-end product development for connected consumer IOT devices, i.e. personal tracking products, connected car products.
View LinkedIn Profile
Collaborative Innovation in Action
Building Platforms & Tools for Citizen Science, to maximise learning & creativity in science for all.
http://citizencyberlab.com/
The Citizen Cyberlab (CCL) was a 3-year EU ICT project funded under the 7th Framework Programme, the objective of which was to research and evaluate on-line collaborative environments and software tools that stimulate creative learning in the context of Citizen Cyberscience.Now at the end of our project, the Citizen Cyberlab project results will continue to be sustained and exploited beyond the project lifetime by the Citizen Cyberscience Centre based at CERN, which has taken on the name of the Citizen Cyberlab.
UCL ExCiteS: Engagement in Publicly Initiated Scientific Research
CERN: Test4Theory & The Virtual Atom Smashing Game
Virtual Atom Smasher is an educational game that allows citizens to contribute to scientific discoveries at CERN without any prior knowledge of particle physics. They control a Monte Carlo event generator (a virtual particle collider) that produces scientific data analogous to the ones generated by the real High Energy Physics experiments, and their goal is to tune its parameters until the results match the measured experimental results. The outcomes are important to the scientific community, since they can validate the current scientific hypotheses.
UNITAR / UNOSAT: GeoTag-X
GeoTag-X is an open source platform set up by UNITAR-UNOSAT to engage and educate volunteers all around the world in analysing media coming out of humanitarian crises and natural disasters. GeoTag-X aims to produce datasets that can be used in relief and recovery efforts by humanitarian and disaster response agencies, both within and outside the United Nations system.
CRI, University Paris Descartes: SynBio4all
The SynBio4all Platform provides citizen scientists with the opportunity to learn about synthetic biology by being involved in every stage of the research process. Citizen participants can learn about the basics of synthetic biology by following our MOOC series. Once inspired, participants will be able to submit their research ideas to our synthetic biology community forum, or through the creativity incubator, IdeaWeave that was developed through the CCL project. The research ideas are next shaped into a testable hypothesis with the help of the SynBio4all community.
Imperial College London: Citizen Grid
CitizenGrid is a platform for application builders to host and promote their volunteer computing applications and for users to discover these applications. The goal of CitizenGrid within the Citizen Cyberlab project was to put “big data” projects like the Large Hadron Collider Experiment at CERN within the reach of citizen science and citizen scientists. We partnered up with the VAS team and made a supercomputing backend for crowdsourcing LHC simulations.
UCL ExCites: GeoKey
GeoKey provides local communities with a web-based infrastructure to collect, share and discuss local knowledge. Community members can use GeoKey to setup their own mapping project to collect, visualise and analyse data using their tools of choice. Geographic information helps communities to identify where action is required and to coordinate activities by capturing and visualising local knowledge on maps. This knowledge can be applied to affect decision making and policies, support work to change places and record these changes as they take place.
CRI University Paris Descartes: RedWire
RedWire is a new online game engine for remixing, mashing up, and experimenting with game designs. All the games are available to play directly from the website. It has been developed by the University of Paris Descartes, together with CERN, in order to support a number of Citizen Cyberlab pilot projects. When you find a game you like, you can just click Remix Me to fork the game and make your own changes. You can then share a link to the playable game with your friends, or even embed the game in your own website.
CRI University Paris Descartes: RedMetrics
RedMetrics offers open source game analytics. It is made up of a RESTful web service and a web app that allows game designers, researchers, and teachers to track game metrics, then download the raw data for offline analysis.
Like existing services, RedMetrics allows you to track player progression through your game. But RedMetrics goes a step further by also tracking snapshots – a recording of gameplay that can include game state such as entities, player input, and anything else that a designers wish to track.
Imperial College London: Epicollect
EpiCollect+ (plus) provides a complete solution for complex mobile data gathering projects and consists of two parts: A mobile app and a web server app
1) Mobile app - The EpiCollect+ mobile app allows you to load a single or multiple projects and provides the interface for users to gather the data you specify. All data can be subsequently synched with a central server and, furthermore, data can be retrieved onto the mobile devices from the central server and viewed as tables or maps.
2) Web Server app - We provide hosting for project data, however we also provide server software and instructions for setting up a database(s) and web application for you to house and view the data collected by any number of mobile devices (you can also enter data directly via the web). All data submitted from multiple devices can be viewed as tables / maps (if location data included) and downloaded for further analysis.
The central focus of our research was Creativity and Learning in on-line Citizen Science. Beyond helping scientists execute laborious tasks, Citizen Cyberscience projects enable citizens to learn about science and take part in the more creative aspects of research. Little is known about the learning and creativity processes stimulated by such projects, even though millions of volunteers participate. Even less is known about how to optimise those processes.
To explore these aspects of citizen science, we evaluated existing on-line collaborative environments and software tools to assess their role in supporting and stimulating creative learning, as also examined the best practices of current Citizen Science projects.
These pilots, platforms and tools that we built were furthermore evaluated by experts in educational technology and human-computer interaction at University of Geneva and UCL. This goal of our research was produce new understanding of creative learning behaviours, anchored in real-world examples of Citizen Cyberscience.
In the below list you can find all of the reports that were produced throughout the entire project.
The Citizen Cyberlab Consortium consisted of seven partners based in France, Switzerland and the UK. The Consortium brought two international research institutions, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR/UNOSAT), together with leading European proponents of Citizen Cyberscience from four top European universities, Imperial College (ICSTM), University College London (UCL), Université de Genève (UNIGE) and Université Paris Descartes (UPD), as well as a UK-based innovation consultancy, Gold Mobile Innovation, with a track-record of running inspiring events for software developers, scientists and educators, under the banner of The Mobile Collective (TMC).
Canberra, AU
Event Website
We’ll be participating in the Earth Observations Hackathon at GeoWeek 2019 as tele-mentors. The hack will focus on developing community-centric citizen science applications for Earth Observations data.
Ravensbourne College,
London, UK
Event Website
We’ll be at Mozfest again this year, this time helping our friends at the Ure Museum of Classical Archaeology, who will be presenting the Open Ure Museum.
Milan, Italy
Event Website
We’ll be in Milan at the Europeana annual meeting in December, to talk about our collaboration with the Ure Museum—a web environment for integrating Europeana collections with the Ure Museum website. We’ll also be drumming up support for a “fragmentathon”—a hackathon for sorting and cataloguing ancient Greek vase fragments, many (indeed) most of which remain uncatalogued in museum collections.
Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh
Event Website
We’ll be in Edinburgh at the Arctic Circle Forum in November, to talk about our experience running a hackathon for STEM students in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska in 2014. We’ll also be talking about one of the follow on projects from that—a mobile app co-developed with a student to help local communities and scientists to work together in tracking environmental issues. Slides
Museum of English Rural Life, Reading, UK
Event Website
We’ll be at the Museum of Rural English Life’s LATE in May, showing off the Ure Museum of Classical Archaeology’s 3d scans of ancient Greek artifacts for a project by the Museum’s 3d expert, James Lloyd.
Over the Air, London, UK
Event Website
Margaret is once again organising the 8th annual Over the Air ”a unique tech-agnostic event for and by the developer community, featuring technical workshops where attendees can roll up their sleeves and tinker with new platforms, operating systems, APIs & SDKs”.
Hoxton Square, London, UK
Event Website
Think Big’s Digital Week gives young people the chance to learn more about digital technology and career opportunities in the tech industry. Margaret will be joining the Mobile on Monday panelists to answer questions on what their careers involve on a day-to-day basis, how they got there and top tips on how you can get into the world of mobile and apps
Kulturbrauerei, Berlin, Germany
ECSA2016 Website
As part of the first international European Citizen Science Association Conference, Margaret ran a Citizen Science ThinkCamp together with Lucy Patterson of Science Hack Day Berlin. Read our Storify of the event for the back-channel and our Google Site for the outcome of the Challenges.
ExCel Centre, London, UK
Event Website
We were out at App World 2015, where Margaret was participating in a panel discussion about the wearables market: “What are the driving forces behind making 2016 the year of the wearables?”
Mozfest, Ravensbourne College, London, Uk
Event Website
We were out at at Mozfest again this year to run an “Open IoT Stack for Schools” workshop as part of the Open Science track. We looked at the present and future of the internet of things in schools, DIY science and Makerspaces, and collaborated with attendees to produce a community wish-list for IoT software, hardware and community resources. You can find our notes on our Etherpad here, which you are also welcome to make your own contributions to!
Over the Air, London, UK
Event Website
At the 7th annual Over the Air we ran two Citizen Cyberlab workshops. Over the Air is “a unique tech-agnostic event for and by the developer community, featuring technical workshops where attendees can roll up their sleeves and tinker with new platforms, operating systems, APIs & SDKs”. At one workshop we showcased the CCL projects, including GeoKey, CitizenGrid, Redwire and Virtual Atom Smasher. At the other workshop we introduced a range of tech tools for DIY Science, as part of the Citizen Science Hack Day Challenge. Find out more about how it went here.
CERN, Geneva, CH
Event Website
The CERN Webfest is a weekend of web-based creativity for students doing a summer placement at CERN, the place where the web was born. The event is modelled on the sort of gatherings (sometimes called hackfests or hackathons) that energize many open source communities. Registration for this event is by invitation only, but the outcomes are made public at: https://webfest.web.cern.ch/
CRI, Paris, France
GLASS
We ran a ThinkCamp on mobile games in science at the GLASS—Game Lab Summer School—at the CRI in Paris. The Think Camp is for GLASS students and we focussed both on brainstorming and hacking—ideas for using mobiles in science games and first steps in mobile development with Apache Cordova.
Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires
Paris, France
As part of the annual Nightscience Conference at the CRI in Paris, we presented the pilot projects of the Citizen Cyberlab on Friday, and helped to run a full-day ThinkCamp on Saturday to encourage the creation of new Citizen Science projects using the platforms and tools of the Citizen Cyberlab.
MacMillan Building, London,UK
Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint
As part of the Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint, we teamed up with our colleagues at CitizenGrid to work on their platform for citizen supercomputers. The Global Sprint is a world-wide event—you don’t have to be in London to join in! For details, see the announcement.
London & Oxford
Pint of Science UK Event Website
We’re proud to have been Sponsors of the Pint of Science series of events. Brian showcased the CERN Virtual Atom Smasher game, along with our colleague Ioannis from CERN, at the “Dark Matter” pub night at the Prince Albert in Camden on the 19th, and at the “Of Scientists and Higgs Hunters” pub night at the Oxford Retreat in Oxford on the 20th. And Margaret showcased the UNITAR GeoTag-X platform for Humanitarian Disaster Relief along with Megan Passey of REACH Initiatives at the “Solutions to the World’s Problems” pub night at the Yorkshire Grey on Theobalds Road on the 19th, and at the “Save the World” pub night at the Old Crown on the 20th.
UCL, London Campus
Event Website
This event was a code sprint together with a number of members of the community to help us extend GeoKey (http://geokey.org.uk/) —a community platform for participatory mapping.
At MozFest we ran a workshop as part of the Open Science stream called “Apps for Climate Change – using Appmaker for Citizen Science“. In this workshop we explored using AppMakers to create citizen sciences apps by and for local communities. The aim was to develop a wishlist of components for citizen science apps in Appmaker, and try our hand at hacking together some apps. The focus was on climate change, and we looked at how apps can help scientists and local communities to work together to help measure and alleviate climate change impact.
The Mobile Collective made the shortlist of 10 exciting new start-ups at the first ever start-up pitchfest at FOTE14. We gave a three minute pitch about how we are running Hack Days at secondary schools, universities, and institutions to promote hands-on learning and creativity in technology.
We created a Hack Day Challenge together with UNITAR for their Geotag-X disaster-mapping platform, as part of the annual CERN Summer WebFest. Read the Storify of the event.
We ran an Arctic Science ThinkCamp in Barrow Alaska, together with the local community and Diana Mastracci of UCL ExCiteS, as part of the STEM Summer Camp at Ilisagvic College. Read about the event on our wiki.
Brian and Margaret gave a Keynote talk at the annual Science Festival for Doctoral students at Imperial College on ‘Creativity and learning in the Citizen Cyberlab Project‘ to highlight the ways in which modern scientific research is making use of multi-media platforms to crowdsource the involvement of volunteers in data collection, data processing, and problem solving. You can find the slides from our talk here and you can watch a video of our talk here.
We participated in two days of science hacking at the World Science Festival in New York, where we ‘Took the Pulse of Citizen Science‘ and pitched ScienceMakers, as well as doing our usual media round-up. Read more about the hacks that were pitched and developed on the Science Hack Day Wiki.
Together with our partners at the Citizen Cyberlab, we ran a workshop called Hands-on Citizen Science as part of the LATES events. We ran hands-on demos of the Hero.coli game, the GeoTag-X platform, and hardware hacking for Arctic Science. Take a look at our round-up of the event.
Tweeting for Science: When Social Media met Citizen Science was held as part of the National Science & Engineering Week at the Dana Centre. The evening was an exploration and discussion about how Social Media can boost the power of science in the hands of individual citizens, across the globe. ‘Science for All, and All for Science’. Read the Storify account of the night, and listen to our interviews of attendees.
The third London Citizen Cyberscience Summit was bigger and better than ever. Thanks to everyone who came to the Hack Day. You can check out what we got up to in the video, and read about the challenges and prizes on the website.
UCL, London UK
Event Website
TMC teamed up with the CHI+MED project and the UCL Interaction Centre to help organise a Persuasive Games Competition for UCL students, at which participants built web games to explore blame culture in healthcare. There were prizes for the winning entries and the winners have been hosted on Errordiary.
Bletchley Park, UK
Event Website #ota13
At the annual Over the Air mobile developer event we ran a hands-on workshop about Epicollect, which is a Citizen Science mobile app and web platform for collecting survey data, photo’s and GPS location data. We also ran the Hack Day ‘Best Science Hack’ challenge, with Air Quality Eggs as prizes. Check out the event video on YouTube.
CERN
Event Website
A weekend of online web-based creativity for students doing a summer placement at CERN, the place where the web was born. The event is modeled on the sort of gatherings (sometimes called hackfests or hackathons) that energize many open source communities. Registration for this event is by invitation only, but the outcomes will be made public.
Together with the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Citizen Cyberscience Center Science Hack Day London, we organised the Science Hack Day Crowdcrafting Citizen Science. For one day, citizen scientists, humanities folks, technologists, designers, students, scientists, and all who are curious gathered together to build apps and projects with various open tools such as Epicollect, PyBossa, and CernVM.
Royal Geographic Society, London UK
University College London, UK
Event Website
The Mobile Collective organised the Hack Day at the 2010 London Citizen Cyberscience Summit, bringing volunteers and scientists from a wide range of Web-based science projects together for the first time, ranging from volunteer computing (SETI@home,ClimatePrediction.net) to volunteer thinking (GalaxyZoo, Herbaria@home) to volunteer sensing (EpiCollect, NoiseTube) and much more. Historians, journalists, teachers and business folks all brought their angle on citizen cyberscience to the event. Above all, it was a chance for the some of the millions of volunteers who make citizen cyberscience so successful to tell their story.
We brought together a fantastic mix of movers, shakers & enthusiasts from both the healthcare and the mobile community came together at our first ever ThinkCamp – a day of sharing insights & experience, generating ideas, and developing them further in free-flow break-out sessions. We wrapped up the day with a series of pitches to address a wide range of issues and opportunities for mHealth innovation.
The Mobile Collective was out at the Healthcare Innovation Expo on behalf of the DotGovLabs Innovation Hub to help them boost awareness for their latest challenge, and to inspire a collaborative approach to innovation as part of the Future Zone programme.
The event attracted 10,000+ health and social care commissioners and providers who are interested in high impact innovations to improve patient care and productivity – we didn’t meet all of them by a long shot – but we certainly had some great conversations, both at the Ideas Wall and during our sessions, and were amazed by everyone’s willingness to let loose a bit of creative energy at the Expo.
Creative Collaboration + Mobile Innovation
Yesterday I had the fun challenge of participating as a panelist in my first #CitSciChat – while on the train! The #CitSciChat on Twitter is a lightning fast discussion format, with a group of panelists answering a number of pre-shared questions, and participants from around the world chiming in. (So luckily I could pre-type a [...]
Continue reading...[View the story "ECSA 2016 Berlin" on Storify]
Continue reading...The more open science becomes, the more opportunity there is for society to participate and share in the scientific process. The term citizen science covers a whole range of practices that try to enable just that. Opening up the ivory tower to participation from other disciplines, communities and members of the public has the potential [...]
Continue reading...Getting in touch and hanging out
Do you have a project you’d like to do with us? Drop us an email at:
We take on both client work and collaborative-partner work.
If you are interested in organising a ThinkCamp or Hack Day event to take a creative collaboration approach to problem-solving, we can put together a proposal for you.
If you’d like to get involved in any of the projects we are currently working on, there is plenty of scope to do so. Just drop us an e-mail.
We’re based in London and either work from our partners offices, or from a range of Cafes with free Wi-Fi. Our current favourite is the Pain Quotidien on North Audley Street.