Stories

How Shannon Dosemagen is working toward systems change

When the BP oil spill devastated the Gulf Coast in 2010, Shannon Dosemagen had a front-row seat to the disaster as a resident of New Orleans. When she saw that affected communities couldn’t access official data and documentation of the disaster affecting their homes, she decided to take action. She cofounded Public Lab, which coordinated over 250 volunteers to document the damage themselves. 

They used balloons, kites, and cheap digital cameras to circumvent flight restrictions, and created more than 100,000 aerial images and maps, some of which were picked up by the news media including the New York Times, the BBC, and PBS.

Building on that success over the next decade, Public Lab grew into a global network, pioneering open and DIY approaches to science that lower the cost of instruments and that communities can control themselves. “We started our work in part to critique and question the popular model of citizen science at the time,” she says. Back then, it was “very top-down, researcher-centric, focused on questions that scientists had, using citizens as data collectors.” 

Public Lab aimed instead to center questions that come from the communities themselves. “We should be thinking about outputs that benefit communities and the advocacy that they’re doing.” They worked on developing ways local citizens can incorporate technology into their efforts to address the environmental issues that they’ve identified, in ways that could complement the work of scientists. 

After nearly a decade of doing this work virtually nonstop, in 2019 Dosemagen took a well-earned sabbatical that finally gave her some time to sit with an uncomfortable truth. Even though the tools were working, and communities were generating valuable data, it wasn’t having an impact on decision making. The problem wasn’t the tools, it was the underlying systems. 

“One of the biggest things that I kept coming up against was competition for resources,” she says. “Competition for resources serves as an anti-collaboration device.” The very structure of science funding—competitive grants, siloed projects, individual attribution—works against the collaboration that communities need.

This realization drove Dosemagen toward what she calls the “systemic layers,” the essential frameworks determining how environmental data moves between communities, scientists, government agencies, and policymakers. She saw that tools without the necessary systemic infrastructure are like roads without intersections: They can take you far, but not necessarily where you need to go.

Working toward systems change

The inaugural Civic Science Fellowship in 2020 came at the right moment. Dosemagen had just stepped down as president and executive director of Public Lab and was looking to create something new. She had obtained support through a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship, and the invitation to be one of the first Civic Science Fellows offered something beyond funding: a chance to experiment with systems-level change.

“It was a really fascinating cohort of people to work with,” Dosemagen says. She collaborated with Fellows Karen Andrade and Sam Dyson to collect Civic Science Stories, conducting 50 conversations across the civic science community. The resulting publication features 25 narratives examining how science can better serve society. Dosemagen contributed an article on “Normalizing the Tools of Science for Use by Everyone” that wove together her cancer diagnosis at age 33 with her conviction that scientific information shouldn’t be subject to gatekeeping by experts.

The Fellowship provided 18 months of concentrated focus without the daily administrative noise, which Dosemagen calls “sandboxing time.” This runway enabled her to launch the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP) to address precisely what Public Lab couldn’t: the governance and infrastructure determining how community data influences policy. OEDP wouldn’t focus on doing participatory science work with communities but instead would ensure that work actually mattered by “poking at the infrastructural domains of how data moves and flows between different interested parties,” she says.

Dosemagen quickly moved from being a Civic Science Fellow to hosting Fellows, welcoming Emelia Williams and then Cathy Richards. In October 2024, Dosemagen stepped down as OEDP’s executive director, but is still involved as a Senior Fellow. “I believe in new leadership coming in regularly to help things not stagnate,” she says. 

OEDP is currently preserving federal environmental databases threatened by ongoing federal policy changes. But this isn’t just a political moment she says. “We’re in the long game right now, and we need to think about it that way.”

This means thinking about what needs to be done differently and looking for opportunities to make those changes. An article she’s currently working on with Drexel professor Gwen Ottinger explores how crisis can be the thing that creates those openings for systemic change. “This has happened in many, many other places before the U.S.,” she says.

Playing the long game for systems change can at times be frustrating, Dosemagen says, “because you don’t see something from one year to the next. But over a decade, you do. Things start to shift.”

Community roots

Dosemagen lives in New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward, three blocks from where her grandfather grew up. “New Orleans is incredibly complex, infrastructurally damaged,” she says. “And deeply beautiful.” 

Her parents were social workers, embedding in her “the ethos of how I approach the world.” She’s working on a personal essay about “the idea of home” amid “compounding crises of climate, insurance collapse, and federal withdrawal from science.”

Dosemagen’s path has been different from civic scientists who work within academia or research labs. “I’ve been working on the fringe,” she says, “with my roots in the organization and advocacy spaces.” Without a Ph.D. or a traditional science institution on her resume, she’s had to build credibility project by project. 

“I’ve been in this space for around 20 years, and every time I go to a new table, I still have to explain my legitimacy to be there,” she says.

But this outsider position gives her unique insight into what communities need from science. It’s also why the legitimacy of the Civic Science Fellowship mattered: It provided institutional recognition for someone whose expertise comes from practice.

The balloons that flew over the BP oil spill documented a single disaster. The infrastructure Dosemagen is now building—through fellowships that become organizations, fellows who become hosts, and networks that persist through political upheaval—ensures communities can document, understand, and respond to their own challenges for generations to come. 

Dosemagen’s journey from fellow to host also serves as an example for funders of how strategic fellowship investments compound—one leader building organizations that support dozens more. 

Dosemagen is part of the 2020-21 Civic Science Fellows cohort. Her fellowship was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.